Reality Bites
Until recently, most scientists believed that only single-celled creatures were capable of enduring life in the hot, high-pressure zone beneath Earth’s crust. Now they’ve discovered tiny worms (pictured above) who live as many as 2.2 miles below ground. What else will we find living deep inside the Earth? More »
The image above is the most complete map of our local universe to date. It took more that ten years to create, has 43,000 galaxies and extends out 380 million light years from the earth. The 3D coordinates of each galaxy was recorded so the raw data could potentially be used to build a realistic 3D model of the universe. Throw in some holographic technology and you have something straight from Star Trek. More »
Today, a group of scientists announced that beneath the surface of the Moon there may be as much water as we have on Earth. This revelation could change everything we know about the Moon — and pave the way for lunar colonies in the next twenty years. More »
A massive explosion that was spotted in 2009 has been declared, by some at least, to be the most distant object ever seen. It’s ninety-six percent of the way to the visible limit of the universe. More »
The Large Hadron Collider, the baddest monster machine around, recently made a matter known as quark-gluon plasma. It’s a hundred thousand times hotter than the inside of the sun and denser than anything in the universe, except black holes. More »
Pro tip for the single men out there: if you want to get a date with the girl next door, don’t smile at her. Raise your arms in the air like you just hit a game-winning home run instead. More »
The fact that our memories degrade over time is nothing new. Everyone knows that as we get older it’s harder to remember where you put your keys or parked your car. Now, one neuroscientist thinks he understands how it happens. More »
We might be on the verge of the biggest archaeological discovery in art history. A tomb in Florence could hold the remains of the model who sat for Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa some 500 years ago. More »
Using high-resolution scans of real human embryos, the BBC has created this somewhat terrifying animation of a fish-like, one-month-old embryo rapidly developing a face up to the 10-week mark. Yes, we all started out resembling Admiral Ackbar. More »
Physicists have long studied the nature of the universe. But some go a step further into the unknown (and probably unknowable), contemplating what lies outside the boundaries of our universe. More »
We can trace our evolutionary heritage back millions of years, but it’s surprisingly tricky to say with certainty which hominid species came directly before us. Now it looks like one of our evolutionary cousins is actually our parent species. More »
The saga of “Semengate”
Cut to this past February. Lazar Greenfield, the incoming president of the American College of Surgeons (ACS), wrote a short Valentine’s Day-themed editorial about mating in Surgery News. In it, he discussed the sex lives of fruit flies, rotifers and humans. He cited the SUNY Albany study before concluding: “So there’s a deeper bond between men and women than St. Valentine would have suspected, and now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.” That gift, of course, being semen.
Greenfield’s editorial sparked a controversy among ACS members, many of whom felt it was blatantly sexist. In response to the flap, Greenfield — a highly respected retired professor at the University of Michigan with a reputation for supporting women in surgery — apologized and stepped down from his post as editor of Surgery News; two weeks ago, as the controversy continued, he also resigned from his position at the College. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press Greenfield said, “The editorial was a review of what I thought was some fascinating new findings related to semen, and the way in which nature is trying to promote a stronger bond between men and women.”
Setting aside the unfortunate politics of this story, I decided to look into the science behind “Semengate” for my first Sex Files column. Could the stuff in semen actually be nature’s own antidepressant?
In the 2002 study, 293 college women filled out questionnaires about their sexual histories and took the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), a widely used measure of depression symptoms. Women who always had unprotected sex had significantly lower levels of depression symptoms than those who usually or always used condoms, as well as those who abstained from sex. There was no significant difference in depression between condom users and abstainers, indicating that the physical act of sex itself wasn’t the mood-boosting factor.
Late last week I asked Gordon Gallup, Jr., an evolutionary psychologist at SUNY Albany and lead author of the study, about the results. “Seminal plasma evolved to control and manipulate the female reproductive system so as to work toward the best interests of the donor — the male,” Gallup explains. “If you begin to think about semen in those terms, then the fact that semen might have antidepressant properties becomes a lot more interesting in that it may promote bonding between the female and her sexual partner.” Such bonding, Gallup says, could increase the male’s chances of developing a long-term reproductive relationship with a female that would work to his reproductive advantage.
Semen is a complex mixture of different compounds, and sperm actually only makes up a small amount of it. When you remove the sperm, what’s left is seminal plasma, a fluid that contains an array of ingredients, some of which can pass through the vagina and be detected in the bloodstream after sex. Three compounds of interest in seminal plasma are estrogen, prostaglandins and oxytocin. Estrogen and prostaglandins have been linked to lower levels of depression, while oxytocin (which women release during birth, breastfeeding and orgasm) promotes social bonding. These and other compounds in semen could function to keep women coming back for more. “I think there’s reason to believe based on some of the evidence we’ve collected that females that are in committed relationships that are having unprotected sex may use sex in part to self-medicate,” Gallup says. “It’s discovered after the fact that being inseminated has effects on mood, and they use sex to modulate their mood.”
There’s also evidence, he says, that women may actually go through semen withdrawal. In an unpublished study he conducted a few years ago, women in committed relationships who were having unprotected sex and were exposed to semen were “far more devastated and adversely affected [after a breakup] than those that were using condoms.” He also found a risk of a rebound effect, where women who were not using condoms had sex with a new partner after a breakup within a couple of weeks versus several months for those who had used condoms. “I don’t think the evidence is conclusive, but it’s certainly very suggestive that it’s a response, in effect, to semen withdrawal,” Gallup says.
