The outcome of the seminal fluid parameters collected via coitus interruptus versus masturbation.

“A one year study was carried out to determine the outcome of the seminal fluid parameters collected via masturbation and coitus interruptus in 151 patients who were undergoing intrauterine insemination (IUI) and patients who came for seminal analysis. There were no statistically significant differences in terms of volume, concentration, progressive motility and normal morphology from specimens collected via coitus interruptus compared to specimens collected via masturbation. Pregnancy outcomes were also comparable.”

Photo: flickr/ Watson House

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Problems with condoms may be reduced for men taking ample time to apply them.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Why you should always put bull semen in your carry-on (but don’t worry about the embryos).
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: [Insert turkey baster joke here.]

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

Over at Genetic Future Dr. Daniel MacArthur has a measured response to a Nature commentary by David Goldstein, Growth of genome screening needs debate. As Dr. MacArthur notes an excessive portion of Goldstein’s piece is taken up with inferences derived from assuming that the model of rare variants causing most diseases is correct, when that is an issue currently in scientific contention (and this is a debate where Goldstein is a primary player on one side). But the last two paragraphs of the piece is where the real action is, no matter the details of genetic architecture of diseases:

One potential problem with this is that numerous genetic risk factors will have diverse and unexpected effects — sometimes causing disease, sometimes being harmless and sometimes perhaps being associated with behaviours or characteristics that society deems positive. Even for simpler Mendelian diseases, up to 30% of the mutations originally termed pathogenic have turned out to be apparently harmless…Wholesale elimination of variants associated with disease could end up influencing unexpected traits — increasing the vulnerability of populations to infectious diseases, for instance, or depleting people’s creativity.

There are no clear-cut answers to the questions of what should be screened ...

1) Post from the past: Genetics is One: Mendelism and quantitative traits

2) Weird search query of the week: “brad pitt look alike.”

3) Please note that I don’t endorse the views of the “comment of the week”! Comment of the week, in response to “1 in 3 Iranian men ‘gay’?”:

I think you are a bunch of idiots trying to judge everything with your nonsensical mindset.

I am a man and have fucked boys in Iran when I was at high school. They were supposedly gay and we used to call them sissy boys. So, will that make me gay? No! I did that because girls were not accessible. Also at a younger age `fucking somebody’ meant `proving your superiority’. Even now, I would happily fuck you mf* to show who has the upper hand!

But this sort of affairs would mostly happen between bullies and sissies. The rest 90% of children were immune of such activities. Those of us who did such things a couple of times also gave up doing so as we became more mature. I think you are out of your mind if you think 30% of men are ...

This is a guest post from Darlene Cavalier, founder of Science Cheerleader and Science For Citizens and contributing editor at Discover Magazine.
If it’s sunny wherever you are today between 4:00 and 7:00 pm local time, contribute to science by taking a photo of a blank white piece of outside in the sun (try to avoid cloud cover). Your photo will be used in an informal study to measure how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back into the skies from the Earth — our planet’s “albedo.” It’s one way scientists can monitor how much energy – and heat – is being absorbed by our planet.

Here is what you need to do to participate in this citizen science project on ScienceForCitizens.net (a partner of Discover Magazine , NBC Learn, and the National Science Foundation’s Changing Planet series):

Today, (August 5, 2011) take a photo between 4:00 pm and 7:00 pm local time. Put a white piece of paper on a flat surface. The white paper should fill 1/4 to 1/2 of the total view. Do not cast a shadow on the image. Snap a digital photo. No flash.

Simply upload your photo here, and include your location (either city/state or latitude/longitude) and description of the background surface (grass, sand, etc).

Albedo is measured by comparing the response of the white card to the response of the ground surface. Data points will be depicted on a map later. We’ll let you know when the results are ready!

There will be more opportunities to contribute to albedo measurements in the future.Sign up to be notified about the next study!

Carl Sagan revolutionized popular astronomy with his book and TV show "Cosmos", which had an audience of hundreds of millions of people. We’ve learned a lot about our Universe since then, and we’re overdue for a modern version of Sagan’s show. So I’m pleased to find out that Neil Tyson will be hosting a revamped and updated version of "Cosmos"!

He’s working with Ann Druyan (Sagan’s widow and herself a science popularizer), Steve Soter (who also worked on the original show), and Seth MacFarlane, creator of "Family Guy". I know, that may sound weird, but MacFarlane is a big science fan, a friend of Neil’s, and commonly puts a lot of science into his shows.

The new show is being created by National Geographic and Fox, and will air on the latter in prime time. To circumvent the expected comments on this, note that Fox News is separate from Fox TV, so the irony is there but perhaps not as strong as you might think.

I’m looking forward to this new show. "Cosmos" had a profound effect on hundreds of millions of people, but times have changed. I’ll be curious ...

