Fruit Bats Join Short List of Creatures Who Dig Fellatio! [Zooillogix]
Oral sex is a rarity in the animal kingdom with just a handful of species (humans, bonobos) who participate in the act. Well, move over high-functioning primates because there's a new, high-fellating mammal on the bj circuit, the short-nosed fruit bat. Yeah, we get it, "short-nosed..." We seriously can't make this stuff up.
Random Fact #265: Due to the terms of his Federal plea bargain, Andrew is actually not allowed to watch this video!
Apparently, according to the paper recently published in PLoS ONE, about 70% of female short-nosed fruit bats engage in oral sex with their partners. Furthermore, "a positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male's penis during copulation and the duration of copulation." This may indicate that females who engage in fellatio may be, in fact, improving the likelihood of fertilization.
Just to recap the findings: All females, of any species, who engage in fellatio increase their genetic fitness. That will be all, thank you.
P.S. NVDH in da house.
P.P.S. We cannot WAIT to use Google Analytics to see what combination of words people entered into Google that led them to this post!
Gore’s Brilliant "Wall" Advertising Strategy and His Back Stage – Front Stage Problem [Framing Science]
Repower America's lastest advertising campaign to promote their new online feature "The Wall" is brilliant. The ads and the social media initiative vividly portray the diversity of support for serious climate action while also framing the relevance of the issue in ways that transcend the traditional ideological divide. As I wrote in a paper this spring at the journal Environment, the Repower campaign is a stark contrast to the dominant message of Inconvenient Truth which may have unintentionally reinforced the partisan divide on climate change.
Gore, however, also faces a major communication dilemma, one that I refer to as his Back Stage - Front Stage problem. From behind the curtain, directing the Repower America campaign, Gore's strategic message and initiative holds the promise of transcending the ideological divide. But each time he steps front stage--such as this week on the cover of Newsweek--given his status as a former presidential candidate, Gore makes it easy for Americans to reinterpret climate change via a partisan lens while providing more rhetorical fodder for conservative media.
Prayer as medicine to be included in Health Care Reform [Greg Laden's Blog]
The current health care reform bill(s) do not address actual health care ... like what procedures to use and stuff ... as much as they address insurance. This is a health insurance reform bill, not a health care system reform bill. (Though there is necessarily overlap.) Nonetheless Republican Wingnuts want a provision regarding prayer as a methods of treatment. Insurance companies would be required to cover prayer treatments:
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Tsunamis, climate, seamounts and impending disaster … ! [Eruptions]
There have been a number of articles floating around the popular press for the last week that I thought I would touch on briefly ... always fun to decipher the real news from the hype.
Active fumaroles on Datun Mountain in Taipei.
- An article out of the Taipei Times suggests that the city of Taipei in Taiwan is in great peril from Datun Mountain/volcano. The volcano, which was previously thought to have erupted ~200,000 years ago is now thought to have erupted only 5,000 years ago. That 195,000 years really does make a difference in terms of worrying about potential future eruptions, but there are few details about what sort of eruption there might have been 5,000 years ago (beyond the TV reports that "NTU professors said that if Datun erupts, its impact would be even worse than the devastating 921 Earthquake." Nothing like some good fear mongering.) They also attribute any seismicity today to "cooling magma" for what its worth - however, with any volcano with active fumaroles (above), the idea that it could still be considered "active" is no surprise.
Another article makes it seem that the potential for a future eruption from the volcano is low, but the mayor of the city still plans to construct a contingency plan if the volcano reactivates (which is still a good idea). Meanwhile, the GVP page on the "Datun Volcanic Group" suggest that the volcanic region was active as recently as the Pleistocene (<20,000 years ago). Most of the group are andesite stratocones or domes.
- The New York Times has a report on the potential tsunami generated by the great Thera eruption between 1630 and 1570 B.C. The eruption likely generated a tsunami that swept across eastern Mediterranean Basin. These findings are based on sediments found at excavations on the shores of the Mediterranean in Israel. Although it is not shocking that an eruption the size of the Minoan eruption at Santorini/Thera would produce a tsunami, finding evidence of the wave is always nice to back up the theory.
