How does inheritance of blood types work?

There are three blood genes: A, B, and O. (I’m going to ignore the + and - part of this.) A and B are dominant, and O is recessive. You inherit one blood gene from your mother and one from your father. The combination of genes determines your blood type. There are four possibilities: A, B, AB, and O.  Here’s how it works:

A + A = A

A + O = A
A + B = AB

B + B = B
B + O = B

O + O = O

{ The Straight Dope | Continue reading }

The Rh (Rhesus) blood group system (including the Rh factor) is one of the currently 30 human blood group systems. It is clinically the most important blood group system after ABO. The Rh blood group system currently consists of 50 defined blood-group antigens, among which the 5 antigens D, C, c, E, and e are the most important ones. The commonly-used terms Rh factor, Rh positive and Rh negative refer to the D antigen only.

An individual either has, or does not have, the “Rhesus factor” on the surface of their red blood cells. This term strictly refers only to the most immunogenic D antigen of the Rh blood group system, or the Rh- blood group system. The status is usually indicated by Rh positive (Rh+, does have the D antigen) or Rh negative (Rh-, does not have the D antigen) suffix to the ABO blood type.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Hidden inside language are small, stealthy words that can reveal a great deal about your personality, thinking style, emotional state and connections with others. These words account for less than 0.1 per cent of your vocabulary but make up more than half of the words commonly used. Your brain is not wired to notice them but if you pay close attention, you will start to see their subtle power. (…)

We found that the use of pronouns – I, me, we, she, they – mattered enormously. The more people changed from using first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) to using other pronouns (we, you, she, they) from one piece of writing to the next, the better their health became. Their word use reflected their psychological state.

This was the prelude to a more substantial discovery. (…) I wondered if there were any gender distinctions and found that yes, there were significant differences. (…) Not only was gender a factor, there were large differences in language style as a function of people’s age, social class, emotional state, level of honesty, personality, degree of formality, leadership ability, quality of relationships and so on. (…)

In one experiment, we analysed hundreds of essays written by my students and we identified three very different writing styles: formal, analytic and narrative.
Formal writing often appears stiff, sometimes humourless, with a touch of arrogance. It includes high rates of articles and prepositions but very few I-words, and infrequent discrepancy words, such as “would”, and adverbs. Formality is related to a number of important personality traits. Those who score highest in formal thinking tend to be more concerned with status and power and are less self-reflective. They drink and smoke less and are more mentally healthy, but also tend to be less honest. As people age, their writing styles tend to become more formal.

Analytical writing, meanwhile, is all about making distinctions. These people attain higher grades, tend to be more honest, and are more open to new experiences. They also read more and have more complex views of themselves.

Narrative writers are natural storytellers. The function words that generally reveal storytelling involve people, past-tense verbs and inclusive words such as “with” and “together”. People who score high for narrative writing tend to have better social skills, more friends and rate themselves as more outgoing.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

artwork { Jean-Michel Basquiat, Tuxedo, 1982 }

I’m going to tell you a little story about a menstruating nurse.

Dr. Bela Schick, a doctor in the 1920s, was a very popular doctor and received flowers from his patients all the time. One day he received one of his usual bouquets from a patient. The way the story goes, he asked one of his nurses to put the bouquet in some water. The nurse politely declined. Dr. Schick asked the nurse again, and again she refused to handle the flowers. When Dr. Schick questioned his nurse why she would not put the flowers in water, she explained that she had her period. When he asked why that mattered, she confessed that when she menstruated, she made flowers wilt at her touch.

Dr. Schick decided to run a test. Gently place flowers in water on the one hand… and have a menstruating woman roughly handle another bunch in order to really get her dirty hands on them.

The flowers that were not handled thrived, while the flowers that were handled by a menstruating woman wilted.

This was the beginning of the study of the menstrual toxin, or menotoxin, a substance secreted in the sweat of menstruating women.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

photo { Andres Marroquin Winkelmann }

Whence the female orgasm? After 40 years of debate evolutionary biologists are no closer to deciding whether it evolved to give women a reproductive boost, or whether it is simply a by-product of male orgasm evolution. The latest attempt to settle the dispute involves quizzing some 10,000 twins and pairs of siblings on their sexual habits.

Some evolutionary biologists reckon the female orgasm is adaptive and possibly influences mate choice, strengthens pair bonds or indirectly helps to suck sperm into the uterus. Others argue that women have orgasms for the same reason that men have nipples – being highly adaptive in one sex, the traits tag along for the ride in the other.

