A bit of a slow start for the year in terms of science news so I’ll have to make do with some softer research articles. All three of the articles are about human psychology. First a short one about how chess grandmasters use their brains. Next, one about how men and women respond to stress differently when under the effects of caffeine and finally an odd look at how having a name that with starts with a letter at the end of the alphabet influences human behavior.

The first article is from New Scientist which talks about how Merim Bilalic at the University of Tübingen in Germany used an MRI machine to look at the brains of various chess players while they were looking at images of geometrical shapes or identifying whether certain situations in chess amounted to a check. Half of these were just novices and the other half were all internationally acknowledged grandmasters.

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