Great moments in research and statistics

This is yet another item that was to be found in the Fortean Times breaking news section

Time reports that a survey by the dating site Smartdata measuring the sexual activity of its French users has revealed that. women whose names end with the letter “a” reported having more than the average 4.4 sexual partners most women had during their lifetime.

At the top of the list is Laura (with an average of 9.7 partners), Tania (9.6), and Lola (9.5). Women named Thérèse averaged 1.1 lovers, just behind 1.2 for Françoise, and 1.3 for Martine.

Make of this what you will… I am far too much of a gentleman to make a salacious comment on these results!

Scientists prove that beer goggles exist!

According to Discovery Online scientists have finally proven that strangers indeed look sexier to people when they booze.

A new study has found that drunk students were up to 10% more likely to fall for less attractive people than those who were sober. It showed the more they drank, the less likely they were to recognise finer details on people’s faces.

A team of psychologists found 64 students of varying levels of drunkenness in bars at Roehampton University, London. They were asked to judge 20 photos of men and women aged 18 to 25. One face in each pair was digitally enhanced to make it more symmetrical — and therefore more attractive.

Thirty six more sober students had a 67% success rate in choosing the symmetrical face. But 28 intoxicated students (who had drunk ten or more units) chose the more symmetrical face in just 58% of cases.

“Drunk students were less good at noticing symmetrical faces and cared less about the defects”, said Lewis Halsey, who led the study.

Excellent news! This is proof positive that science constantly strives to improve humanity....

Shock research discovers that meeting pretty women makes men feel good

According to the Telegraph researchers found that just being in the presence of a pretty member of the opposite sex causes a temporary boost in levels of testosterone and cortisol. However hanging around with other men has the opposite affect – reducing the levels of both substances in the body.

The researchers at the University of California carried out the study to see if humans replicated the boost found in animals known as the “mating response”. They recruited 149 male students aged between 18 and 24 with a third interacting with a male researcher of 25 and the others talking to one of seven young female undergraduates aged 18 to 22.

After the short five minute sessions the men were asked to rate the physical attractiveness of the women between one and seven. The average was 5.83 showing they found them alluring.
The participants then swished with mouthwash before providing a sample of saliva into a collection vial which was tested within 20 to 40 minutes of exposure to the women.

Psychologists found that just a five minute talk with an attractive women raised the levels of testosterone by 14 per cent and the anti-stress hormone cortisol by 48 per cent. Spending the same time with men saw the hormones drop two per cent and seven per cent respectively.

Dr Leslie Knapp, a biological anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, said the response was evolutionary and was to do with finding and competing for possible mates. “It all boils down to sex,” she said. “High levels of testosterone are associated with boosting sexual performance whereas cortisol helps focus your energy and helps you deal with anxiety.”

Err why am I not surprised! The researchers should have observed this overweight, talentless loser last year at a picnic in Versailles with several talented, charming and beautiful Iranian women.... or dinner with six talented, charming and beautiful Iranian women and a Finnish dancer. They could have seen the testosterone and cortisol fountaining from the top of my head through a reopened fonatnelle!

Perhaps Hydrogen Sulphide doesn’t smell so bad after all

Although highly poisonous hydrogen sulphide could soon provide doctors with new treatments for conditions ranging from strokes to chronic arthritis. Some researchers are even trying to use it to put patients with strokes or serious injuries into a form of suspended animation to help them survive severe traumas. This research is now being backed by the US military, who believe it could help their surgeons cope with injuries suffered by soldiers in battle.

'Hydrogen sulphide is made in very low doses in the body and, far from doing harm, it has become clear that it can do a great deal of good,' said Dr John Wallace, a pharmacologist at the University of Calgary in Canada. 'It is found in the brain and is also thought to control blood pressure. It is quite pervasive, in fact.'

One key piece of research has shown that hydrogen sulphide could protect against internal bleeding, ulcers and other gastric effects suffered by those on long-term regimes of anti-inflammatory painkillers such as aspirin and ibuprofen. In a series of experiments on rats and mice, Wallace and his colleagues found that these painkillers - when administered with chemicals that released hydrogen sulphide into the gut - produced no harmful side effects. 'Now we are preparing to repeat these experiments on humans,' said Wallace, who has formed a company, Antibe Therapeutics, to create drugs based on hydrogen sulphide technology. 'We envisage using standard medicines, mixed with hydrogen sulphide-releasing chemicals, as painkillers that will not cause internal bleeding to long-term users.'

Hydrogen sulphide research in medicine began three years ago when Dr Mark Roth, of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Centre in Seattle, Washington, found that mice exposed to low levels of the gas passed out, their body temperatures dropped more than 20C and their metabolic rates plunged. Once the gas was switched off, they returned to normal. Now Roth is working on research aimed at reproducing the effect in humans, buying time for patients who have had heart attacks, strokes or wounds that have caused drastic losses of blood.

'I still get startled reactions from other scientists when I put forward proposals to use it for medical research,' said Wallace. '"Isn't this a poison?" they say to me. Then I point out what researchers have already found and they look stunned.'

No comment on this article but the the usual "ain't science wonderful!"

Ladder-proof tights? Oh Brave New World!

A research team has created an elastic substance that can mend itself for up to a week after being broken thanks to its arrangement of molecules. Such a material will have have many applications of course - increasing the durability of artificial bones, the production of unbreakable glass and unchippable paint. Perhaps the greatest application of all will be tights that repair themselves after laddering.