- A deep sea expedition to the Casablancas seamount 300 km off Morocco in the Atlantic has turned up evidence for fresh eruptions from the seafloor volcano. What appears to be fresh lava flows and craters were discovered by the submersible HyBIS. Of course, the submersible was at the seamount in hopes that there was life - not fresh evidence of eruption - which shows you can never guess what you might find in explored regions at the seafloor.
- I stumbled across this excellent image of El Misti (the volcano) and Arequipa (the city) in southern Peru. It shows clearly how close to the active volcano the city of over 1 million people is creeping. El Misti last erupted in 1985, producing a small (VEI 1) explosive event, with the last known significant eruption in 1784.
- Finally, there has been a lot of discussion in the comments by readers about the study have claims that a mystery volcanic eruption might have played a significant role in climate during the early 1800s. It definitely is a quandary how such a prominent SO2 signal could be found both in ice from Antarctica and Greenland yet no obvious candidate for an eruption easily identified. However, remember that even in 1809-1810, great swathes of the world were unpopulated and unseen, so an eruption such as the Kasatochi eruption in the Aleutians, which released huge amounts of sulfur dioxide last year, might have never been recognized due to its remote location. The same might be said for eruptions along long stretches of the Andes in Chile. There are multiple, uncorrelated spikes in the sulfur dioxide record in the ice cores over the past few thousand years, which makes it all the more interesting to determine what volcanoes might be hiding significant eruptions in the relatively recent past.
Research subjects should have access to their own data [Genetic Future]
My contribution to Genomics Law Report's superb "What ELSI is New" series is up now.
The gist of my argument: as we move into an era of large-scale whole-genome sequencing studies and the utility of genomic information grows, researchers will increasingly frequently be faced with the discovery of highly medically relevant information within their subjects' genomes. Yet under the consent procedures established for most modern genetic research projects the anonymised subjects would never have a chance to learn about this information.
As such, people will die from breast cancer and other diseases even though someone out there possesses genetic information they would have needed to avoid this that could have been used to guide additional screening to detect such cancers early.
Throwing medically actionable data away without the subjects ever having a chance to learn about it is unconscionable - we need to start changing the way we think about the rights of research subjects to their own data.
It's important not to understate the challenges posed by returning research data to research subjects - such as balancing against the need for privacy and data security, or unduly alarming people with inaccurate results - but these are not reasons to avoid data return. They are simply obstacles we need to overcome.
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Biotechnology for Sustainability [Tomorrow's Table]
Kent J. Bradford, Professor of Plant Sciences and Academic Director of the Seed Biotechnology Center at UC Davis, is today's guest blogger.
Ever since our ancestors adopted an agricultural lifestyle about 10,000 years ago, our own sustainability has been intimately tied with that of our food production systems. Those systems currently support 6.7 billion humans, or more correctly, adequately support about 5.9 billion with another 800 million or so suffering from food insecurity, malnutrition or hunger. Compare that with the 1960's when the world population was 3 billion, with 1 billion inadequately fed. Developments in agricultural technology have increased productivity sufficiently to feed an additional 3.9 billion people over the past 40 years while slightly decreasing the number in need and using less than 10% more land. However, food shortages, price increases and riots across the globe in 2008 were stark reminders that agriculture must be continuously successful or dire consequences quickly follow.
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Opium, Rape and the Bravest Woman in Afghanistan [The Primate Diaries]
Chris Hedges, the American war correspondent who has authored such books as War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, has a new article entitled "Opium, Rape and the American Way" published on the website of RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan).
The warlords we champion in Afghanistan are as venal, as opposed to the rights of women and basic democratic freedoms, and as heavily involved in opium trafficking as the Taliban. The moral lines we draw between us and our adversaries are fictional. The uplifting narratives used to justify the war in Afghanistan are pathetic attempts to redeem acts of senseless brutality.
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In a pandemic climate, public sneezing increases fears of unrelated risks [Not Exactly Rocket Science]
A friend of mine recently got onto a train and found a group of four seats that were empty except for one woman who was sitting face down. She looked asleep and he looked forward to a quiet journey. As soon as he sat down, the woman lifted her head to reveal streaming, puffy eyes and started sneezing profusely. This happened a few weeks after swine flu first began to dominate the headlines but being English, he was bound to the socially awkward choice of staying in his seat for the sake of avoiding social awkwardness.
