Public restrooms are a great place to find bacteria, as the authors of the new study euphemistically put it, “because of the activities that take place there and the high frequency of use by individuals with different hygienic routines.” Furthermore, different neighborhoods within bathrooms probably house different communities of bacteria. To perform a census on these hidden but lively communities, researchers sampled surfaces in six men’s rooms and six women’s rooms at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Genetic sequencing of these samples told them which species of bacteria were present. Out of all the bacterial types that turned up, there were 19 phyla of bacteria present in every bathroom.

{ inkfish | Continue reading }

illustration { Wendy MacNaughton, Meanwhile, The San Francisco Public Library }

The majority of studies testing this theory have examined men and women’s responses to hypothetical infidelity scenarios in which participants must choose which type of infidelity (sexual or emotional) is more distressing or upsetting.

Although studies using this forced-choice methodology generally find that a higher proportion of men than women choose the sexual infidelity as more distressing, reliance on this methodology has led to a number of serious challenges, including: (a) that sex differences in jealousy are not replicable with continuous measures of jealousy, and (b) that sex differences in jealousy do not emerge when people report their reactions to actual infidelity experiences.

{ Evolutionary Psychology | Continue reading }

photo { Rankin }

related { Which Infidelity Type Makes You More Jealous? Decision Strategies in a Forced-choice Between Sexual and Emotional Infidelity. }

“Did you know that 95% the universe is dark matter?” (…) “What about dark energy?” (…)

It is true that most of the universe is made up of things that can’t be seen, and whose presence is inferred by its effects on the things that can be seen. But what effects do we see? And how does that translate to a percentage of the universe that remains a mystery?

Galaxies rotate, and when we use gravitational laws to predict what that rotation should look like, we find that they should behave like the solar system–the farther away something is from the central mass (in the case of the solar system, the sun, and in the case of a galaxy, the supermassive black hole at the center), the slower it should orbit; the gravitational force on Pluto, for instance, is much smaller than the gravitational force on Mercury, because it’s much farther away from the sun. A star at the fingertip of an arm of the galaxy should orbit more slowly than we do. However, that’s not really what happens: galaxies have flat rotation curves, meaning that objects farther away from the supermassive black hole don’t really orbit more slowly than things closer to it.

What this implies is that there is lots of mass spread throughout the galaxy–that most of the mass isn’t just at the center–and that the spread-out mass has a large gravitational effect on the galaxy’s rotation.

{ Smaller Questions | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Pearly | 2. Natalia Arias }

related { Computer simulations suggest that a giant planet was kicked out of our solar system billions of years ago, saving Earth in the process. But how solid are those simulations? }

{ The Amazing History and the Strange Invention of the Bendy Straw | Centuries before Darwin, Leonardo guessed through his study of rocks and fossils that the world is far older than Genesis claims }

Sit back, close your eyes, relax for a minute and allow your mind to wander wherever it wants to go. Don’t try to think of anything… Have you ever wondered what is going on inside your brain when your mind isn’t doing anything in particular, just like a moment ago? It turns out quite a lot.

One of the most astonishing qualities of the brain is its voracious appetite for energy. It accounts for only 2% of body weight, yet it burns an amazing 20% of the total calories consumed by the body. So you might think that the brain at rest would be conserving energy until the next task, but this is hardly the case. The energy consumption of the brain at rest decreases by only 5% compared to a brain at full capacity. Scientists have named the energy consumed during rest the brain’s “dark energy,” since the massive energy consumption during this so-called rest period is one of the biggest mysteries in neuroscience today.

{ BrainBlogger | Continue reading }

screenshot { Marley Shelton in Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, 2007 }

From time to time, you will see news of a lobster being caught with some unusual color, like orange, blue, or calico. (…) What determines color in crustaceans generally? It’s a complicated mix.

