Lasers meet the fly penis: It's all good to videotape duck erections if you want to study the impact of elaborate genitalia on speciation. But some scientists are experimentalists, and feel the need to manipulate an experimental system in the lab. Hence, we have a team from Berkeley using lasers to lop spines off a fly penis. The spineless males were badly outcompeted by control flies when it came to mating. If these guys have received federal funding for this work, I fully expect to hear a politician making fun of it at some point in the future. But did they consider what might happen to the penis' bacterial population? The more familiar human circumcision process appears to provide some protection against HIV transmission, although we don't quite know why. A team that studied the "penis microbiome" suggests that the effect may be a result of changes in the bacteria that live on the penis following the procedure. They find that, with the foreskin removed and the underlying tissue exposed to the air, a couple of bacteria that prefer anaerobic environments essentially vanish. One possibility they consider is that these anaerobes normally attract immune cells to the region, allowing HIV to find a home more easily. With these bacteria gone, there are fewer infective targets in the nearby tissues.
New York City, land of mislabeled food and unknown roaches: A high-tech high school project has produced some very down-to-earth results. The students used DNAbarcoding, in which short sequence fragments are used to identify the species a sample belongs to. Their raw material? Stuff found around New York City. This apparently included a roach that, while physically indistinguishable from a standard American cockroach, is genetically quite distinct. Also, many food vendors lie about the source of things like meat and cheese—even when the product was meant for pets. Finding the cause of obsessive-compulsive Dobermans: We're all familiar with the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive behavior, but I was unaware that dogs suffered from canine compulsive disorder, which tends to be apparent in behaviors like tail chasing, repetitive pacing, and over-grooming. As with many other facets of dog behavior, this one is more prevalent in some breeds, and researchers have now used pedigrees of the Doberman pincher to genetically map the causal gene. The gene they identified is called cadherin 2, and helps cells attach to one another; it amy be involved in help neurons establish connections with each other, in this case. Chili peppers and anal surgery: a painful mix: No surprise really, but I wonder a bit about whether it's possible to do a blinded study that involves the experimental group ingesting chili peppers. Even though this study wasn't blinded it did come up with some impressive p values for things like postoperative pain and anal burning. "This study shows that consumption of red chillies after anal fissure surgery should be forbidden to avoid postoperative symptoms," the author concludes. Pictures are worth much less than 1,000 words in the neonatal intensive care unit: This study compared the ability of staff of an neonatal ICU to make the right decision when the same information was conveyed in three ways: human-generated descriptions, computer-generated descriptions, and computer-generated graphs. The computers flunked. Apparently, language can do a better job of conveying the key information contained in a series of numbers, but only if someone who knows what they're talking about decides on what language to use. The authors, oddly, are pretty excited about the performance of the computer-generated descriptions.
(#video) Lasers meet fly penis duck tape erections! It's all Good
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