{ NewScientist | Continue reading }

photo { Hiroshi Watanabe }

Regular and moderate alcohol consumption in working middle-aged women has been found to improve their health by helping them to ‘wind down’.

The new study, published in PLoS Medicine today, analysed data from the U.S. Nurse’s Health Study, a long-term study that has tracked the health conditions of 121,700 female nurses since 1976. (…)

The researchers found that those middle-aged women (median age 58 years) who drank five to 15 grams of alcohol per day were 20% more likely to have good overall health when older, in comparison to non-drinkers.

{ Cosmos | Continue reading }

1985. Five lionesses at the Singapore Zoo are put on birth control after the lion population increases from 2 to 16.

{ Wikipedia }

images { 1. Henri Rousseau, The Dream, 1910 | 2. Veterinary Anatomical Illustrations, 1898-1925 }

related { Women who use contraceptives like birth control pills experience memory changes, according to new research }

Stolen parrot helps to catch thief after recognising owner in pet shop.

Rescuers free drunken moose stuck in tree.

Abandoned for two weeks, starving dogs eat owner.

Woman bit by rat in rare attack while waiting for train at MTA station.

Ben & Jerry’s Introduces ‘Schweddy Balls’ Ice Cream Flavor. [Thanks GG!]

Dogs Can Sniff Out Lung Cancer From Patients’ Breath.

Men and women have different reasons for cheating, study shows.

Our significant others (even our exes) influence our new relationships.

At what age do girls prefer pink?

Are you getting enough sleep?

A part of the human brain that’s involved in emotion gets particularly excited at the sight of animals, a new study has shown.

Sex hormones strongly influence people’s interests, which affect the kinds of occupations they choose, according to psychologists.

Why Some Languages Sound So Fast.

New research from MIT suggests that there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language.

Alcohol dulls the brain “signal” that warns people when they are making a mistake, study finds.

Plastering the Head with Crushed Snails to Treat Pediatric Hydrocephalus: An Ancient Therapy with a Pharmacological Basis.

Cars could run on recycled newspaper, Tulane scientists say.

What’s the best way to evacuate a skyscraper?

What is happiness economics? [PDF]

Thinking of past and future brings us to another problem that has foxed scientists and philosophers: why time should have a direction at all.
The Theory of Banking: Why Banks Exist and Why We Fear Them.

$2.2 trillion, the amount of money paid to bankers over the last five years. Extrapolating over the coming decade, the numbers would approach $5 trillion.

Linux, created by Linus Torvalds, a Finnish computer science student, was first announced to the world 20 years ago. At the time, Torvalds described his work as a “hobby” and contended that it would not be “big and professional” like the GNU project. But the Linux kernel turned out to be one of the most significant pieces of open source software ever developed..

In late 1979, a twenty-four-year-old entrepreneur paid a visit to a research center in Silicon Valley called Xerox parc. He was the co-founder of a small computer startup down the road, in Cupertino. His name was Steve Jobs.

How AT&T conquered the 20th century.

Digital subscriptions to nytimes.com went from zero to 224,000 in three months. Add in the 57,000 tablet subscribers on Kindles and iPads and the paper already has 281,000 new paying customers.

Why Grilled Cheese Is The Next Frontier Of Technology. [more]

How a high school jock from Texas rose to the top of one of Mexico’s most powerful and ruthless cartels.

How psychology helped locate the light cruiser HMAS Sydney II, lost for over 60 years.

Inside the mind of a London cabbie.

No! Set a date, son. Barry Duncan, master palindromist.

Is It Possible to Not Judge A Book by Its Cover?

The contorted history of autofellatio.

Amorphophallus is a large genus of some 170 tropical and subtropical tuberous herbaceous plants. A few species are edible as “famine foods” after careful preparation to remove irritating chemicals.

Did Einstein discover E = mc²? One plausible precursor is Fritz Hasenöhrl, a physics professor at the University of Vienna.

When secretaries switched from manual typewriters to electrics, did they gain 20 pounds?

Standard work hours around the world.

Map of Manhattan, 1865.

The End. [more]

Worn-out frying pans.

Café de l’enfer.

<3

JP Morgan explains the euro crisis with lego.

Making of relief-maps, London, 1916.

Teeny Quiz.

