> A new study could change that. Researchers have identified an odorless compound emitted by people—and in particular babies—called hexadecanal, or HEX, that appears to foster aggressive behavior in women and blunt it in men.<p>Hexadecanal is a sixteen-carbon chain aldehyde:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecanal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecanal</a><p>A few years back a team claimed to have isolated essence of old person, 2-nonenal, a chemically-related nine-carbon unsaturated aldehyde:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Nonenal" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2-Nonenal</a><p><a href="https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(15)41198-4/fulltext" rel="nofollow">https://www.jidonline.org/article/S0022-202X(15)41198-4/full...</a><p>The occurrence of pheromones in the animal kingdom, but so far scant evidence in humans, is a puzzle:<p><a href="https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-pheromones-real/" rel="nofollow">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/are-human-pheromo...</a><p>Maybe there really are no human pheromones. Or maybe they're just really hard to study because studying human behavior is so hard in general.
I don’t know if this counts as a pheromone, but babies definitely emit _something_. As a recent father, I have had numerous people remark on how wonderful babies smell after smelling my child. I can’t smell anything. People who can smell this particular smell seem very perplexed that I can’t smell it.
This was a great article in that it was a decent example of how pop-science articles could be written.<p>- the claim made focuses only on the results of the chemical itself<p>- the explanations adequately state the limitations of the results themselves<p>- the follow up comments from in field individuals clearly states the relationship (or lack of it) to the study<p>- the article notes quite strongly that while babies emit the chemical, it’s unknown if the amounts emitted are enough to alter behavior.
Also found in rotten horse meat and insect cadavers and that's enough scrolling pubmed for me today.<p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34653803/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34653803/</a><p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738202/" rel="nofollow">https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34738202/</a>
Babies are funny, my 7 month old is only making noises while breathing in. I wish more of our language had breathing-in based sounds, it could double our information transfer rate!
>We cannot say that this is a pheromone,” says study author Noam Sobel, a neuroscientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science. “But we can say that it’s a molecule expressed by the human body that influences human behavior, specifically aggressive behavior, in a predicted manner.”<p>so... a pheromone?
There is something magical about being a father. I remember a scene in the sitcom Friends, where Chandler mumbles cute words after seeing emma.<p>I feel exactly the same whenever I see my son. And he is 5 years old now. So grown up and all.<p>HN successfully attenuated the magic, by floating out these articles which reduce the magic to chemical factors.<p>PS - On a lighter note.
Wow, a study with a bit of work on mice and a small non-blinded study done on undergraduates at a university? What are the odds of this actually being an actual real effect? <1%?
It kinda makes sense.... after birth a woman could be recouping and 'vulnerable', in cavemen days, so maybe the pheremones are to make men who might have nefarious notions back off, and women stand up like a bear on all fours when someone tries to be shitty to them, but to also protect their baby.<p>Probably has a role w/ post-partum depression too, I'd imagine.
Hubermann mentioned this phenomenon in his podcast (I believe this episode: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXKhu5UZwk" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJXKhu5UZwk</a>) back in April