Riding on a plume of fire from its Atlas V rocket, the NASA mission Juno launched at 16:25 UT (12:25 Eastern US time) on its way to Jupiter.

Juno will take 5 years to get to Jupiter, taking the 3 billion kilometer scenic route. In October 2013 it will actually pass the Earth once again, using the gravity of Earth and its motion around the Sun to steal a tiny bit of our energy and propel it to the outer solar system. From here, it will take a wide elliptical path to the giant planet, which orbits the Sun 5 times farther out than the Earth does. That’s why it takes so long.

Once there, it will orbit Jupiter for about an Earth year (how cool and science fictiony is it be able to say that?), taking its measure of Jupiter’s atmosphere, composition, surrounding environment, and magnetic field. It’s equipped with microwave, ultraviolet, infrared, and visible light detectors (which means very high-resolution pictures!) as well as other instruments to try to understand this enormous planet.

Interestingly, Juno is using solar panels for power; sunlight is only 4% as strong at Jupiter ...

If you’re turning green, it’s not the scenery’s fault.

As you may or may not know, Switzerland, land of chocolate, cheese, and cuckoo clocks, is also the land of trains. More than 1,800 miles of track crisscross the quaint alpine utopia, carrying 347 million passengers per year and maintaining the punctuality of a Stepford wife. That’s some serious trainage.

Some of those trains, unfortunately, are making people trainsick. And the Schweizerische Bundesbahnen, the Swiss train authorities, just wouldn’t stand for that. They asked some scientists to get to the bottom of it.

The problem trains are a class of vehicles that tilt by 8 degrees as they go around curves, preserving their speed by compensating for centripetal force. Something about those tilts was putting passengers off-kilter, so a team of Swiss and American neurologists attached accelerometers and gyroscopes to a test train and to the heads of passengers, whom, one hopes, were compensated for consenting to their unusual headgear.

A tilting train in action.

Usually, the tilt starts with the first train car that hits the curve, then propagates through the later cars. It’s also rather slow, so passengers’ heads get tipped ...

What’s the News: Whether genes can be property is an ongoing controversy in the world of biotechnology, and last week saw the latest court battle in that war: Upon appeal, a suit brought by the ACLU charging that genes aren’t products of human ingenuity and thus cannot be patented was settled largely in favor of Myriad Genetics, the biotech company that has patents on two BRCA genes. The genes are linked to hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, and plaintiffs charged that Myriad’s exclusive test for the genes kept patients from getting second opinions.

A detailed description of the court’s reasoning can be found over at Ars Technica. But for those of you who are thinking, what? someone else can own my genes?, chew on this: About 20% of human genes are patented or have patents associated with them, according to a comprehensive analysis. Here’s why.

What Are the Rules for Patenting Genes?

The general description of what’s patentable lays out a few guidelines: (1) It’s got to be useful. (2) It’s got to have something new about it that’s not already known by experts in its field. (3) It can’t be ...

Rise of the Planet of the Apes may have just unseated Captain America: The First Avenger as my favorite pro-enhancement film. Andy Serkis and John Lithgow render the sapient mind a character and drama unto itself – growing, evolving, and dying before our eyes. As a summer blockbuster, the film offers gorillas smashing helicopters, orangutan sign language humor, and a one-two punch apocalyptic virus to sate any palate slavering for action. As a meditation on enhancement, we’re treated with a film that has the brass to own up to the real villain of Frankenstein: the horrified masses and absentee father-scientist. Rise of the Planet of the Apes calls out a fear that sits at the heart of humanity: what if our offspring is more intelligent for us and because we cannot properly care for it, judges us to be lacking?

In the film, we see over and over that it is not Caesar’s enhancement that causes problems. In fact, Caesar’s enhancement makes him the most moral and wisest person on the screen. The failure of those around him – from the cruel ape sanctuary caretakers to Caesar’s own father figure, Will Rodman ...

When I published Tuesday’s much discussed DeSmogBlog post on conservative white men and climate change denial, I had no idea I would need to defend the basic idea that there is such a thing as “social dominance orientation” (which I only discussed for one paragraph of a much longer post). I figured readers would take it for granted that this is a serious scientific concept, so I just linked to the Wikipedia page. I mean, it’s not like somebody just conjured up social dominance orientation during a walk by the seaside one day. A psychometric scale was developed and validated to measure this attribute or characteristic, which varies within the human population. See here for the published research on this.

