The sperm count of French men fell by a third between 1989 and 2005, a study suggests.

The semen of more than 26,600 French men was tested in the study, reported in the journal Human Reproduction.
The number of millions of spermatozoa per millilitre fell by 32.3%, a rate of about 1.9% a year. And the percentage of normally shaped sperm fell by 33.4%. [..]

“To our knowledge, this is the first study concluding a severe and general decrease in sperm concentration and morphology at the scale of a whole country over a substantial period.” […]

Prof Richard Sharpe, from the University of Edinburgh, said: “Something in our modern lifestyle, diet or environment like chemical exposure, is causing this. “We still do not know which are the most important factors, but perhaps the most likely is a combination, a double whammy of changes, such as a high-fat diet combined with increased environmental chemical exposures.”

{ BBC | Continue reading | Thanks GG }

With everything from banking records and health data to contacts lists and photos available through our mobile phones, the ability to securely  access this data is an increasingly important concern.  That’s why many phone manufactures and data holders are keen on biometric security systems that reliably identify individuals.

The question of course is which biometric system to use. Face, fingerpint and iris recognition are all topics of intense research. But the most obvious choice for a mobile phone is surely voice identification. However, this approach has been plagued with problems.

For example, people’s voices can change dramatically when they are ill or in a hurry. What’s more, it’s relatively easy to record somebody’s voice during authentication and use that to break the system. So many groups have steered away from voice biometrics.

That could be set to change. Today, RC Johnson at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs and a couple of pals lay out a new approach to voice biometrics which they say solves these problems. The new system provides secure authentication while also preserving the privacy of the user.

In the new system, users set up their accounts by recording a large number of words and phrases which are sent in encrypted form to a bank, for example. This forms a template that the bank uses to verify the user.

{ The Physics arXiv Blog | Continue reading }

With a homicide rate historically more than three times greater than the rest of the United States, Newark, N.J., isn’t a great vacation spot. But it’s a great place for a murder study.

Led by April Zeoli, an assistant professor of criminal justice, a group of researchers at Michigan State University tracked homicides around Newark from 1982 to 2008, using analytic software typically used by medical researchers to track the spread of diseases. They found that “homicide clusters” in Newark, as researchers called them, spread and move throughout a city much the same way diseases do. Murders, in other words, did not surface randomly—they began in the city center and moved in “diffusion-like processes” across the city.

The study also found that the there were areas of Newark that, despite being beset by violence on all sides, remained almost completely immune to the surrounding trends over the entire course of the 26 years studied.

{ Vice | Continue reading }

Chinese astronauts are preparing to grow fresh vegetables on Mars and the moon.

Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements.

In the name of equality, the French government has proposed doing away with homework in elementary and junior high school. French President Francois Hollande argues that homework penalizes children with difficult home situations, but even the people whom the proposal is supposed to help disagree.

Researchers believe that they have found the definitive difference between humans and other primates, and they think that the difference all comes down to a single gene.

Researchers confirm the ‘Pinocchio Effect’: When you lie, your nose temperature raises.

You are more likely to die in the late morning — around 11 a.m., specifically — than at any other time during the day.

Romantic relationships are still the most common context for sexual behavior, at least among women in their first year of college.

Mixed weight couples experience more relationship conflict.

Men with erection problems are 3 times more likely to have inflamed gums.

Many investors state bluntly that they prefer to see people under 40 in charge.

This paper presents a theory of the Global Financial Crisis which argues that psychopaths working in corporations and in financial corporations, in particular, have had a major part in causing the crisis.

Who Can Stop Psychopaths from Ruining Companies? Insurers.

Are You a Psychopath? Take the Test.

How to track roadkill on your smartphone. [more]

By reorganizing the typewriter’s characters into ready-made clusters of commonly used words, Mao-era Chinese typists solved problems that cell phones only came to recently.

About 100 years ago, we’re told, boys wore pink clothes, but then during the early 20th century, it flipped over. However according to psychologist Marco Del Giudice, the whole “pink-blue reversal” is a ‘urban legend.’

He talks about how LA is superior to New York because you can sing in the car when you’re stuck in traffic, and also he once saw the movie Swingers here.

Jessica Simpson is pregnant again even though she just gave birth 20 minutes ago.

Why was Margaret Thatcher interrupted so often in interviews?

The only two things missing in Bach’s music are randomness and sex.

Nabokov’s letter to Hitchcock.

This study comprehensively ranks the American states on their public policies that affect individual freedoms in the economic, social, and personal spheres. [New York is by far the least free state.]

The Odds in a Coin Flip Aren’t Quite 50/50.

