Despite what’s written in sex advice books, the scientific search for the female erogenous zone known as the G-spot has proved surprisingly elusive. But now one physician claims to have found the first anatomical evidence of the fabled structure.

Gynecologist Adam Ostrzenski of the Institute of Gynecology Inc. in St. Petersburg, Fla., reports online April 25 in the Journal of Sexual Medicine that a surgical dissection revealed a sac of erectile tissue in the front wall of a woman’s vagina that Ostrzenski believes is the G-spot. If he’s correct, the discovery might help pave the way for therapies to treat female sexual dysfunction, Ostrzenski says.

Yet several respected sex researchers, including one who helped name the G-spot, are skeptical of the claim. (…)

In the new study, Ostrzenski dissected the vaginal wall of an 83-year-old woman who had died of a head injury less than 24 hours earlier.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

photo { Pina Bausch, Bluebeard, 1977 }

A team led by psychology professor Ian Spence at the University of Toronto reveals that playing an action videogame, even for a relatively short time, causes differences in brain activity and improvements in visual attention. (…) This is the first time research has attributed these differences directly to playing video games.

{ University of Toronto | Continue reading }

Retrocausality is any of several hypothetical phenomena or processes that reverse causality, allowing an effect to occur before its cause.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

related { Quantum decision affects results of measurements taken earlier in time }

Researchers have shown that by becoming carnivores, our ancestors were able to give birth to a greater number of offspring.

“Eating meat enabled the breast-feeding periods to be reduced and thereby the time between births to be shortened,” said lead author Elia Psouni from Lund University in Sweden. “This must have had a crucial impact on human evolution.”

Past research has tried to explain the relatively short breast-feeding period of humans based on social and behavioral theories of parenting and family size. For an average human baby, the duration of breast-feeding is two years and four months. This is not long in relation to the maximum lifespan of our species - around 120 years. It is even less if compared to our closest relatives - female chimpanzees suckle their young for four to five years, whereas the maximum lifespan for chimpanzees is only 60 years.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

Analyses suggest that a personality high in agreeableness is associated with lower earnings. This might seem surprising, given that agreeableness is associated with interpersonal effectiveness, increasingly important in jobs. But at least it helps explain why women experience pay inequality, given that women tend to have warm qualities; if they want to earn more, they better toughen up.

A recent study seeks to uncover more about why disagreeableness breeds pay, and why the situation for women is rather different.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

related { Woman Fired After Giving Up Kidney to Save Boss’s Life }

A fun little study from 2008 looked at rates of self-reported mental illness in mental health professionals. (…) The presence of Axis I traits (i.e. mental illness) was reported by 81.2%, the three most frequent traits being mood, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and eating disorder. Axis II traits (personality disorders) were reported by 73.4% of subjects, the three most frequent conditions being narcissistic, avoidant, and obsessive-compulsive personality traits.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

When you see a person’s face, how do you go about combining his or her facial features to make a decision about who that person is? Most current theories of face perception assert that the ability to recognize a human face is not simply the result of an independent analysis of individual features, but instead involves a holistic coding of the relationships among features. This coding is thought to enhance people’s ability to recognize a face beyond what would be expected if each feature were shown in isolation. In the study reported here, we explicitly tested this idea by comparing human performance on facial-feature integration with that of an optimal Bayesian integrator.

Contrary to the predictions of most current notions of face perception, our findings showed that human observers integrate facial features in a manner that is no better than would be predicted by their ability to use each individual feature when shown in isolation. That is, a face is perceived no better than the sum of its individual parts.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

Would you make the same decisions in a foreign language as you would in your native tongue? It may be intuitive that people would make the same choices regardless of the language they are using, or that the difficulty of using a foreign language would make decisions less systematic. We discovered, however, that the opposite is true: Using a foreign language reduces decision-making biases. (…) We propose that these effects arise because a foreign language provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

A new company backed by two Google Inc. billionaires, film director James Cameron and other space exploration proponents is aiming high in the hunt for natural resources—with mining asteroids the possible target. (…)

The possibility of extracting raw materials such as iron and nickel from asteroids has been discussed for decades, but the cost, scientific expertise and technical prowess of fulfilling such as feat have remained an obstacle. NASA experts have projected it could cost tens of billions of dollars and take well over a decade to land astronauts on an asteroid. (…)

Earlier this month, a study by NASA scientists concluded that, for a cost of $2.6 billion, humans could use robotic spacecraft to capture a 500-ton asteroid seven meters in diameter and bring it into orbit around the moon so that it could be explored and mined. The spacecraft, using a 40-kilowatt solar-electric propulsion system, would have a flight time of between six and 10 years, and humans could accomplish this task by around 2025.

