I’ll be a judge again this year for the National Academies Communication Award, a $20,000 prize for excellence in reporting on science. The prize is awarded in four categories:

• Book
• Magazine/Newspaper
• Film/Radio/TV
• Online

The nominations are now open. More information can be found here.

The next time your partner isn’t in the mood for some nookie, how about tempting him or her with a piece of… er… pork? It may sound strange, but Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez swears that a little bit of pig has a whole lot of pop to it.

Reuters quotes the president:

“I’ve just been told something I didn’t know; that eating pork improves your sex life… I’d say it’s a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry. She said she recently ate pork and “things went very well that weekend, so it could well be true.”

Well, maybe pork could spice things up in the bedroom, but plenty of other foods have previously been rumored to be aphrodisiacs, like oysters, bananas, figs, strawberries, raspberries, sweet basil, and garlic. It also helps to remember that President Fernandez made this remark while addressing bigwigs from the pig farming industry, and that the country is trying to get beef-happy Argentinians to eat more pork.

Speaking of pigs, there’s related news from Europe. A new law approved by the upper house of the Dutch parliament bans human sex with animals, which until now was legal in the Netherlands, providing the animal was unharmed. The new law also prohibits the production or distribution of animal pornography, dealing a body blow to–ahem–animal lovers around the world.

Reuters reports:

Given the illicit nature of the product, precise figures on animal pornography video sales are difficult to find, but the Dutch newspaper Algemeen Dagblad, in a 2007 survey, found that distributors in the Netherlands were responsible for some 80 percent of bestiality videos worldwide.

So, no more crazy horse-lady-man-tortoise videos anymore. Which could potentially be a blow to frustrated Chinese migrant workers who, the Chinese government worries, aren’t getting enough action. Guangdong province, whose export industries are powered by millions of migrant workers from across China, is home to many men who have left their wives behind–and 36 percent of those married men, according to a new China Daily survey, are sexually repressed.

The provincial government is now anxious that these men could be out and about, indulging in unsafe sex. Meanwhile, women may also be corrupted, China Daily reported, and could be turning to the internet for release–going as far as “participating in the online sex industry, such as chatting to men online while nude.”

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As I’m writing, blogging, and more, there’s a guy who patiently stands by me through everything. He doesn’t mind listening as I endlessly discuss the trials and tribulations of a postdoc while he tirelessly works to prepare for his. It doesn’t upset him that my perspective occasionally ruffles the feathers of others in his field–including those friendly with his awesome advisor John Willis. He doesn’t even complain about how late he needs to come collect me from the airport constantly. Instead, he helps me get the details right whenever I have a question, brings me along on cross country road trips to the field, and has a kind word no matter what the DNA sequence looks like on any given day. And he always supports my crazy ideas with boundless encouragement and enthusiasm.

So today I want to congratulate my wonderful, brilliant fiancé David Lowry, who just received his Ph.D. in evolutionary genetics and genomics at Duke. (Photo left was taken just before his final seminar talk). David’s a damn good field and lab biologist who’s taught me everything I know about speciation, adaptation, Mimulus–and so much more. His research on understanding ecotype formation amazes me and I’m so excited to see where it goes next!

And directly to David: You continue to inspire me every day and I love you.

What’s better than a gorgeously stunning image of a massive cluster surrounded by delicate, wispy nebulosity?

Well, nothing, really. Unless you can use it for SCIENCE!

[Click to gigantisize.]

Purty, ain’t it? That’s NGC 3603, a very large star-forming region in our own Milky Way Galaxy, lying about 20,000 light years away. It can only be seen from the southern hemisphere, which is why the European Southern Observatory folks got this image using the ginormous Very Large Telescope, an 8-meter behemoth in Chile (and actually, Ginormous Telescope would be a cool name).

Not too long ago — no more than a million years, give or take — a lot of the stars forming the central cluster there were born. There are so many that they appear to overlap, but that’s an illusion due to the blurring of the image from the Earth’s atmosphere (and the nature of light itself only allows us to make star images so small).

Lost in that crowd is a star designated NGC 3603 A1, and it is the most massive star to ever have its mass directly measured. It’s actually a binary star, two monsters locked in a gravitational dance, orbiting each other once every 3.77 days — which right away tells you this is a special pair, possessing enough gravity to toss themselves around that rapidly.

Using simple laws of physics discovered by Kepler back in the 1600s, we can measure the masses of each star in the duo. The heftier of the two is a whopping 116 times the mass of the Sun — which is close to the upper limit of what a star can get to without tearing itself apart. The more massive a star, the more luminous it is, and the surface can get so hot that any material there gets blown off… so that sets a lid on how big a star can get. Details vary depending on a lot of factors, but really 116 times the mass of the Sun is about as big as you’ll ever get for a star in our galaxy.