Nor did I think that it would be surprising to observe that, if there is dominance behavior in males, a little hormone called testosterone might be involved. I have not done much reporting on testosterone, but here is a recent review paper that more than covers it. The conclusion:

Testosterone has been the focus of intensive research for decades. Whereas early studies pointed towards a role in physical aggression, recent evidence suggests that this simple view needs to be refined. In particular, it appears that testosterone promotes status-seeking and social dominance motives, and thus plays an important role in social status hierarchies. (Note, however, that most of these recent studies were conducted on Western student populations; it remains to be tested whether these findings generalize to other populations.) Most recently, several studies in humans have begun to test the causality of the link between social, emotional and economic interaction behavior through acute testosterone administration. These studies have confirmed that an account of testosterone as a simple mediator of aggression falls short of the truth; instead, testosterone appears to have a more subtle and complex role in driving behaviors that tend to increase an individual’s motivation and ability to acquire and defend social status. The exact mechanisms by which testosterone has these effects remain elusive; however, recent research has suggested four plausible channels, namely threat vigilance, reward processing, fear reduction and stress resilience. The task of future studies will be to delineate the role of testosterone in social interaction more precisely and to test which of these candidate channels accounts for most of the observed behavioral variance.

So the bit about dominance actually seems to be the most established part of the testosterone story.

Why point all this out?

Because Wesley Smith–who I’ve met on several occasions, and found to be a nice guy–has misinterpreted my DeSmogBlog post. He seems to think that I blamed the conservative white male effect on social dominance orientation via testosterone. No: that would be silly. I merely raised SDO as one possible explanation among many other related contenders–the others being identity protective cognition, system justification, selective exposure to self-affirming information streams, in-group affirmation, and so on.

Look, here’s the story. We have conservative white men denying global warming at much higher frequencies than other segments of the population. Given that the science of climate is very well established–as is the human fingerprint on the global warming trend–this phenomenon cries out for an explanation. Why is this one group so inclined to fly in the face of scientific consensus?

A lot of explanations have now been suggested, and some will presumably be put to the test, in standard scientific fashion. Should SDO be included among such tests? That’s not my call; I will only note that published research already links it to maleness, conservatism, and anti-environmental attitudes.

For much more on SDO, I recommend reading Robert Altemeyer’s The Authoritarians.

“328 college students in midwest and west coast regions read one of five news stories (four airplane crash and one irrelevant) or none. They estimated the likelihood of their victimization in an airplane crash and indicated the maximum amount of time that they would be willing to spend driving in lieu of flying. Analysis showed those who read one of the airplane crash stories reported higher perceived risk of victimization than did those who read the irrelevant story or none. Reading airplane crash news was not related to the number of hours reported for driving instead of flying.”

Photo: flickr/J.C.Photos

Related content:
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Groundbreaking study proves it’s hard to see in the dark.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Clueless doctor sleeps through math class, reinvents calculus… and names it after herself.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Shocking study finds New Year’s resolutions work better than procrastination!

WTF is NCBI ROFL? Read our FAQ!

On August 4 at about 04:00 UT, the Sun let loose with another big flare, this one ranking as an M 9.5 or so on the standard flare classification, bigger than the one earlier this week. It also triggered a coronal mass ejection, which means we may get some effects here on Earth.

First, the way-cool video:

[Set the resolution to 720p or 1080p for the best view. Note: In the video title I said this happened on August 3. It did, in my time zone! It was August 4th in Universal Time, however. Sorry about any confusion.]

This is in the far ultraviolet, where energetic events like these show up well. The bright regions are actually sunspots, which are dark to our eye but are pretty glowy in the UV. At 03:57 UT the magnetic field lines in the spot reconnected, starting a cascade that released all the energy they contained. This caused the flare that’s fairly obvious in the video. But you can also see material blasting away from the area, some falling back down. Finally, there are wispy tendrils of material arcing up that fade away.

What you don’t really see here ...

Click here to view gallery

The future of manned spaceflight, it’s not. We hope.

Ever since the Space Shuttle took its last flight earlier this summer, the US has had no real plan for getting humans back up in space in the near future. Meanwhile, NASA is sending three LEGO figurines to Jupiter tomorrow, as part of a sponsorship deal with LEGO “to inspire children to explore science, technology, engineering and mathematics.” Because flying little aluminum Jupiter, Juno, and Galileo more than 1,700 million miles is a great way to demonstrate to future scientists the importance of funding!

The figurines of the god, goddess, and seventeenth-century astronomer aren’t part of any of the scientific experiments also making the journey on NASA’s Juno probe. But, the press release is quick to note, “Of course, the miniature Galileo has his telescope with him on the journey.” Too bad he has no eyes.

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/KSC

For male Houbara bustards, extravagant sexual displays come with a price: rapid sexual aging. By studying over 1,700 North African Houbara bustards, researchers in France have learned that the birds, by age six, already begin producing smaller ejaculates with a large number of dead and abnormal sperm. The more showy the bustard, the quicker he burns himself out. As lead researcher Brian Preston said in a prepared statement:

This is the bird equivalent of the posers who strut their stuff in bars and nightclubs every weekend. If the bustard is anything to go by, these same guys will be reaching for their toupees sooner than they’d like.