“I think it will have all sorts of uses,” said Professor Ludwik Leibler, one of the researchers behind the invention. “It’s just a matter of using your imagination. We have only just begun to think of what can be done with it. Stockings are a very good idea. It could be used in glass vases so they don’t break when your children knock them over - it could make the glass bouncy.” Professor Leibler and his colleagues at the Industrial Physics and Chemistry Higher Educational Institution in Paris are convinced that it has potential for use in a wide range of applications. They are most hopeful of adapting the technology in medicine, where self-healing properties would be invaluable for artificial bone and cartilage.

The technology could also be applied to paint and other coatings, saving householders and car owners the expense of repairing chips and nicks. Its use in pipes would make plumbing repairs easier, perhaps sealing leaks before they became serious. The substance, which has taken five years to develop, is ready for commercial use, Professor Leibler says. This is expected to be in plastics.

The material mimics the elastic qualities of rubber but with the advantage of having “sticky ends” when a break occurs. The substance has small molecules arranged in a network that stretch but will return to its original shape. Once the broken ends are pushed together they start healing because the molecular make-up is such that the surfaces have lifelike attributes and seek to form bridges.

The research team reported their invention of the “supramolecular rubber” in the journal Nature. “These materials can be easily processed, reused and recycled. Their unique self-repairing properties, the simplicity of their synthesis, their availability from renewable resources and the low cost of raw ingredients bode well for future applications.”

They added that the material behaved like a rubber but “exhibits unique self-healing properties: when a sample is broken or cut into pieces and the pieces are brought into contact together for some time at room temperature (20C, 68F) they self-heal without the need to heat or press strongly. The process of breaking and healing can be repeated many times.”

The maximum time the ends can be left before it becomes impossible for them to repair themselves reduces as temperatures rise. At 23C they can be left for more than a week but at 40C the time falls to 48 hours. The longer the surfaces are left to fuse, the stronger the repair, but even after 15 minutes of bonding the material could still be stretched to three times its normal length before snapping.

I have a one word comment – Wow!

The three way embryo

Scientists at Newcastle University Scientists have created an embryo with three separate "parents". The breakthrough could eradicate a whole class of hereditary diseases transmitted through mitochondrial DNA mutations.

The embryos have been created using DNA from a man and two women – Nuclear DNA from an embryo was and placed in to a donor egg from which the original nucleus was removed. The technique is intended to help women with diseases of the mitochondria. Faults in the mitochondrial DNA can cause around 50 known diseases, some of which lead to disability and death. About one person in every 6,500 people is affected by such conditions, which include fatal liver failure, stroke-like episodes, blindness, muscular dystrophy, diabetes and deafness. There is currently no treatment for mitochondrial diseases.

Any baby born through this method would have genetic elements from three people. However it is only nuclear DNA that influences appearance and other characteristics would not come from the woman providing the donor egg. The team currently only have permission to carry out lab experiments so it could not at present be offered as a treatment.

Professor Patrick Chinnery, a member of the Newcastle team, said: "We believe that from this work, and work we have done on other animals that in principle we could develop this technique and offer treatment in the foreseeable future that will give families some hope of avoiding passing these diseases to their children."

Dr Marita Pohlschmidt, of the Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, which has funded the Newcastle research, was confident it would lead to a badly needed breakthrough in treatment. "Mitochondrial myopathies are a group of complex and severe diseases," she said. "This can make it very difficult for clinicians to provide genetic counselling and give patients an accurate prognosis."

I’m empathising, honest!

I yawned my head off in school physics lessons, Psycholinguistics lectures at university had me bored stiff, tedious meetings about nugatory exercises at work made me lose the will to live. It thought I was bored stiff – in reality, I was highly attuned to the social world around me.


Research suggests that those who are prone to contagious yawning — the mysterious phenomenon by which the urge to yawn can be “caught” by watching others doing it — also have particularly high empathy for the emotions of others. Apparently they (we?) notice that others are yawning and then unconsciously mirror their actions.


A study led by Catriona Morrison, of the University of Leeds, indicated that infectious yawning is strongly linked to empathy. She found that people who are good empathisers yawn contagiously about three times as often as people with less pronounced social skills. Research led by Simon Baron-Cohen, of the University of Cambridge, had previously indicated that people who are good at systemising, or understanding how things work, are often not as good at empathising. Dr Morrison tested the theory on 40 students of psychology, an “empathising” discipline, and 40 students of engineering, which requires systemising ability. On average, the psychology students yawned 5.5 times, compared with 1.5 yawns for the engineers in the first experiment, and in a subsequent one, the average score was 28 for the psychologists and 25.5 for the engineers. Dr Morrison said that yawning, which is often related to tiredness, may have evolved as a way of improving alertness in social groups.

So the next time you’re bored stiff you have a “get out of jail free” card!

Sometimes scientists look for one thing but find something different, this was the case with researchers at the Washington University in St Louis who were hunting genes that govern our ability to sense pain. What they seem to have found is the gene that lets us feel itchy.

Zhou-Feng Chen, who led the study, was studying mice bred to lack a gene called GRPR, which was thought to be involved in helping pain signals pass along the spinal cord. It soon became clear that the mice reacted to pain in exactly the same way as normal mice. But later on, the team decided to test the animals' response to substances known to cause itching. They found that while the normal mice began repeatedly scratching themselves with their hind legs, the mice lacking GRPR hardly scratched at all.

The chance discovery should help drug developers design pills which can block the itchiness pathway. It could dramatically improve the comfort of people with skin disorders such as eczema, and treatments which can cause chronic itchiness as a side-effect.

Could dramatically improve the comfort of people with eczema, he says? Oh please and do it quickly I say....