What are the real-life equivalents of trolling on the Internet? Leave the copy machine set to reduce 200%; extra dark; 17 inch paper; 99 copies.

The accident happened in Shuangxi, Fujian province.

This was terrible news for neuroscience—if six studies led to six different answers, why should anybody believe anything that neuroscientists had to say? […] And then, surprisingly, the field prospered. Brain imaging became more, not less, popular. The technique of PET was replaced with the more flexible technique of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which allowed scientists to study people’s brains without the use of the risky radioactive tracers, and to conduct longer studies that collected more data and yielded more reliable results. […]

After two decades of almost complete dominance, a few bright souls started speaking up, asking: Are all these brain studies really telling us much as we think they are?

{ The New Yorker | Continue reading }

related { Neuroscience Team Explains Why Old People Get Scammed }

If everyone knows a tenth of the population dishonestly claims to observe alien spaceships, this can make it very hard for the honest alien-spaceship-observer to communicate fact that she has actually seen an alien spaceship.

{ OvercomingBias | Continue reading }

{ WTF? Myspace grows 1% as Facebook falls 10% }

In 1870, German chemist Erich von Wolf analyzed the iron content of green vegetables and accidentally misplaced a decimal point when transcribing data from his notebook. As a result, spinach was reported to contain a tremendous amount of iron—35 milligrams per serving, not 3.5 milligrams (the true measured value). While the error was eventually corrected in 1937, the legend of spinach’s nutritional power had already taken hold, one reason that studio executives chose it as the source of Popeye’s vaunted strength.

The point, according to Samuel Arbesman, an applied mathematician and the author of the delightfully nerdy “The Half-Life of Facts,” is that knowledge—the collection of “accepted facts”—is far less fixed than we assume. In every discipline, facts change in predictable, quantifiable ways, Mr. Arbesman contends, and understanding these changes isn’t just interesting but also useful. For Mr. Arbesman, Wolf’s copying mistake says less about spinach than about the way scientific knowledge propagates.

Copying errors, it turns out, aren’t uncommon and fall into characteristic patterns, such as deletions and duplications—exactly the sorts of mistakes that geneticists have identified in DNA. Using approaches adapted from genetics, paleographers—scientists who study ancient writing—use these accumulated errors to trace the age and origins of a document, much in the same way biologists use the accumulation of genetic mutations to assess how similar two species are to each other. For example, by analyzing the oddities and duplicated errors in the 58 surviving versions of “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue” from Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” researchers deduced the content of the original version.

Mr. Arbesman’s interest in the spread of knowledge also leads him to the story of Brontosaurus, the lovable, distinct herbivore we all grew up with—only it never existed. Originally described in 1879 by Othniel Marsh, the Brontosaurus was soon determined to be a type of dinosaur that Marsh had already discovered in 1877, the Apatosaurus. But since the original Apatosaurus was just “a tiny collection of bones,” while the Brontosaurus that Marsh named “went on to be supplemented with a complete skeleton, beautiful to behold,” the second discovery captured the public’s imagination and the name “Brontosaurus” stuck for nearly a century. Only recently has the name “Apatosaurus” started to gain traction.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

{ During the recent $550 million upgrade of the Empire State Building, Ms. Christy was asked whether she could help get more people up to the observation deck. She said she couldn’t get more people into a car but could move them up more quickly. So she increased the elevators’ speed by 20%, to 20 feet per second. Now the cars can rise 80 floors in about 48 seconds, 10 seconds faster than before. Ms. Christy strikes down one common myth—that “door close” buttons don’t work. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, she says. It depends on the building’s owner. | WSJ | full story }

The past couple of years have seen findings, that, taken together, suggest that we should embrace coffee for reasons beyond the benefits of caffeine, and that we might go so far as to consider it a nutrient. […]

Coffee, researchers found, appears to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes. […]

Caffeine might also function as a pain reliever. […]

While a small study this month found that concentrated amounts of caffeine can increase positivity in the moment, last September the nurses’ cohort demonstrated a neat reduction in depression rates among women that became stronger with increased consumption of caffeinated coffee. […]

Findings have been supporting that coffee can protect against some cancers. […]

If you have fatty liver disease, a study from last December found that unspecified amounts can reduce your risk of fibrosis.

{ The Atlantic | Continue reading }

Over the second half of the 20th century, the average age for girls to begin breast development has dropped by a year or more in the industrialized world. And the age of first menstruation, generally around 12, has advanced by a matter of months. Hispanic and black girls may be experiencing an age shift much more pronounced. […]

“If you basically say that the onset of puberty has a bell-shaped distribution, it seems to many of us the whole curve is shifting to the left,” says Paul Kaplowitz, chief of the division of endocrinology and diabetes at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. More girls, he says, are starting puberty before age 8, putting them at “the lower end of the new normal range.”

