Word: hypothalamus
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...thermostat regulates room temperature. According to this explanation, known as the set-point theory, the brain plays an importatnt role in determining a person's ideal weight, which remains more or less constant throughout adult life. Whenever a person loses weight, a portion of the brain called the hypothalamus responds by increasing the appetite and slowing the metabolism so that the body can store more fat. By contrast, when a person gains weight, the hypothalamus decreasses appetite and speeds metabolism. However, the brain does not seem to work as hard to ward off weight gain as it does to combat...
Lean women, including many athletes, have very little body fat, so a part of the brain called the hypothalamus represses the woman's menstrual cycle by keeping estrogen levels...
Years later, their efforts were rewarded when they isolated and purified a factor--HIF--from the hypothalamus. Chemists at Columbia analyzed the chemical and determined that it differed from its plant counterpart only by the three-dimensional placement of certain atoms...
...first I replied, a bit smugly, "Well, if you followed the recent developments in this kind of research, the Simon LeVay hypothalamus study and all that, it was obvious that this was the direction in which we were headed. Blah, blah, blah...
Other scientists presented other strategies by which to study biological differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals, involving the structure of a given part of the brain. Levay studied differences in the size of a certain part of the brain's hypothalamus which is thought to regulate sexual behavior...