The most dramatic color variants are caused by genetics. (…)

Bowman investigated this in crayfish decades ago by placing crayfish in normal tanks, tanks painted black, and tanks painted white. Crayfish placed in black tanks had more red coloration, and those in the white tanks, more white coloration. Bowman also noted that animals that had become adapted to the bright white tanks did not darken up again after being placed into black surroundings. There are limits to how flexible the color changes are.

{ Marbled Crayfish News & Views | Continue reading }

…suggesting that brains have two distinct molecular learning mechanisms, one to learn about relationships among events in the world around them, and one to learn about the effects of their own behavior on the world.

{ Bjoern Brembs | Continue reading }

Do you really know what you want in a partner?

“People have ideas about the abstract qualities they’re looking for in a romantic partner,” said Eastwick, assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University and lead author of the study. “But once you actually meet somebody face to face, those ideal preferences for traits tend to be quite flexible.”

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

photo { Ruth Bernhard }

Stuart Brody, a psychology professor at the University of the West of Scotland, claims that you can discern a woman’s ability to achieve orgasm just by looking at her lips.

Vaginal Orgasm Is More Prevalent Among Women with a Prominent Tubercle of the Upper Lip

Introduction. Recent studies have uncovered multiple markers of vaginal orgasm history (unblocked pelvic movement during walking, less use of immature psychological defense mechanisms, greater urethrovaginal space). Other markers (perhaps of prenatal origin) even without obvious mechanistic roles in vaginal orgasm might exist, and a clinical observation led to the novel hypothesis that a prominent tubercle of the upper lip is such a marker.

Aims. To examine the hypothesis that a prominent tubercle of the upper lip is associated specifically with greater likelihood of experiencing vaginal orgasm (orgasm elicited by penile–vaginal intercourse [PVI] without concurrent masturbation).

{ Wiley | Continue reading | via UA }

photo { Annika von Hausswolff }

New research suggests it can take just 20 seconds to detect whether a stranger is genetically inclined to being trustworthy, kind or compassionate.

The findings reinforce that healthy humans are wired to recognize strangers who may help them out in a tough situation. They also pave the way for genetic therapies for people who are not innately sympathetic, researchers said.

“It’s remarkable that complete strangers could pick up on who’s trustworthy, kind or compassionate in 20 seconds when all they saw was a person sitting in a chair listening to someone talk,” said Aleksandr Kogan, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

{ UC Berkeley | Continue reading }

Dmitri Mendeleev (1834 – 1907) was a Russian chemist and inventor. He is credited as being the creator of the first version of the periodic table of elements. Using the table, he predicted the properties of elements yet to be discovered.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

photos { 1. Daniel Everett | 2. Lars Tunbjörk, Stockbroker Tokyo, 1999 }

Past research, feminist theory and parental admonishments all have long suggested that when men see a woman wearing little or nothing, they focus on her body and think less of her mind. The new findings by Gray, et al. both expand and change our understanding of how paying attention to someone’s body can alter how both men and women view both women and men.

“An important thing about our study is that, unlike much previous research, ours applies to both sexes. It also calls into question the nature of objectification because people without clothes are not seen as mindless objects, but they are instead attributed a different kind of mind,” says UMD’s Gray.”

“We also show that this effect can happen even without the removal of clothes. Simply focusing on someone’s attractiveness, in essence concentrating on their body rather than their mind, makes you see her or him as less of an agent [someone who acts and plans] more of an experiencer.”