Researchers are now turning their attention to what could be driving the trend. Many scientists suspect that younger puberty is a consequence of an epidemic of childhood obesity, citing studies that find development closely tied to the accumulation of body fat. But there are other possibilities, including the presence of environmental chemicals that can mimic the biological properties of estrogen, and psychological and social stressors that might alter the hormonal makeup of a young body.

{ ScienceNews | Continue reading }

Last year, for the first time, sales of adult diapers in Japan exceeded those for babies.

Beverly Hills Caviar has unveiled its first touch-screen vending machine.

Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter.

Facebook may cause stress, study says.

China to build world’s tallest building - in just 90 days. Critics have pointed out that BSB’s construction company has never built anything taller than 30 storeys before, but the builders seem unworried.

Cellphones reshape prostitution in India, complicate efforts to prevent AIDS.

Singapore is world’s least emotional country, poll finds.

Security Flaw In Common Keycard Locks Exploited In String Of Hotel Room Break-Ins.

ADHD medication could cut crime rates.

Salivary Testosterone Levels in Men at a U.S. Sex Club.

In terms of psychological characteristics, porn actresses had higher levels of self-esteem, positive feelings, social support, sexual satisfaction, and spirituality compared to the matched group.

For the very first time researchers have streamed braille patterns directly into a blind patient’s retina, allowing him to read four-letter words accurately and quickly with an ocular neuroprosthetic device.

Psychologists Release Emotion-On-Demand Plug In For Virtual Characters.

Dogs learn to associate words with objects differently than humans do.

Drug companies’ influence over research grows. Even in the most respected of medical journals, firms’ funding and ties to studies open the door to bias.

Here, we investigated the sexual capability of the fungus Penicillium roqueforti, used as starter for blue cheese production.

The anal voice is the meeting-place of shit and the rectum (what Freud calls the first penis and the first vagina), which inaugurates the subject qua the subject of discourse, the speaking-being.

What are map bunnies, you ask? In the cartography business, it’s a small piece of erroneous information tucked away on a map on purpose.

Your brain by the numbers.

Lighter in blender.

When I was a kid, probably about 9 or 10 [years old], we went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. Just as my dad was about to pay, he suddenly tinked his spoon against his glass and stood up. The whole restaurant went silent. My dad said, “I’d just like to thank you all for coming; some from just round the corner, some from much further afield. You’re all most welcome to join us for a little drinks reception across the road.’

And so an entire restaurant of strangers who had never seen us before were  all applauding wildly because they didn’t want to be seen as gatecrashers. We just took off. He [told me] we’re not going to the pub really and [explained that his] old friend Malcolm had [just opened a new pub across the street].

[…]

If you’re an intelligent psychopath and violent [and get a good start], there are any number of exciting occupations, anything from special forces operative to head of a criminal syndicate.

{ Kevin Dutton/Time | Continue reading }

Young children are inclined to see purpose in the natural world. Ask them why we have rivers, and they’ll likely tell you that we have rivers so that boats can travel on them (an example of a “teleological explanation”). […] A new study with 80 physical scientists finds that they too have a latent tendency to endorse similar teleological explanations for why nature is the way it is. They label those explanations as false most of the time, but put them under time pressure, and their child-like, quasi-religious beliefs shine through.

Deborah Kelemen and her colleagues presented 80 scientists (including physicists, chemists and geographers) with 100 one-sentence statements and their task was to say if each one was true or false. Among the items were teleological statements about nature, such as “Trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe”. Crucially, half the scientists had to answer under time pressure - just over 3 seconds for each statement - while the others had as long as they liked. There were also control groups of college students and the general public. […]

When they were rushed, the scientists endorsed 29 per cent of teleological statements compared with 15 per cent endorsed by the un-rushed scientists. This is consistent with the idea that a tendency to endorse teleological beliefs lingers in the scientists’ minds. This unscientific thinking is usually suppressed, but time pressure undermines that conscious suppression. […]

Scientists who admitted having religious beliefs, or beliefs about Mother Nature being one big organism, were more prone than most to endorsing teleological explanation under time pressure.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

Man arrested in Athens over ID theft of most of Greek population.

Full Moons Do Not Drive People Crazy.

The ‘enigmatic’ protein behind our heartbeat. New research has shed light on the mechanism responsible for a regular heartbeat, scientists announced, saying the findings could help explain cardiac arrest in otherwise healthy young people.

