Its a funny old thing, the world of science. It covers a vast area of knowledge and research, with new discoveries being published continuously, all across the world.
Obviously, it wouldn't be possible for any one person to keep up with all the novel discoveries. Instead they can read my list of Interesting Things and Ideas that have been in the headlines this week.
Disclaimer: Some Interesting Things and Ideas may be omitted from this list for reasons of brevity, simplicity and my lack of complete omniscience
©Wikicommons; Image Credit: Emichan
People prefer sex to story telling
Covered in Nature News here.
Researchers first thought that genetic drift could be predicted through the spread of fairy stories across cultures. The idea being that, when groups of people meet each other, they would socialise by sharing folk tales and then part. Later, when they meet again, they might marry (or, more likely, just produce some offspring) and new genetic material would be introduced into each culture.
Instead it seems that the processes for sharing cultural and genetic information are not parallel. It was found that the cultural variation was more pronounced than the genetic variation across the European cultures studied.
In short, people went for sex over conversation when it came to making new friends.
You can tell how stressed an elephant is from its poo
Researchers in Africa's Serengeti National Park have found that elephants living within the protected area of the park are less stressed than those that live in the in the less protected adjoining areas of Grumeti Game Reserve and Ikoma Open Area. The scientists found this by looking at hormone levels in the elephants' dung.
More elephants live inside the park area, even though there are no physical borders marking out the park boundaries. No male elephants were found outside of the protected park. The happiness of the elephants appears to be entwined with the levels of human activity where they are living, and they have learnt not to leave the protected areas to avoid large numbers of humans.
TV lowers your sperm count
In newly published research, The Harvard School of Public Health has announced that a man's sperm quality can be significantly lowered simply by watching 20 or more hours of TV a week.
The young men was all otherwise healthy and had considerably less impressive swimmers than their contemporaries who watched little to no telly. Men who took part in mild to vigorous physical activity for at least 15 hours every week had the healthiest sperm.
Even mild increases in physical activity (5-8 hours a week) had a generally positive impact on the fitness of the sperm.
Previous research into the effects of physical activity on sperm health had only looked into comparisons between professional athletes who dedicate their lives to sport and the average man who doesn't have the time to dedicate to achieving that level of fitness.
This new data is likely to have a significant importance for couples who are struggling to conceive, as it seems that even modest lifestyle changes will have a positive impact on their chances.
We were all cute once
Maureen O'Leary at the University in New York State, has, through incredibly extensive mapping of evolutionary trees, identified the lsat common ancestor of all placental mammals.
Through genetic analysis, our fluffy, bug-eating grandma has been identified as living at the same time as the last of the dinosaurs - approximately 100 million years ago. However, currently no fossil records have been found of placental mammals predating the KPg Extinction.
Ancestral trees based around morphological characteristics can be compared to those based upon molecular characteristics, and often these two do not overlap. Trees based around morphological traits seem to suggest that placental mammals did not begin to diversify until after the dinosaurs had become extinct.
Published in The Yorker 11th February 2013
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