Traditional research and theories on objectification suggest that we see the mind of others on a continuum between the full mind of a normal human and the mindlessness of an inanimate object. The idea of objectification is that looking at someone in a sexual context—such as in pornography—leads people to focus on physical characteristics, turning them into an object without a mind or moral status.
However, recent findings indicate that rather than looking at others on a continuum from object to human, we see others as having two aspects of mind: agency and experience. Agency is the capacity to act, plan and exert self-control, whereas experience is the capacity to feel pain, pleasure and emotions. Various factors – including the amount of skin shown – can shift which type of mind we see in another person.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

I was working with psychotic patients at the time, and I particularly enjoyed my conversations with one of my patients, Ron, who would discourse at length on politics, art and science, and who gave cogent accounts of his brilliant, but curtailed, academic career. And then he would flip. He entered a parallel, paranoid universe; an alternative history in which he had served as Princess Anne’s bodyguard, but was now being persecuted by agents of the royal family. Why? Because he had betrayed a terrible secret: the princess had given birth to Siamese twin daughters and hidden them away. One of the brightest people I ever met, Ron was also the most resolutely insane. He refused medication, preferring to meet his madness head on. (…)

Then there are the extremely rare cases of “dicephalic parapagus” (one trunk, two heads) and “diprosopic parapagus” (one trunk, one head, two faces).

Is it possible in such cases to determine the number of persons present? Philosophers delineate various conditions of personhood, among them: humanity (membership of the human race), identity (psychological continuity over time), and individuation (factors distinguishing one person from another). Conjoined twins clearly meet the first two conditions but create confusion over the third. If bodily functions and/or brain activity are to some extent shared then, arguably, the individuation of conjoined twins is only partial. There is neither one person nor two.

{ Prospect | Continue reading }

Men and women are what is termed sexually dysmorphic in terms of finger lengths. In women, the index and ring fingers are generally the same length, while in men the index finger is generally shorter.

Researchers from UC Berkeley created a stir in 2000 when they reported that lesbian women tended to have a ratio of the two finger lengths that was more typical of men. But the situation was more complicated for men. The team found no difference in the ratio between gay and straight men unless they had several older brothers — a factor which had previously been linked to being homosexual. Such men were found to have an unusually low ratio of the finger lengths.

Other recent research has suggested that men with a lower ratio have a more symmetrical face and are more attractive to women, a phenomenon known as the “sexy ratio.”

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

The longer a man’s ring finger when compared with his index finger, the longer the length of his penis, according to Korean researchers.

{ ABC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fingers can provide clues to his risk of prostate cancer, according to new research.

{ BBC | Continue reading }

The length of a man’s fourth finger has been linked to his libido.

{ Daily Mail | Continue reading }

Men with longer ring fingers more likely to be rich.

{ Telegraph | Continue reading }

photo { Erica Segovia }

We’re not always aware of how we are making a decision. Unconscious feelings or perceptions may influence us. Another important source of information—even if we’re unaware of it—is the body itself. (…)

In a new study, Eerland and colleagues Tulio Guadalupe and Rolf Zwaan found that surreptitiously manipulating the tilt of the body influences people’s estimates of quantities, such as sizes, numbers, or percentages. (…)

How many Number 1 hits did Michael Jackson have in the Netherlands? The answers were all between 1 and 10. As expected, participants gave smaller estimations when leaning left than when either leaning right or standing upright. There was no difference in their estimates between right-leaning and upright postures.

The researchers point out that body posture won’t make you answer incorrectly if you know the answer.

{ APS | Continue reading }

At the turn of the 20th century, finding a new form of radiation could put a physicist’s career on the fast track. Wilhelm Röntgen changed the world by discovering X-rays in 1895. Soon thereafter, Ernest Rutherford and Paul Villard identified three different kinds of radiation, dubbed alpha, beta, and gamma rays, emitted by radioactive compounds. In 1903 French scientist René Blondlot added to the frenzy with his announcement of N-rays, a strangely democratic form of radiation emitted by wood, iron, living organisms—just about anything at all.