In 2009, a nine year-old Brazilian girl became pregnant with twins after being raped by her stepfather. With advice from doctors, her mother opted for her to have an abortion. After pleading with Brazil, which outlaws abortions except when the mother’s life is in danger or when she has been raped, her daughter was granted one. Then things got really ugly. When the Archbishop of the city of Recife heard the news he invoked Canon law and excommunicated the mother and daughter and the members of the medical team who performed the abortion; the stepfather, meanwhile, remained a loyal and accepted member of the church. (…)

The question is: why do humans remain so steadfast to their beliefs, sometimes even in the face of overwhelming opposing evidence?

The answer rests in a few psychological tendencies that when mixed together form a potent recipe for ignorance. The first is confirmation bias – the propensity for people to look for what confirms their beliefs and ignore what contradicts their beliefs while not being concerned for the truth. (…)

Then there’s cognitive dissonance, which describes a “state of tension that occurs whenever a person holds two cognitions that are psychologically inconsistent.” (…)

Finally, there’s motivated reasoning, which describes our tendency to accept what we want to believe with much more ease and much less analysis than what we don’t want to believe.

{ Why We Reason | Continue reading }

What makes up 95 percent of the universe?

The answer to the most basic of questions—what’s out there?—has been undergoing constant revision for millennia. (…) It turns out that atoms and other particles we know and understand only make up about 5 percent of the whole shebang. (…)

Why do we need sleep?

Two prevailing theories argue that sleep either restores the energy we need to thrive, or it helps us adapt to threats. Both concepts turn on the idea that evolution made us sleep for a reason. (…)

How do we come to make decisions?

Like all matters relating to gray matter, the answers aren’t clear. “We probably don’t know 99 percent about how the brain does what it does,” says Charles “Ed” Connor, a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute. Still, researchers are making great inroads in understanding things at the cellular and molecular levels, he adds. They understand that the brain collects information delivered by the senses, and when that data reaches a critical mass, parts of the prefrontal cortex act as judge and jury, leading us to come to a conclusion. (…)

When will an earthquake strike? (…)

Are we alone?

{ Johns Hopkins Magazine | Continue reading }

Technically, fundamentally, and economically everything that can go wrong is going wrong for the stock market – all at once.  Which is a positive development for those who understand the need for closure and rock-bottom. In life, the fear of future events is typically worse than when those fears are realized, particularly when the overhang drags on for so long a period of time. I think I speak for most market participants when I say that I’m pleased to see the endgame approaching faster up ahead, because it is only on the other side of these issues that we can progress to the next phase.

{ Joshua M Brown/The Big Picture | Continue reading }

Does semen really glow in the dark?

Sort of. Semen won’t give off light like a glow-in-the-dark sticker, but it does fluoresce. In other words, it absorbs ultraviolet light and re-emits that energy as visible light. The same holds for many organic substances, and most bodily fluids—including sweat, saliva, and urine—will shine when you put them under an ultraviolet “black light.” Semen happens to glow the brightest, however, on account of the particular mix of chemicals it contains.

{ Slate | Continue reading }

Semen is primarily water, but contains trace amounts of almost every nutrient the human body uses. It has somewhat higher amounts of commonly deficient minerals, such as potassium, magnesium, and selenium. One typical ejaculation contains 150 mg of protein, 11 mg of carbohydrates, 6 mg fat, 3 mg cholesterol, 7% US RDA potassium and 3% US RDA copper and zinc.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

For most people, the term art crime invariably brings to mind images of daring museum break-ins, the theft of million-dollar paintings, and the stylish, sexy thieves who mastermind them.

In reality, high-value museum thefts are the exception rather than the rule. As retired FBI Art Crime Team Special Agent Bob Wittman recounts in his memoir, “art theft is rarely about the love of art or the cleverness of the crime, and the thief is rarely the Hollywood caricature. (…) Nearly all the art thieves I met in my career had one thing in common: brute greed. They stole for money, not beauty.”

{ Crime, Law and Social Change | Continue reading }

“People often follow a different way of thinking than the one dictated by classical logic,” says Aerts. “The mathematics of quantum theory turns out to describe this quite well.”

It’s a finding that has kicked off a burgeoning field known as “quantum interaction”, which explores how quantum theory can be useful in areas having nothing to do with physics, ranging from human language and cognition to biology and economics.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

image { William Hogarth, Analysis of Beauty, 1753 }

A survey conducted in 2006 by political scientist Jon D. Miller of Michigan State University showed that only 14 percent of American adults consider evolution “definitely true” while roughly a third believe it to be “absolutely false.” Out of a sampler of 34 countries, only Turkey was less accepting of Darwin’s theories, while in nations such as Denmark, Sweden, and France, better than 80 percent of the adults questioned sided with Darwin. Perhaps more disquieting is the fact that 20 years ago about seven percent of U.S. adults were uncertain about evolution; that number has since tripled.

