Brains and Behavior
bushwells | June 3, 2008""The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he's too thick - my husband is sexier."
So says Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, whose surname translates to English as "Berlin Wall."
The Telegraph resurrected Frau Berliner-Mauer's fascinating case of objectum-sexual in a news of the weird article: Woman "married" to Berlin Wall for 29 years. Overall, this is an article worthy of The Onion, but apparently the Wall's spouse widow occasionally makes the rounds discussing her fetish.
Having recently polished off Mary Roach's Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (I'll review this marvelous book…
bushwells | December 10, 2007So does anyone want to lay odds on how long it will be before "discovery of the gay gene" gets spread like a crazed rhinovirus through the popular media? A recent press release announces the discovery that male fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster) with mutations in the GB (genderblind) allele not only mate with female flies but also were attracted to - and try to mate with - male flies.
The mutation apparently alters perception of chemosensory cues. Two of the major chemical attractants in the world of fruit fly sex are 7-tricosene and cis-vaccenyl acetate: the flies taste the former…
bushwells | July 11, 2007As a belated follow-on to my rant on ol' Hissy Chrissy Hitchies' contention that women aren't funny, I offer this film clip via LiveScience: Humor and the Sexes. Be forewarned that you must suffer through a Yahoo ad in the beginning which pokes gentle fun at Incompetent Men and Their Tools, a subject that is always a knee-slappper. In the meat of the film, Allan Reiss discusses the tantalizing observations that men's and women's brains respond differently to humor.
From Hitchen's Vanity Fair article:
The researchers found that men and women (10 each - Doc Bushwell) share much of the same…
jfiore | June 1, 2007Thanks to commenter Derelict from my Summer Reading entry, I listened to a talk with Christopher Hitchens on the Dennis Prager show. There was one particular item that caught my ear. Prager posed the following question:
"If you were in a strange city in the USA at night and you saw ten men coming toward you, would you or would you not be relieved to know that they had just come from a bible study class?"
Apparently, Hitchens mentioned this question in his book God Is Not Great, but generalized it to "religious study" and any city in the world. Hitchens then recounted a number of instances…
bushwells | February 6, 2007There's a little corner of the Internet which I stumbled across several weeks ago, a personal blog in which a young writer, her educational background in biopsychology, recently dissected an expansive and bizarre post-modern Milgram-esque experiment which occurred at fast-food chain restaurants throughout the United States during the span of 2000 through 2004, at which time a suspect was arrested, and the hoaxes ceased. The story, as reported originally in the Louisville KY Courier-Journal, A hoax most cruel in October 2005, outlines the history and consequences of a series of abuse by an…
bushwells | November 13, 2006
An eye-opening publication in the Journal of Human Evolution garnered some press as noted here in The Economist, Eyeing up the collaboration, and Why eyes are so alluring from LiveScience.com
Michael Tomasello and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute report that whereas great apes like gorillas, chimps and bonobos are influenced by head position when trying to follow another's gaze, humans take cues directly from eye movement. Thanks to the whites of our eyes and other high contrast features, our gaze is easier to follow.
What is the the evolutionary driver for white sclera? One theory…
bushwells | September 28, 2006Once again those feisty young fellows at Frink Tank have caused my withered ovaries to twitch with faint lust. As a Simpsonophiliac, casual (and sometimes cynical) Dawkins observer, and admirer of All Things Irreverent, I was sent over the edge by this blog gobbet from Not Shitashi. Crazy Cat Lady. Ha! I will never think of Dawkins as Darwin's Rottweiler again.
That cephalopodean dude wrote a review of The God Delusion which appears in the November '06 print edition of Seed Magazine. We coddled Science Bloggers get freebie print mags but you readers will have to rush to your…