In freshwater ponds around the world live tiny animals called bdelloid rotifers. As a group, they have not had sex for somewhere between 40 and 100 million years.

Very few researchers have attempted to describe a biomechanical model for numerical simulation of front and back somersaults, as performed on the trampoline.

Which Bond Villain Plan Would Have Worked (and Which Not)?

Why do women have long hair and men don’t?

Is the Chinese word for “crisis” a combination of “danger” and “opportunity”?

List of unexplained sounds.

Directed by Michael Bay.

Critics claim that evolutionary biology is, at best, guesswork. The reality is otherwise. Evolutionists have nailed down how an enormous number of previously unexplained phenomena—in anatomy, physiology, embryology, behavior—have evolved. There are still mysteries, however, and one of the most prominent is the origins of homosexuality. […]

If homosexuality is in any sense a product of evolution—and it clearly is, for reasons to be explained—then genetic factors associated with same-sex preference must enjoy some sort of reproductive advantage. The problem should be obvious: If homosexuals reproduce less than heterosexuals—and they do—then why has natural selection not operated against it?

{ The Chronicle of Higher Education | Continue reading }

photo { Holly Andres }

These days, the TSA’s major role appears to be to make plane trips more unpleasant. And by doing so, it’s encouraging people to take the considerably more dangerous option of traveling by road. […]

A longer list of TSA’s confiscations would include a G.I. Joe action doll’s 4-inch plastic rifle (“it’s a replica”) and a light saber. […]

Researchers at Cornell University suggest that people switching from air to road transportation in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks led to an increase of 242 driving fatalities per month—which means that a lot more people died on the roads as an indirect result of 9/11 than died from being on the planes that terrible day. They also suggest that enhanced domestic baggage screening alone reduced passenger volume by about 5 percent in the five years after 9/11, and the substitution of driving for flying by those seeking to avoid security hassles over that period resulted in more than 100 road fatalities.

{ BloombergBusinessweek | Continue reading }

In a year or two, augmented reality (AR) headsets such as Google Glass may double up as a virtual dieting pill. New research from the University of Tokyo shows that a very simple AR trick can reduce the amount that you eat by 10% — and yes, the same trick, used in the inverse, can be used to increase food consumption by 15%, too.

The AR trick is very simple: By donning the glasses, the University of Tokyo’s special software “seamlessly” scales up the size of your food. […]

It has been shown time and time again that large plates and large servings encourage you to consume more. In one study, restaurant-goers ate more food when equipped with smaller forks; but at home, the opposite is true. In another study, it was shown that you eat more food if the color of your plate matches what you’re eating.

{ ExtremeTech | Continue reading }

Six years ago, Mexico was the world’s ninth largest exporter of cars. Today the country is ranked fourth—behind Germany, Japan and South Korea—with exports expected to total more than 2.14 million vehicles this year.

One in 10 cars sold last year in the U.S. was made in Mexico. Next year, every new taxi in New York’s fleet—made by Nissan Motor Co.  —will carry the “Hecho en Mexico” label. Mexico is now exporting vehicles to China, and even helped Japan keep up with orders after last year’s tsunami.

Mexico’s Economy Minister Bruno Ferrari boasted that a batch of new factories planned by car makers will help Mexico surpass South Korea in a few years. […]

For decades, the free world drove cars made primarily in the U.S., Germany and Japan. But a global shift toward smaller cars has put pressure on profit margins, forcing car companies to find lower-cost manufacturing elsewhere. […]

Wages for Mexican assembly-line workers begin at $40 a day, experts said. That is far below minimum wage requirements in the U.S. or Europe and approaching the average manufacturing wage in China, which is $3 per hour.

{ WSJ | Continue reading }

Customers buy a saliva kit online at 23andMe.com, send it in, and the company extracts their DNA from cheek cells preserved in saliva. In its labs, 23andMe then copies the DNA many times until there’s enough to be genotyped. Then, says lesbian scientist Emily Drabant, the DNA is examined for tens of thousands of genetic variants linked to various conditions and traits, and within weeks users get more than 100 reports on diseases, more than 50 reports on traits, more than 40 reports on carrier status, and more than 20 for drug response. […]

The most commonly requested test, Drabant says, is for sexual orientation, a particularly controversial area. […] The company initiated its sexual orientation project about six months ago, and researchers are hoping that tens of thousands of LGBT folks take the genetic test and fill out the accompanying survey — the information from which allows 23andMe to see patterns among, for example, gay men or transgender women. […] As soon as the company has a big enough sample, it plans to make those results public.

{ Advocate | Continue reading }