Some 300 scientific papers were written about N-rays. There was just one problem: They weren’t real. A skeptical physicist named Robert Wood visited Blondlot’s lab and secretly removed a key part of his apparatus; this had no effect on Blondlot’s perception of N-rays, showing that they were purely a product of the imagination. (…)

The modern version of the search for new kinds of radiation is the search for new forces of nature. And while there may be unknown forces waiting to be discovered, we can say with great confidence that such forces must be so feeble that only a professional physicist like me would really care. (…)

According to modern physics, the world is fundamentally composed of particles interacting via forces. Over the course of the 20th century, researchers discovered many new particles interacting in many different ways. But it gradually became clear that the vast majority of such particles are merely different combinations of smaller ones, and the great variety of interactions boils down to just a few forces. When the dust settled in the 1970s, we were left with two kinds of elementary particles: quarks, which group into heavier composites like protons and neutrons; and lighter particles called leptons, like the electron and the neutrino, which can move freely without bunching into heavier combinations.

Amazingly, these particles interact through just four different forces. Two are familiar—gravity and electromagnetism. (…) The other two forces are the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force. (…)

How can we be so sure there aren’t other forces that we just haven’t yet been clever enough to find? The answer is, we can look for them. We know where to look, and indeed we have looked. Other forces are not out there, at least not to any significant extent. Any new force we might someday discover must be so impotent over everyday distances that there’s no way it can affect the macroscopic world. If it could, we would already have found it.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

painting { Linnea Strid }

According to a new paper, the brains of male-to-female transexuals are no more “female” than those of men. (…) But is it so simple? (..)

Structural MRI scans were used to compare the size of various brain structures between three groups of volunteers: heterosexual men, heterosexual women and the transexuals (or “MtF”s as I will call them for short) who were diagnosed with gender dysphoria and were “genetically and phenotypically males”.

There were 24 in each group, which makes it a decent sized study. None of the MtFs had started hormone treatment yet, so that wasn’t a factor, and none of the women were on hormonal contraception.

The scans showed that the non-transsexual male and female brains differed in various ways. Male brains were larger overall but women had increases in the relative volumes of various areas. Male brains were also more asymmetrical.

The key finding was that on average, the MtF brains were not like the female ones. There were some significant differences from the male brains, but they weren’t the same differences that distinguished the females from the males. (…)

There could be all kinds of chemical and microstructural differences that don’t show up on these scans.

There are lots of people with severe epilepsy, for example, whose brains clearly differ in some major way from people without epilepsy, yet they look completely normal on MRI.

{ Neuroskeptic | Continue reading }

photo { Bruce Davidson }

Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we’re no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach – a very stretchy container – we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we’ll still polish it off. And then we’ll go have dessert.

Consider a clever study done by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing at Cornell. He used a bottomless bowl of soup – there was a secret tube that kept on refilling the bowl with soup from below – to demonstrate that how much people eat is largely dependent on how much you give them. The group with the bottomless bowl ended up consuming nearly 70 percent more than the group with normal bowls. What’s worse, nobody even noticed that they’d just slurped far more soup than normal.

{ Wired | Continue reading }

photo { Annee Olofsson }

Food allergies are weird. Basically, you eat something, it gets broken down, and sometimes the food has proteins in it that the body doesn’t digest. In food allergy sufferers, the immune system will recognize this foreign protein and raise hell about it (i.e. trigger inflammation). When you’ve inadvertently ingested some disease-causing bacteria, this is a great response; when you’ve eaten a chocolate bar that has brushed against peanut dust in some factory, this response is just unfortunate. (…)

A future without food allergies? Quite possibly.

{ Try Nerdy | Continue reading }

photo { Erwin Olaf }

A sociological content analysis of advertising catalogues with the eye-tracking method

Is it possible to look at something without actually noticing it? Is it possible to see something in the picture that is not really there? The answers to these philosophical questions can be obtained by comparing the results of eye-tracking tests combined with interviews based on sociological theories. (…)

The respondents, in line with our expectations, turned out to be familiar with the catalogue investigated. All of them provided the correct name of the company. When asked to describe in their own words the situations presented, the respondents would stress the fact that they show “the ideal” world. (…)

While most attention should be given to watching the advertisements, we constitute our dreams of a perfect life, environment and the items that furnish it.

{ Qualitative Sociology Review | Continue reading | PDF }