{ WSJ | Continue reading | Asteroid Retrieval Feasibility Study | PDF }

Women with heart disease are more likely to give birth to female rather than male babies according to a new study.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

A new study shows that images of the left side of the face are perceived and rated as more pleasant than pictures of the right side of the face, possibly due to the fact that we present a greater intensity of emotion on the left side of our face.

{ Springer | Continue reading }

photos { Rob Steel | Thomas Macker }

Universal mind uploading is the concept (…) that the technology of mind uploading will eventually become universally adopted by all who can afford it, similar to the adoption of modern agriculture, hygiene, and permanent dwellings. The concept is rather infrequently discussed, due to a combination of 1) its supposedly speculative nature and 2) its “far future” time frame. Yet some futurists, such as myself, see the eventuality as plausible by as early as 2050. (…)

Mind uploading would involve simulating a human brain in a computer in enough detail that the “simulation” becomes, for all practical purposes, a perfect copy and experiences consciousness, just like protein-based human minds. If functionalism is true, as many cognitive scientists and philosophers believe, then all the features of human consciousness that we know and love — including all our memories, personality, and sexual quirks — would be preserved through the transition. By simultaneously disassembling the protein brain as the computer brain is constructed, only one implementation of the person in question would exist at any one time, eliminating any unnecessary philosophical confusion. Whether the computer upload is “the same person” is up for the person and his/her family and friends to decide. (…)

An upload of you with all your memories and personality intact is no different from you than the person you are today is different than the person you were yesterday when you went to sleep, or the person you were 10^-30 seconds ago when quantum fluctuations momentarily destroyed and recreated all the particles in your brain.

{ h+ | Continue reading }

Thinking about death can actually be a good thing. An awareness of mortality can improve physical health and help us re-prioritize our goals and values, according to a new analysis of recent scientific studies. Even non-conscious thinking about death – say walking by a cemetery – could prompt positive changes and promote helping others.

Past research suggests that thinking about death is destructive and dangerous, fueling everything from prejudice and greed to violence. Such studies related to terror management theory (TMT), which posits that we uphold certain cultural beliefs to manage our feelings of mortality, have rarely explored the potential benefits of death awareness.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Rachel Hulin }

In an act of transformation worthy of any magician, scientists have converted scar tissue in the hearts of living mice into beating heart cells. If the same trick works in humans (and we’re still several years away from a trial), it could lead us to a long-sought prize of medicine – a way to mend a broken heart.

{ NERS/Discover | Continue reading }

Large eggs must have thick shells, which make it difficult for the developing embryo to ‘breathe’ by exchanging gases with the outside world. This places an upper limit on egg size.

So, even though they grew into giants as adults, dinosaurs were forced to produce relatively tiny young. Titanosaur hatchlings, for example, were nearly 2,500 times smaller than the 4-tonne adults. By contrast, the live-born calf of an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) is about 25 times smaller than its mother.

When the young of large animals start out small, they must grow through a large size range before reaching adulthood, and compete with species of many different sizes as they do so.

Codron and his colleagues developed a model that suggests that there was intense competition among small and medium-sized dinosaurs, so that it was difficult for medium-sized adults to make a living, and adults had to keep growing until they reached very large sizes to gain a competitive edge.

But being big also has drawbacks. When an asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous period (65 million years ago) wiped out most large-bodied animals, there were so few small dinosaur species that the group was almost obliterated, with only the birds surviving. However, the many small mammals alive at the time were well suited to a world that favored diminutive species.

