All this happened, more or less.

In a series of elegant experiments, starting in the early 1980s, Nottebohm and his colleagues
showed that , indeed, thousands of new neurons are added every day to the avian brain. They did so by, first, showing the production of new cells with thymidine labelling42; second, producing ultrastructural evidence that the new cells were neurons receiving synapses43; and last, in a technical tour de force, showing that the putative neurons responded to sound with action potentials44.In subsequent studies, they showed that the
axons of new neurons extended over long distances, that neuronal birth and death proceeded in parallel, that in both singing and nonsinging species neurogenesis was widespread throughout the avian forebrain — including
the hippocampus — and that in the latter structure it was modulated by environmental complexity and learning experience39–47. Charles G. Gross. Neurogenesis in the adult brain: death of a dogma. Science. Volume 1. Oct. 2000. http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v1/n1/pdf/nrn1000_067a.pdf

variation in a section of the gene called RS3 334 was linked to how men bond with their partners. Men can have none, one or two copies of the RS3 334 section, and the higher the number of copies, the worse men scored on a measure of pair bonding.

Not only that, men with two copies of RS3 334 were more likely to be unmarried than men with one or none, and if they were married, they were twice as likely to have a marital crisis.

RS3 334's social effects extend beyond bonding in couples. Earlier this year, the same gene section was shown to affect signalling in people's amygdalas, linked to trust. Another study found that people with autism, which is characterised by unusual social behaviour, often have multiple copies of RS3 334.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14641-monogamy-gene-found-in-people.html

the team's next task is to test how a nasal vasopressin spray affects altruism and jealousy.

Intuitive judgments have received extensive attention and there is mounting evidence that these judgments can be made extremely quickly, particularly when they involve inferring social information from a face. For example, affective judgments, such as determining whether or not you like somebody based on their photograph, can be made as quickly as 160 ms. These rapid judgments can also be made when the stimuli have been barely processed within conscious awareness. People are able to infer traits, such as competence or trustworthiness, from faces they have seen for as little as 100 ms. Despite their rapidity, these trait inference judgments have been demonstrated to predict important decisions, such as voter choices in U.S. congressional elections.

...in another experiment, the authors found that students were happier with choices made intuitively than when these were made analytically.*

Alan G. Sanfey, Luke J. Chang (2008) Multiple Systems in Decision Making
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1128 (1) , 53–62 doi:10.1196/annals.1399.007

Nov 30 06:09 AM US/Eastern
Chinese police are to stop arresting women who carry condoms, traditionally seen as evidence of prostitution, in an effort to help curb the spread of AIDS, state press said Friday.

Despite efforts to stop the practice, women in China are still being sent to labour camps for prostitution offences merely because they were carrying condoms when detained by police, the report said, quoting an expert.

"We have investigated many education-through-labour camps and we have found that for those sentenced for prostitution, the sole evidence was that they possessed condoms," Xinhua quoted the unnamed expert as telling an AIDS conference here.

Copyright AFP 2007

Although the difference was slight, high-income children outperformed their less wealthy peers on both IQ tests and an exam designed to replicate achievement in various academic subjects. Lower income kids performed at a lower level than others in reading comprehension and mathematical calculations but were competitive in basic cognition, memory and reading skills, indicating that poverty may affect development at the level where different abilities must be combined, such as verbal skills and memory, in the case of reading comprehension. SciAm, May 18, 2007.

Jack and Suzy Welch in BusinessWeek writing about Global Warming: If you accept it as reality, adapting your strategy and practices, your plants will use less energy and emit fewer effluents. Your packaging will be more biodegradable, and your new products will be able to capture any markets created by severe weather effects. Yes, global warming may not be as damaging as some predict, and you might have invested more than you needed, but it’s just as Pascal said: Given all the possible outcomes, the upside of being ready and prepared for a “fearsome event” surely beats the alternative.

via Freakanomics blog