Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Coco-Nuts
I went out with a guy once who had a nut allergy (including coconut), and aside from all of his other issues, I realized that there was no way it'd work for that reason alone: no Thai food, no Indian food, no German Chocolate Cake, no PBJ picnics. And now, I'm guessing, no vacations to Papua New Guinea! The PNG island of Bougainville is working to replace diesel fuel with coconut oil, and thus become independent of the expensive imported former source of energy. That's really cool, and even if it's not a global or long-term solution to our energy crisis, it's gotta smell nice!
Speaking of, uhm, nuts, yet another US study has found that, despite what the wingnuts constantly claim, getting kids to use condoms doesn't make them more promiscuous: the UW study found that kids who reported using condoms their first time having sex had the same average number of partners as those who didn't use, and were less likely to have contracted an STI. So as usual, when the fundies scream about not wanting kids to have sex, what they really mean is that they don't want them to have sex without getting gonorrhea.
There's a bit on the other kind of nuts - crazy people - sitting here as well, but I want to think more about it (since it's really cool) before I blog it, so that'll come up later today.
In the meantime, we go to crazy hippies and their meditating ways (kinda). It seems that intensive mental training, by way of Vipassana meditation, improves people's ability to discriminate and attend to temporally close stimuli. Basically, the researchers found that intensively-trained participants had significant reductions in their 'attentional blink' time relative to baseline and more reduction than did a less-intensively trained group. The study was small, and I think the controls were perhaps lacking (groups were not randomized, and the intensive-group were people already signed up for the program -- selection bias?, etc.), but it's an interesting starting point for more research.
Speaking of, uhm, nuts, yet another US study has found that, despite what the wingnuts constantly claim, getting kids to use condoms doesn't make them more promiscuous: the UW study found that kids who reported using condoms their first time having sex had the same average number of partners as those who didn't use, and were less likely to have contracted an STI. So as usual, when the fundies scream about not wanting kids to have sex, what they really mean is that they don't want them to have sex without getting gonorrhea.
There's a bit on the other kind of nuts - crazy people - sitting here as well, but I want to think more about it (since it's really cool) before I blog it, so that'll come up later today.
In the meantime, we go to crazy hippies and their meditating ways (kinda). It seems that intensive mental training, by way of Vipassana meditation, improves people's ability to discriminate and attend to temporally close stimuli. Basically, the researchers found that intensively-trained participants had significant reductions in their 'attentional blink' time relative to baseline and more reduction than did a less-intensively trained group. The study was small, and I think the controls were perhaps lacking (groups were not randomized, and the intensive-group were people already signed up for the program -- selection bias?, etc.), but it's an interesting starting point for more research.
Labels: attention, chlamydia, coconuts, condoms, energy, food, fuel, gonorrhea, jailbait, kids, learning, meditation, neuroscience, nuts, sex, STI, Vipassana
Friday, April 13, 2007
Watch Out for Coughing Cowboys!
This ain't your grandfather's gonorrhea. Due to careless antibiotic use and of course to careless sexual practices, the US is seeing a ginormous rise in proportion of drug-resistant strains of this STD. Currently only one class of antibiotic seems to remain effective, and how long that will last no one can guess.
Speaking of making babies, a UK group claims to have grown immature sperm from bone marrow stem cells, potentially hinting at future fertility treatment advances. Gives new meaning to the concept of "boning" somebody...
But what genes get passed on? Hopefully not a faulty copy of FTO, which greatly increases risk of obesity. We may also soon know a good bit more about how genes evolve and change over time from the newly sequenced macaque genome.
Finally, if you thought bird flu and monkey pox were bad, wait till you hear about cow tuberculosis! It appears that this potentially lethal infection is, contrary to previous thought, transmissable from human to human. D'oh!
Speaking of making babies, a UK group claims to have grown immature sperm from bone marrow stem cells, potentially hinting at future fertility treatment advances. Gives new meaning to the concept of "boning" somebody...
But what genes get passed on? Hopefully not a faulty copy of FTO, which greatly increases risk of obesity. We may also soon know a good bit more about how genes evolve and change over time from the newly sequenced macaque genome.
Finally, if you thought bird flu and monkey pox were bad, wait till you hear about cow tuberculosis! It appears that this potentially lethal infection is, contrary to previous thought, transmissable from human to human. D'oh!
Labels: antibiotic resistance, bacteria, bird flu, bone marrow, bovine, cowboys, cows, evolution, fertility, genes, genome, gonorrhea, macaque, obesity, sex, sperm, STDs, stem cells, TB, tuberculosis