[Read more about these peculiar birds and see a video of one of their seductive dances at the BBC.]

Image courtesy of Frank. Vassen / Flickr

For the past few years, tantalizing evidence has been found that Mars — thought to be long dead, dry, and lifeless — may have pockets of water just beneath the surface. To be clear, we know there’s water on Mars, in the form of ice. We see ice in the polar caps, and we’ve seen it revealed under the surface by small meteorite impacts.

The question is, is there liquid water?

New images by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter bring us a step closer to answering that question. A series of pictures of the 300 km (180 mile) wide Newton crater taken over the course of several years show dark deposits on the crater wall which change predictably with the seasons, clearly affiliated with some sort of material flowing downslope:

[Click to barsoomenate.]

The picture above shows Newton’s crater wall. It’s pretty steep, with about a 35° slope, and the dark deposits are labeled. This crater is located in the southern mid-latitudes of Mars, and this part of the crater faces north. That’s critical! Since it faces toward the equator, that means it’s facing the Sun in the summer, and so these deposits appear when ...

Is there any limit to the cool things you can do with Microsoft’s Kinect? Just last month we told you about students in Switzerland that used the device to create a gesture-controlled quadrocopter; now, students in California are looking to employ the Kinect in archaeological digs in Jordan.

Excavation is painstaking work, requiring careful cataloging of every artifact and the exact locations where they were found. To simplify this tedious process, researchers at the University of California, San Diego have modified a Kinect to do all the work for them. The new system, called ArKinect (archaeology + Kinect, if you didn’t catch that), extracts information from the Kinect’s streaming data feed of visible and infrared light.

The archaeologists will the use the system to quickly make accurate 3D scans of both the entire dig site and anything they pull up from the ground. The idea is to then plug the data into their 360-degree virtual reality environment called StarCAVE, which would allow the archeologists to interact with the virtual objects. “We can then use the 3D model, walk around it, we can move it around, we can look at it from all ...

Current drugs for conditions from depression to Parkinson’s work by changing levels of chemicals in the brain—an imprecise method that can have a wide range of unintended effects. But a new study suggests it could be possible to make drugs that work by turning off genes instead, getting at, for instance, a specific receptor in a particular part of the brain.

The researchers attached an anti-depressant, setraline, to a bit of what’s called small interfering RNA. They found that when mice were given the combo nasally, it shut off a particular serotonin receptor thought to be involved in depression in just the region of the brain they were aiming for, and nowhere else. On his blog, Neuroskeptic points out that it’s not clear when, or if, the drug will be ready for humans—but wow, is that an exciting idea:

The mind boggles at the potential. If you could selectively alter the gene expression of selective neurons, you could do things to the brain that are currently impossible. Existing drugs hit the whole brain, yet there are many reasons why you’d prefer to only affect certain areas. And editing gene expression would allow ...

Each fluid reveals a different letter.

What’s the News: Scientists have developed a chip that can instantaneously identify fluids applied to it, just from their unique surface tension. In a handheld device, it could help toxic site remediators figure out what that ominous clear liquid is. And there’s a bonus for the kids-in-the-treehouse user demographic: different secret messages can appear on the chip depending on what fluid is applied.

What’s the Context:

Materials scientists—who, put simply, study stuff—have long been interested in how fluid moves through the tiny myriad holes of substances like coral, or bone.
By building coral-like structures out of glass in the lab and then treating them with various chemicals, they can make it impossible for some fluids to seep into the maze of holes, while others glide right in. A substance’s ability to absorb fluids is called “wettability,” and it’s the subject of much research, as you can imagine—it’s the reason your raincoat stays dry and your sponge sops up spilled juice.
A fluid’s ability to seep through holes is dependent on its own physics, as well as the wettability of the substance. Molasses, for instance, is too thick to creep into holes ...

Hard on the heels of my post on Abell 39 last week comes another nebula that forms perhaps an even more perfect circle: PN G75.5+1.7, aka the Soap Bubble Nebula:

[Click to ennebulenate.]

That’s really cool. As I pointed out in the earlier post, these are called planetary nebulae, and are the results of the dying stars blowing off winds of gas. They are very rarely circular, instead coming in all kinds of fantastic shapes. It’s thought that you might not get a PN unless the star is binary or swells up to eat its planets as it dies; when that happens the star can get spun up and eject the gas more easily.

It’s not really a circle, of course: it’s a sphere, or more properly a spherical shell. It really is like a soap bubble! The bright edge is due to an effect called limb brightening, which I explained in that earlier post.

This isn’t really well understood, but to get one this symmetric the star must be a loner, and spherical ones are pretty rare. The Soap Bubble is extremely round, maybe even more than Abell 39, so that in ...