What’s the News: What if the egg is fine and the sperm is dandy, but you still can’t seem to have a baby? Couples who are having trouble conceiving can testify to the frustration of learning that there’s no clear reason for their infertility. Now, however, scientists have found a genetic mutation that makes outwardly normal sperm much less fertile, potentially explaining many such cases and suggesting new routes to conception.

What’s the Context:

Infertility is defined as failure to conceive after a year of unprotected sex. About 10-15% of couples run into this problem.
Some cases of infertility are fairly easily explained: there may be a shortage of sperm, or they may be unable to swim far enough to make it to the egg. The eggs in turn may be malformed, or the womb may have conditions that make implantation of the fertilized egg difficult. But in about 20% of infertile couples, it’s not clear what is impeding the process.
When treating infertility, knowing the source of the problem is a big help. For instance, if the problem is the number of sperm, one option is concentrating sperm into a single sample and trying with ...

At 09:57:54 GMT today, July 21st, 2011, the Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis rolled to a safe stop on Runway 15 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, marking the end of last Shuttle flight.

It flew 33 missions since its first launch in 1985, spending over 300 days in space and making nearly 5000 orbits of the Earth. It visited Mir, the ISS, and even Hubble.

With this landing, the Era of the Shuttle is over. But our presence in space is not. NASA still has working rockets that can carry machines into space, and is working on developing a new rocket system. Private companies are gathering the capability to go to space and to low-Earth orbit. Other countries still have the ability to take humans into space as well. As Americans we pride ourselves on our history of exploration and being the first. For now, that pride may have to wait.

But I’ll note that after Apollo 17, the last Moon landing, it was 8 years before the first Shuttle launch. I’m hoping the current gap that began this morning will last much less than that. I wish there were no gap at ...

Amazon has put my ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind on sale for the gotta-get-it price of $3.99. If you want some information on the ebook, check out…

The Brain Cuttings page on my web site

A conversation with science writer Steve Silberman on Brain Cuttings and the future of science ebooks

A review by Vaughan Bell on his essential blog, Mind Hacks

And if the only information you need is “$3.99,” here’s where you can get a copy.

(PS–I have no idea why Amazon decided to put the ebook on sale, and have no idea how long the sale will last. So grab it now!)

Atoms sometimes release alpha particles during radioactive decay.

What’s the News: An international team of researchers has completed the most precise measurement of the Earth’s radioactivity to date. By analyzing subatomic particles streaming out of the interior of the planet, the geologists and physicists discovered that the radioactive decay of several elements generates roughly half of the Earth’s total heat output. Their results were published recently in the journal Nature Geoscience.

What’s the Context:

Radioactive decay is a natural process where an unstable atom loses energy by emitting particles (thus decaying into smaller atoms). Radioactive decay can sometimes release neutrinos: tiny, electrically neutral, and nearly massless elementary particles that pass through most normal matter with little to no interaction. Because of their ability to phase through matter mostly unaffected, these ghostlike particles are very hard to detect.
Like all other particles, neutrinos have anti-siblings, called antineutrinos. A proton can sometimes capture an antineutrino, which then splits into a neutron plus a positron (an anti-electron). That positron will annihilate when it hits an electron, releasing energy that can be detected with very sensitive instruments, such as the Kamioka Liquid Scintillator Antineutrino Detector (KamLAND) deep in ...

I mentioned offhand to Trey of Genomes Are Us that I’d look around for the effect of adoptive environments on criminality (what with the recent concern about studying the genetics of criminal predisposition). Luckily I have Steve Hsu in my RSS, as he posted something of interest just yesterday, pointing me to this paper, The environments of adopted and non-adopted youth: evidence on range restriction from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS):

Previous reviews of the literature have suggested that shared environmental effects may be underestimated in adoption studies because adopted individuals are exposed to a restricted range of family environments. A sample of 409 adoptive and 208 non-adoptive families from the Sibling Interaction and Behavior Study (SIBS) was used to identify the environmental dimensions on which adoptive families show greatest restriction and to determine the effect of this restriction on estimates of the adoptive sibling correlation. Relative to non-adoptive families, adoptive families experienced a 41% reduction of variance in parent disinhibitory psychopathology and an 18% reduction of variance in socioeconomic status (SES). There was limited evidence for range restriction in exposure to bad peer models, parent depression, or family climate. However, restriction in range ...

A new paper in PLoS Biology is rather like the last person to leave turning the light off. Evolutionary psychology as we understood it in the 1980s and 1990s is over. Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology:

None of the aforementioned scientific developments render evolutionary psychology unfeasible; they merely require that EP should change its daily practice. The key concepts of EP have led to a series of widely held assumptions (e.g., that human behaviour is unlikely to be adaptive in modern environments, that cognition is domain-specific, that there is a universal human nature), which with the benefit of hindsight we now know to be questionable. A modern EP would embrace a broader, more open, and multi-disciplinary theoretical framework, drawing on, rather than being isolated from, the full repertoire of knowledge and tools available in adjacent disciplines. Such a field would embrace the challenge of exploring empirically, for instance, to what extent human cognition is domain-general or domain specific, under what circumstances human behaviour is adaptive, how best to explain variation in human behaviour and cognition. The evidence from adjacent disciplines suggests that, if EP can reconsider its basic tenets, it will flourish as a scientific discipline.