{ Nature | Continue reading }

Humans can only process small amounts of information at a time (consciously that is… the estimate is that we handle 40,000,000 pieces of information every second, but only 40 of those make it to our conscious brains). One mistake that web sites make is to give too much information all at once. (…) Think progressive disclosure.

{ 48 Psychological Facts | Continue reading }

Vets have been trying to explain strange symptoms in 21 cats that arrived in North-East Scotland, between 2001 and 2010. The animals appeared to have a slowly-progressing neurological disease. This paper observes how the cats walk with an odd gait with stiff, extended tails. Dubbed “robotic cats” due to their movements, they presented a veterinary oddity not seen before.

Cats with a slightly different but possibly related condition have been spotted in Sweden and Austria, where it was referred to as “staggering disease.” One of authors suggests “All the cats included in our study, and most of the cats reported with ‘staggering disease’, belong to the rural population accustomed to hunting birds and rodents”. It can be speculated that the agent may be transmitted from these animals to cats. The authors conclude that the late onset age of this disease, its slow progression, peculiar clinical signs and the data from the tests suggest these cats were affected by the same unique, previously unreported condition.

{ Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery/SAGE | Continue reading }

When it comes to diagnosing depression in teens, differentiating mental illness from normal mood swings can be difficult. But it can be a crucial diagnosis, given that untreated depression in youth makes them more vulnerable to later substance abuse, social maladjustment, physical illness and suicide.

“Depression in adolescents affects basically every component of their thinking and makes everything very difficult psychologically and socially,” says Eva Redei, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.

Currently, a depression diagnosis in teens relies on their descriptions of symptoms and their physician’s subjective observations. But now a new study suggests there may be a surer, more objective way: a blood test that identifies major depression by looking for a specific set of genetic markers in the blood.

{ Time | Continue reading }

photo { Pina Bausch, Blaubart, 1977 | performance still }

Happiness has long been regarded as one of the highest goals in human life. If our sense of happiness is closely connected to brain functions, future methods may allow us to control happiness through refined, effective brain manipulation. Can we regard such happiness as true happiness? In this paper I will make some remarks on the manipulation of the sense of happiness and illuminate the relationship between human dignity and happiness. (…)

The President’s Council on Bioethics’s 2003 report Beyond Therapy includes an extensive discussion of the morality of mood-improvement drugs such as SSRIs (Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). The report argues that while SSRIs can help patients live a better life by inducing calm, providing a background of well-being, and changing personality, such drugs create some fundamental ethical problems. First, one might come to “feel happy for no good reason at all, or happy even when there remains much in one’s life to be truly unhappy about.” Second, “SSRIs may generally dull our capacity to feel [psychic pain], rendering us less capable of experiencing and learning from misfortune or tragedy or empathizing with the miseries of others.” And third, those drugs “might shrink our capacity for true human flourishing.” To conclude, the report recommends those drugs be “sparingly” used so that we “are able to feel joy at joyous events and sadness at sad ones.”

The Council’s argument was made from the perspective of conservative or communitarian ethics, and it has been harshly criticized by proponents of technological advances as being overly sentimental. (…)

In order to further develop their argument, here I would like to make a thought experiment. Suppose we have a perfect happiness drug without any side effects, and, having taken that drug, the user is filled with a sense of happiness for a couple of days regardless of his or her experiences. (…) “Today my child was killed, but how happy I am now!” (…) This is a typical example of Beyond Therapy’s case in which a person feels “happy when there remains much in one’s life to be truly unhappy about.”

{ Journal of Philosophy of Life | PDF }

A massive genetics study relying on fMRI brain scans and DNA samples from over 20,000 people has revealed what is claimed as the biggest effect yet of a single gene on intelligence – although the effect is small.

There is little dispute that genetics accounts for a large amount of the variation in people’s intelligence, but studies have consistently failed to find any single genes that have a substantial impact. Instead, researchers typically find that hundreds of genes contribute.

Following a brain study on an unprecedented scale, an international collaboration has now managed to tease out a single gene that does have a measurable effect on intelligence. But the effect – although measurable – is small: the gene alters IQ by just 1.29 points.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

related { Niceness is at least partly in the genes }