Socializing is found across the animal kingdom, but osculation — or kissing — seems to a human behavior. How did it start and why? The Science of Kissing author Sheril Kirshenbaum discussed the history and biology behind kissing on NPR.

 Has Valentine’s Day become post-racial? Not yet, it seems, Yasmin Anwar writes from UC Berkeley.
New research from the University of California, Berkeley, suggests that when it comes to dating, cyberspace is as segregated as the real world. Data gathered from more than 1 million profiles of singles looking for love online show that whites overwhelmingly prefer to date members of their own race, while blacks, especially men, are far more likely to cross the race barrier in hopes of being struck by Cupid’s arrow.

 Are you still looking for a date for Valentine’s Day? Here’s some dating advice straight from the laboratory: It turns out there may be something to “playing hard to get.” A study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that a woman is more attracted to a man when she is uncertain about how much he likes her. 

On the one hand, a lot of psychological research has found that person A usually likes person B about as much as they think person B likes them. “If we want to know how much Sarah likes Dave, a good predictor is how much she thinks Dave likes her,” write the authors of the paper, Erin R. Whitchurch and Timothy D. Wilson of the University of Virginia and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University. “But what if Sarah is not sure how much Dave likes her?” This might lead Sarah to spend a lot of time thinking about Dave, wondering how he feels, and she might find him more attractive the more she dwells on him. 

 Many mammals advertise their fertility to the opposite sex in a period, when for dogs, they are referred to as being on heat. So does the same thing happen in humans? The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Robyn Williams considered the issue in a recent programme.

A new paper from PD Gupta makes a round up of research that a keen observer may already haver seen. Of particular interest is the use of James Kohl's research.

Here's the paper's introduction:

Pheromones are low molecular weight chemical substances that are produced by a plant or animal and cause a response in another individual of same or another species.

 You could hardly ask for a more positive test of pheromones than this UK documentary which tested out Scent of Eros. That's no doubt why the SoE creator James Kohl put it on YouTube. See him speak here.