People getting upset from the actual result: Zero.
Sadly this is our current state of approach on science.
"Title using 'very large' does not come from the article, which gives a more subtle image:"
which sounds to me like someone taking offense to the title?
Among other things, it can mean, “dear God, just from the title I can tell that the comments on this are going to be 90% people staying their preconceptions of how other people will feel about it and/or imputing motives to thread or comment moderation, 5% people reacting to the title, and 5% people quoting the article in response to the previous 5%.”
Women score as well as men on general intelligence tests, although men have higher levels of variance and score slightly higher on certain subsets (e.g., spatial reasoning). This study shows the former very well - although men scored slightly better on a verbal-numerical reasoning test, the results were statistically insignificant (p=.45).
The relationship between body size, brain volume, and general intelligence only appears to apply within a given gender, and not between the two genders.
As far as I can tell, all of this has been known for a long, long time, so I don't think anyone's feelings are going to get hurt from a study that looked at brain volumes in older (44-77 year old) adults in the United Kingdom.
Yes it did.
> We linked the structural brain differences to scores on two cognitive tests taken at the time of the imaging visit: verbal-numerical reasoning and reaction time (see Method). Descriptive statistics for the cognitive tests are shown in Table 1. Note that we coded both tests (reflecting the reaction time variable) so that higher scores indicated better performance. The test scores correlated positively, but weakly (r = .12). Males had a slightly higher mean score than females on verbal-numerical reasoning (d = −0.18) and slightly faster mean reaction time (d = −0.22); there was no significant variance difference for verbal-numerical reasoning (VR = 0.97, P = .45), though males had marginally more variance in reaction time (VR = 0.92, P = .03).
I don't know why they didn't include any graphs for those results.
You could have stopped typing there.
The title of this HN post, "Mean differences in men's and women's brains are very large," is in fact untrue as the top-voted comment points out. They're statistically significant but not that large, and there's lots of overlap in the distributions.