The other star in the binary is no slouch, tipping the scales at 89 solar masses. If it were just sitting out there all by itself it would rate as a phenomenal star, too. But its partner still wins the prize.

And how do I know those stars were born no more than a million years ago? Because massive stars don’t live long, and any beasts like these two live short lives indeed. It won’t be long before they detonate as supernovae, lighting up with a violence and fury that will make each outshine the rest of the stars in our entire galaxy combined!

Not only that, but pretty much every star you see in that cluster is of the massive and luminous classes astronomers call O and B stars, bruisers with enough oomph to explode as supernovae. How many stars do you see in that cluster? Dozens? So think about that: each one of those will become a titanic supernova, wreaking havoc across dozens of light years, sending out blasts of light to outshine galaxies, and throwing out octillions of tons of gas.

Eventually that gas, laced with heavier elements created in the nuclear forge of the supernova blast wave itself, will slam into, merge with, and seed the surrounding gas in the nebula. Compressed beyond its ability to sustain itself, the gas will collapse and form more stars. Some of these may be massive ones which will again repeat the cycle, and some will have lower mass, be fainter, cooler. They may form planets from those heavy elements. It will be a rocky birth, given the environment, but the vagaries of orbital dynamics dictate that eventually those systems will leave the nebula and move out on their own in the Milky Way. And a billion years from now, two, four billion, who knows what creatures may roam the surfaces of any of those worlds.

And will they see more stellar factories dotting the galaxies starscape, and wonder what their own looked like, all those eons ago?

There’s been lots of gloating, arguing, and tossing around of cliches like “game-changing” in the wake of a new study on abstinence education and its potential to reduce sexual activity in teens. But the study isn’t exactly what the political forces trumpeting its arrival would like you to believe.

The study appears in the journal Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. In its introduction, study leader John B. Jemmott III concludes that “Theory-based abstinence-only interventions may have an important role in preventing adolescent sexual involvement.”

So what’s actually in the study? Between 2001 and 2004, Jemmott’s team studied 662 African-American middle schoolers in the northeastern United States, who were each paid $20 a session to attend sex-education classes. The kids were randomly assigned to one of several different programs: One program emphasized only abstinence, one both safe sex and abstinence, one just safe sex, and the last was a control group that simply taught healthy living—eating well, exercise, and the like.

According to the study, which relied on self-reported surveys, about half of the kids in the safe-sex only class began having sex over the next two years, compared to a third for the students in the abstinence-focused program and 42 percent of those in the combination program. But while abstinence-only backers jumped for joy at the results, the journal ran an accompanying editorial cautioning that public policy should not be based on the results of a single study and that policy makers should not “selectively use scientific literature to formulate a policy that meets preconceived ideologies” [The New York Times]. That speaks directly to the posture of Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association, who said the study “just verifies what we’ve known intuitively all along.”

Jemmott’s study will now rightfully enter the debate as the first to show that abstinence programs could work in some situations. But there are other reasons to question how much his results mean for the country at large (other than the previous studies casting doubt on the effectiveness of abstinence-only education). He says the team chose to study only African-American students, and at such a young age (about 12 on average), because “African-Americans tend to have a higher rate of early sexual initiation than others,” and starting young could allow for intervention. Researchers will have to duplicate the study with other demographic groups and time spans to sort out this question further.

In addition, the abstinence-only program that Jemmott’s team devised wasn’t exactly the “wait until your married” approach that many social conservatives would like to see taught to kids. It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms [The Washington Post].

Among those critical of the Jemmott study was Heather Boonstra of the Guttmacher Institute, which released data showing that after a decade-long decline, America’s teen-pregnancy rate rose 3 percent in 2006. Ms. Boonstra is among those who believe some of that uptick may be due to the reliance on abstinence-only programs [Christian Science Monitor]. Once again, though, correlation doesn’t imply causation. So although the trend reversal coincides in time with President Bush’s emphasis on funding abstinence programs, we can’t say for sure that’s the main cause.

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Image: iStockphoto

Talk about keeping up with technology. The Pope recently urged his priests to go forth and blog and to use social networking sites to keep up with their flock, but a priest in Poland has already taken it one step further. He now fingerprints his flock.

The priest, who lives in Southern Poland has taken to fingerprinting school children to check if they have been attending mass regularly. If they’ve checked in the requisite 200 times over three years, then the kids are spared exams prior to their confirmations. The kids love the idea.

Reuters interviewed one young churchgoer:

“This is comfortable. We don’t have to stand in a line to get the priest’s signature (confirming our presence at the mass) in our confirmation notebooks,” said one pupil, who gave her name as Karolina. Poland is perhaps the most devoutly Roman Catholic country in Europe today and churches are regularly packed on Sundays.

While the fingerprinting idea seems to have gone down well with the kids, it must make some adults nervous that someone out there (possibly in the Vatican?) has access to a huge database of tiny fingerprints.

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Image: iStockphoto