Many of us probably have similar stories. At a time when fears of a flu pandemic dominate the headlines, does an innocuous sneeze make people fear the worst? Perhaps, but a new study suggests that hearing someone else sneeze plays with our minds far beyond exaggerated worries about pandemics. They can make us more worried about completely unrelated threats like heart attacks, crime and accidents. They can even affect our political attitudes.
On May 7, 2009, when swine flu had spread to at least 24 countries, a group of researchers from the University of Michigan took it upon themselves to sneeze in front of passers-by on their campus. Led by Spike Lee (no, not that one), the team approached 26 people who had heard the sneeze and 24 controls who hadn't, and asked them to complete a questionnaire for a class project.
Compared to the control group, those who had heard the sneeze felt that "average Americans" were more likely to contract a serious disease, citing risks of 41% compared to just 27%. More surprisingly, they also gave significantly higher estimates for the risk of dying from a heart attack by the age of 50 or of dying from crime or accidents. They even had slightly less faith in US healthcare, although this difference wasn't statistically significant.
Later on in the month, when almost twice as many countries had been infected, Lee performed a similar experiment in a shopping mall. This time, the experimenter asked passers-by to take part in a one-minute survey. Twenty-four of the volunteers received the form without much ado. Another 23 were handed the form by an experimenter who pretended to cough and sneeze at the same time, while covering her mouth with her forearm.
The first question asked people if they would prefer the federal government to allocate .3 billion towards the production of flu vaccines or the creation of green jobs. Faced with a sneezing, coughing researcher, almost half (48%) of the volunteers chose to finance the vaccine. Without the symptoms, only 17% did.
Of course, it's possible that being handed a form by a spluttering individual just put the volunteers in a negative and grumpy mindset. But Lee thinks not - a second question about the general direction of the country showed that both groups of volunteers were, on the whole, equally ambivalent about it.
Lee suggests that a minor, everyday event (like a sneeze) can heighten our worries about a whole range of unrelated hazards because it brings to mind a prominent threat (like a flu pandemic). Our emotions are affected by our ability to assess risks, regardless of what those risks are. In this way, the feelings elicited by one threat can feed into our evaluation of others, and sneezing in a pandemic climate can make people more worried about unrelated hazards from heart disease to crime.
Obviously, there's more work to be done. Lee's team haven't actually demonstrated that sneezing in a pandemic era makes people more worried about that specific threat. It would also be interesting to see if the effect they found waxes and wanes over time, and how that related to the amount of concurrent media coverage .
Nonetheless, one thing is clear. Like many aspects of our minds, people are completely unaware of this effect. When asked later, the volunteers didn't twig to the aims of the experiments. And while they assumed that a sneeze could make them overestimate the risk of flu, they didn't think it would make them think differently about the odds of other threats.
Reference: Psychological Science, in press.
More on our bizarre minds:
- Holding heavy objects makes us see things as more important
- Does having more competitors lower the motivation to compete?
- The peril of positive thinking - why positive messages hurt people with low self-esteem
- Thinking about money soothes sting of social rejection and physical pain
- Our moral thermostat - why being good can give people license to misbehave
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First ever association study using whole genome sequences [Genetic Future]
New-technology DNA sequencing provider Complete Genomics will provide near-complete genome sequences of 100 individuals to the Institute for Systems Biology, driving the first ever association study for a complex trait using whole-genome sequencing. Here's the press release, and GenomeWeb has some additional information.
This is pretty exciting stuff:
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UK Home Office Restores Drug Science to the Back of the Bus [DrugMonkey]
When I last took up the quixotic campaign of David Nutt, Ph.D., Professor of Psychopharmacology, Univ. of Bristol and former Chair of the UK Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, it was to point out his belief that MDMA should be downgraded to a lesser harm category. He had issued opinion pieces comparing MDMA's propensity for causing harm favorably with alcohol and waxed enthusiastic about the current clinical trials. The trigger for my post was his absurdist essay on the unfortunate harms to public health that are associated with addiction to "equasy".
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