The uniquely American aspect to this resurgence of religious fundamentalism is reiterated by a chart showing the relationship of wealth to religious belief republished in the June 2, 2010 opinion section of by the New York Times (“Why Is America Religious?”), which demonstrates that “the wealthier a country is, the less important religion is to that country. The one exception: The United States.”

{ Logos Journal | Continue reading }

You live in the past. About 80 milliseconds in the past, to be precise (just slightly longer than the blink of an eye). Use one hand to touch your nose, and the other to touch one of your feet, at exactly the same time. You will experience them as simultaneous acts. But it takes more time for the signal to travel up your nerves from your feet to your brain than from your nose. The reconciliation is simple: our conscious experience takes time to assemble, and your brain waits for all the relevant input before it experiences the “now.” (…)

Aging can be reversed. (…) It’s only the universe as a whole that must increase in entropy, not every individual piece of it. Reversing the arrow of time for living organisms is a technological challenge, not a physical impossibility.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Violet Forest }

This study comes out of Alzahra University, in Tehran, where a group of researchers, noting that music therapy has already been shown to reduce pain, improve sleep quality, and improve mood in cancer patients underoing therapy and multiple sclerosis patients, wondered if music might alleviate depression as well. It does.

They took 56 depressed subjects, had them listen to Beethoven’s 3d and 5th piano sonatas for 15 minutes twice a week in a clean, otherwise quiet room — and saw their depression scores on the standard Beck Depression Scale go [down] signficantly.

{ Scientific American | Continue reading }

ICANN, the Internet’s ruling body, is going to allow anyone to create a new Top Level Domain (…) allowing anyone with $200,000 to become a provider of everything from .eco to .gucci.

Existing top level domains — .com, .org, etc. — have become crowded. It’s as if the inventors of the Internet never imagined that the metropolis represented by .com could ever fill up. But so it has — and, for the most part, with some rather unseemly characters.

{ Mims’s Bits | Continue reading }

Facial expressions have been called the “universal language of emotion,” but people from different cultures perceive happy, sad or angry facial expressions in unique ways, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association. (…)

Some prior research has supported the notion that facial expressions are a hard-wired human behavior with evolutionary origins, so facial expressions wouldn’t differ across cultures.

{ EurekAlert | Continue reading }

related { What does a typical European face look like according to Europeans? It all depends on which European you ask. Germans think the typical European looks more German; Portuguese people think the typical European looks more Portuguese. }

‘“Most people are simply not designed to eat pasta:” evolutionary explanations for obesity in the low-carbohydrate diet movement

Low-carbohydrate diets, notably the Atkins Diet, were particularly popular in Britain and North America in the late 1990s and early 2000s. On the basis of a discourse analysis of bestselling low-carbohydrate diet books, I examine and critique genetic and evolutionary explanations for obesity and diabetes as they feature in the low-carbohydrate literature. Low-carbohydrate diet books present two distinct neo-Darwinian explanations of health and body-weight. First, evolutionary nutrition is based on the premise that the human body has adapted to function best on the diet eaten in the Paleolithic era. Second, the thrifty gene theory suggests that feast-or-famine conditions during human evolutionary development naturally selected for people who could store excess energy as body fat for later use. However, the historical narratives and scientific arguments presented in the low-carbohydrate literature are beset with generalisations, inconsistencies and errors.

{ SAGE | Continue reading }

related { Habit makes bad food too easy to swallow }

Stimulus Control Therapy consists of six very straightforward steps. If you follow these it should improve your sleep.

1. Lie down to go to sleep only when you are sleepy.

2. Do not use your bed for anything except sleep; that is, do not read, watch television, eat, or worry in bed. Sexual activity is the only exception to this rule. On such occasions, the instructions are to be followed afterwards, when you intend to go to sleep.

3. If you find yourself unable to fall asleep, get up and go into another room. Stay up as long as you wish and then return to the  bedroom to sleep. Although we do not want you to watch the clock, we want you to get out of bed if you do not fall asleep immediately. Remember the goal is to associate your bed with falling asleep quickly! If you are in bed more than about 10 minutes without falling asleep and have not gotten up, you are not following this instruction.

4. If you still cannot fall asleep, repeat step 3. Do this as often as is necessary throughout the night.

5. Set your alarm and get up at the same time every morning irrespective of how much sleep you got during the night. This will help your body acquire a consistent sleep rhythm.

6. Do not nap during the day.

{ PsyBlog | Continue reading }