But couldn’t there just be fundamental differences between women who have unprotected sex and women who use condoms? That’s the question most often posed by skeptics of Gallup’s work, he says. “What we’ve discovered is that if you look at depression scores on the Beck Depression Inventory as a function of the amount of time that has elapsed since the respondents’ last sexual encounter, it turns out that those that are using condoms show no effect of time since sex. Their depression scores are independent of whether they’ve had sex recently or not. For those that are being exposed to semen, BDI scores increase as the time since sexual encounter increases. This implies that the difference between those that are using condoms and those that are not is not an enduring fundamental trait difference. Rather, it’s a state difference that’s induced by semen.”
Next up, Gallup would like to study how a man’s mental state affects his semen. Researchers studying artificial insemination have found that the makeup of seminal fluid changes depending on what the donor was doing when he provided the sample. “If they’re using their imagination to achieve the necessary sexual arousal to ejaculate, Gallup says, “the sample is not nearly as potent than if they’re watching explicit video pornography.” (Cue the tapes!)
For what it’s worth, I asked Gallup what he thought about Semengate. “I think it’s a tragic overreaction,” he says. “The point at which we begin to let a political agenda dictate what science is all about is the point when science ceases to be a viable enterprise.” Considering how fascinating this research is — and whether or not it offends our sensibilities — I have to agree.
Jennifer Abbasi is a science and health writer and editor living in Brooklyn. She has seen every episode of The X-Files. Have a question about the science of sex? Email Jen at popsci.thesexfiles@gmail.com.
A scientist who studies the small, silver elephantfish may have stumbled on the key to speciation, the process that allows one species to evolve into two or more. And it’s all about developing new sensory perceptions. More »
This week, the SETI Institute announced that it would have to shut down its large radio telescope facility, called the Allen Telescope Array, near the California mountain town Hat Creek. For over a decade, SETI has used the 42 radio dishes in its array to scan the skies for possible communications from extraterrestrial intelligence. More »
Did scientists running the massive Large Hadron Collider finally discover what Einstein eloquently hypothesized was the “mind of God” for the last 30 years of his life? Possibly, yes, if a memo leaked this week turns out to be legitimate. More »
Already a record holder for mashing protons together at 7 TeV (trillion electron volts), the Large Hadron Collider can now add world’s brightest beam to its list of accomplishments. Beam intensity is a way of measuring the number of collisions in its 17-mile-long track, and a higher intensity means more impacts — which, in turn, means more data, increasing the likelihood that the elusive Higgs boson will rear its head (should such a thing exist). The LHC smashed the previous luminosity record set last year by the Tevatron collider. What’s next for the CERN team, with two world records under its belt? Largest beard of bees.
Large Hadron Collider smashes beam intensity record, inches closer to discovering God particle originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 22 Apr 2011 14:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Dark matter, we barely knew you, but before we ever found out if you were, in fact, the invisible hand pushing the cosmos apart, an Italian scientist ginned up a new theory that has anti-gravity doing the Yoko Ono to the universe’s merry band of galaxies. Massimo Villata’s theory assumes that both matter and antimatter have positive mass and energy density, which gets particles attracting particles and antiparticles attracting antiparticles through the force of gravity. To give dark matter the heave-ho from the galactic expansion equation, Villata supposes that the theory of general relativity applies in reverse to antimatter particles to create anti-gravity. And just as gravity pulls particles together, anti-gravity shoves them apart — giving the universe its burgeoning waistline, no clown, king, or colonel required.
Universe expansion: dark matter’s out, anti-gravity’s in, matter and antimatter still can’t get along originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 21 Apr 2011 08:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Mark this day, folks, because the brainiacs have finally made a breakthrough in quantum teleportation: a team of scientists from Australia and Japan have successfully transferred a complex set of quantum data in light form. You see, previously researchers had struggled with slow performance or loss of information, but with full transmission integrity achieved — as in blocks of qubits being destroyed in one place but instantaneously resurrected in another, without affecting their superpositions — we’re now one huge step closer to secure, high-speed quantum communication. Needless to say, this will also be a big boost for the development of powerful quantum computing, and combine that with a more bedroom friendly version of the above teleporter, we’ll eventually have ourselves the best LAN party ever.
First light wave quantum teleportation achieved, opens door to ultra fast data transmission originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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With the plethora of acronyms and creative spellings available to the modern text messaging user, it seems only logical that knowledge of the actual spellings would be forgotten. And yet, against all odds, text messaging can actually improve spelling abilities. More »
You already know the strange powers of Stephin Merritt, but today we’re talking about real magnetic fields. Powerful electromagnets, it turns out, can do remarkable things to the brain — in this case, prevent a volunteer from reciting “Humpty Dumpty.” The carefully directed magnets temporarily disrupt the brain’s speech centers; the volunteer can still sing the rhyme using different areas of the brain, but simply can’t overcome a series of stammers when trying to merely recite it. Of course, it’s not all mad scientist applications: the UK team experimenting with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) thinks it can help us understand and treat migraines (as we’ve seen before with the Migraine Zapper), depression, and ADHD, among other ailments. But improving physical well-being doesn’t make for nearly as entertaining media — see the British inflict some involuntary quiet time in the video above.
Magnetic fields shut down speech, permit love songs (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 17:56:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.