Heritability is a fraught topic. It comes up repeatedly on this weblog, but even long time readers can be confused as to its implications, as evidenced by the incorrect inferences made from their own understanding of the concept. The most common problem is that too often people think that heritability is just a scienced up version of the colloquial idea of some traits being “more genetic” or “less genetic.” It’s not that at all. Traits totally specified in their details by genetic pathways can be non-heritable. That’s because heritability looks at the association between parents and offspring on a trait and attempts to separate the population-wide proportion of the variation attributable to genes and not attributable to genes. When you have a genetically specified trait, like the number of human fingers, you have no real variation within the population to work with (with some rare exceptions). It doesn’t make sense to talk about the heritability of the number of fingers, because this is a fixed trait in the human species.

In contrast, height is a perfect trait to illustrate heritability. Unlike behavioral or cognitive traits its measurement is clear, ...

“This study explored how domestic cats perform in a horizontal string-pulling task to determine whether they understand this case of physical causality. Fifteen cats were tested on their ability to retrieve an unreachable food treat in three different set-ups: (a) a single baited string, (b) two parallel strings where only one was baited and (c) two crossed strings where only one was baited. All cats succeeded at pulling a single string to obtain a treat, but none consistently chose the correct string when two strings were parallel. When tested with two crossed strings one cat chose the wrong string consistently and all others performed at chance level. There was no evidence that cats understand the function of the strings or their physical causality.”

Photo: flickr/oskay

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Optimizing the sensory characteristics and acceptance of canned cat food: use of a human taste panel.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Introducing…the automatic LOLcat detector!
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Cooperation and individuality among man-eating lions.

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

What’s the News: By knocking out a single gene, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have significantly increased the physical endurance of lab mice, as explained in their recent paper in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. The researchers also found that certain variants of the same gene may be linked to greater endurance in humans.

How the Heck:

Past in vitro studies showed that a gene called IL-15R? is involved in controlling muscle contractions, which play a role in both muscle strength and endurance. But the gene has never been studied in a living animal, so physiologist Tejvir Khurana and his research team decided to engineer lab mice that lack IL-15R?.
They noticed that at night the altered mice ran six times farther than normal mice. When the team dissected the engineered mice, they found that their muscles had more fibers than normal mice, as well as a higher number of mitochondria, the power plants of cells. ...

We are a cooperative ape, and a fair one. We work together to put food on the table and once it’s there, social rules compel us to share it around equitably. These two actions are tied to one another. In a new study, Katharina Hamann from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology has shown that three-year-old children are more likely to fairly divide their spoils with other kids if they’ve worked together to get them.

The same can’t be said of chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives. Sharing comes less naturally to them, and it doesn’t become any more likely if they’ve worked together to get a meal.

Hamann says, “Among great apes, only humans are true collaborative foragers.” Other species might look for food together, but being next to one another is not the same as working together. The only exception are the hunting parties of chimps, where several individuals work together to kill monkeys for food. The slain monkeys are shared, but either under duress or in exchange for favours.

With children, things are very different. Studies have shown that children as young as five to seven start ...

Tomorrow morning, July 21, at 5:56 a.m. EDT (09:56 GMT), the Space Shuttle Orbiter Atlantis is scheduled to set wheels down on Earth one last time. When it launched, though, pictures were taken as the rocket rolled that allowed Nathaniel Burton-Bradford to create a 3D red/cyan anaglyph:

[Click to enlaunchenate.]

I posted another 3D image he made of Atlantis, too, and he has one of the ISS he just made as well. If you don’t have red/cyan glasses, you can search for ‘em online. They’re pretty cheap, and I do sometimes link to pictures like this… like in Related Posts below. It’s totally worth a buck, just for that moment of "wow".

Credit: NASA, Nathanial Burton Bradford

Related posts:

- 3D Apollo
- The lumpy, 3D Earth
- Phobos is, like, totally groovy
- 3D House of Comet Nucleus

Shorter House of Representatives: NASA shouldn’t do astrophysics anymore. Via the Tracker, an article by Eric Hand in Nature News that puts the fiasco in helpful graphical form.

Misleading graphic alert! The vertical scale starts at $0.5 billion, not at $0. But taking that into account merely changes the situation from “complete annihilation” to “devastating harm.” We’re talking about a 40% cut, which won’t leave room to do much more than keep the lights on for existing programs.

The 2011 numbers are the President’s budget request; the 2012 numbers are from the bill that passed the House. This isn’t yet law, so there’s still time; the Senate and the White House will (thankfully) be involved in the final compromise.

Times are tough, and not everything is worth doing. But there are few things more important to the long-term flourishing of a country than investment in basic science. Sad to see the future sacrificed for bizarre political reasons.