Fear of a Female Planet

When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger
By DENISE GRADY, The New York Times, May 5, 2012

He threw away tax documents, got a ticket for trying to pass an ambulance and bought stock in companies that were obviously in trouble. Once a good cook, he burned every pot in the house. He became withdrawn and silent, and no longer spoke to his wife over dinner. That same failure to communicate got him fired from his job at a consulting firm.

By 2006, Michael French — a smart, good-natured, hardworking man — had become someone his wife, Ruth, felt she hardly knew. Infuriated, she considered divorce.

But in 2007, she found out what was wrong.

“I cried,” Mrs. French said. “I can’t tell you how much I cried, and how much I apologized to him for every perceived wrong or misunderstanding.”

Mr. French, now 71, has frontotemporal dementia — a little-known, poorly understood and frequently misdiagnosed group of brain diseases that eat away at personality and language. Although it was first recognized more than 100 years ago, there is still no cure or treatment, and patients survive an average of only eight years after the diagnosis.

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A Crocodile Too Huge to Fit on the Family Tree
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, May 7, 2012

Giant crocodiles, far larger than any known to date, lived in Kenya two million to four million years ago among our human ancestors, according to a new report.

A fossil of one specimen, 27 feet in length, shows that it is not closely related to the Nile crocodile, as some scientists had thought, said Christopher A. Brochu, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Iowa and the new study’s first author.

Although the two crocodiles look similar, the ancient species has a different skull and jaw formation from the Nile crocodile.

“There’s this misconception that crocodiles are these living fossils that haven’t changed,” he said. “This is something different, a species of a true crocodile, but different from anything known.”

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Zombie-Ant Fungus Has Its Own Killer Fungus
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, May 7, 2012

Like something out of a horror movie, the zombie-ant fungus attacks and invades the brains of carpenter ants. Possessed ants march to their death, and the fungus lives inside the exoskeleton.

Now, a new study reports that the zombie-ant fungus itself faces attack by another fungus.

This secondary attacker, a white fungus, is “looking for its own lunch, and it thinks this dead ant is a nice thing to eat, along with the fungus that’s eating the ant,” said David Hughes, a disease biologist at Penn State and one of the authors.

This attack prevents the spores of the zombie-ant fungus from spreading and infecting other ants in the colony, Dr. Hughes said.

“Looking at the colony, it’s a good thing for the ants,” he said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

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Lactose Intolerant, Before Milk Was on Menu
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, March 5, 2012

Since it was discovered in 1991, preserved in 5,300 years’ worth of ice and snow in the Italian Alps, the body of the so-called Tyrolean Iceman has yielded a great deal of information. Scientists have learned his age (about 46), that he had knee problems, and how he died (by the shot of an arrow).

Now, researchers have sequenced the complete genome of the iceman, nicknamed Ötzi, and discovered even more intriguing details. They report in the journal Nature Communications that he had brown eyes and brown hair, was lactose intolerant and had Type O blood.

The lactose intolerance makes sense, said Albert Zink, an anthropologist at the European Academy of Research in Bolzano, Italy, who was one of the study’s authors.

“In early times, there was no need to digest milk as an adult because there were no domesticated animals,” Dr. Zink said. “This genetic change took hundreds of years to occur.”

But the scientists were surprised to find that Ötzi had a strong predisposition to heart disease. “If he wasn’t shot with an arrow, it would have been possible that he might have had a heart attack soon after,” Dr. Zink said.

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Giant Jurassic Fleas Packed a Mean Mouth
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, March 2, 2012

Scientists have discovered the world’s oldest fleas to date — bloodsuckers that lived among (and possibly on) dinosaurs.

Fossils found in northeastern China belong to two ancient species of fleas, the researchers report in the current issue of the journal Nature: one dating to the Middle Jurassic, about 165 million years ago, and the other to the Early Cretaceous, about 125 million years ago.

Females ranged from one-eighth to half an inch long, males from one-sixth to a third of an inch.

That makes them giants. Today’s fleas are only about one-tenth the size.

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No Animals Were Harmed in the Making of This Fossil
By SARAH FECHT, The New York Times, March 5, 2012

The famous feathered dinosaur archaeopteryx seems to have had a penchant for fossilizing in painful positions, with its head cranked backward at a severe angle. The contorted posture is so common in dinosaur fossils that it has its own name: opisthotonus, from the Greek “tonos,” meaning tightening, and “opistho,” behind.

Since the 1920s, paleontologists have debated how these dinosaurs came to have such grotesque final resting positions. Some theorized that water currents moved the bones into formation, or that the muscle contractions of rigor mortis pulled the head backward. Others thought the animals must have died in pain.

New research proposes a simpler explanation.

In a paper published last month in the journal Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, Achim G. Reisdorf of the University of Basel in Switzerland writes that the trouble with the death-throe hypothesis is that carcasses are flexible. To fossilize in the traumatic death position, a carcass would have to be quickly buried in the exact spot where it died, without any transportation.

But that is unlikely, Mr. Reisdorf wrote. Many of the dinosaurs found in opisthotonic posture are land animals that fell into sediment at the bottom of bodies of water, and probably had to settle before reaching their final resting place.

Mr. Reisdorf thought water might be the key. So he and a colleague, Dr. Michael Wuttke, decided to try some kitchen science. They bought fresh chicken necks from a butcher and plunged them into water buckets.

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Why Even Resolute Dieters Often Fail
By JANE E. BRODY, September 19, 2011, The New York Times

If you’ve been trying for years to lose unwanted pounds and keep them off, unrealistic goals may be the reason you’ve failed. It turns out that a long-used rule of weight loss — reduce 3,500 calories (or burn an extra 3,500) to lose one pound of body fat — is incorrect and can ultimately doom determined dieters.

That is the conclusion reached by Dr. Kevin D. Hall and his colleagues at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases. Recently they created a more realistic model of how the body responds to changes in caloric intake and expenditure, basing their calculations on how people of different weights responded to caloric changes in a controlled setting like a metabolic unit.

Their work, spelled out in a new study published in The Lancet, explains how body weight can slowly rise even when people have not changed their eating and exercise habits.

Their research also helps to explain why some people can lose weight faster than others, even when all are eating the same foods and doing the same exercise, and why achieving permanent weight loss is so challenging for so many.

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Really? The Claim: Musicians Have a Greater Risk of Hearing Loss
By ANAHAD O'CONNOR, September 19, The New York Times

THE FACTS

To many musicians, hearing loss is just an unfortunate — and inevitable — consequence of pursuing a passion.

But a lifelong dedication to playing an instrument or being in a band may not be quite as hard on the ears as many assume. Some recent research suggests it may even benefit hearing.

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In a Married World, Singles Struggle for Attention
By TARA PARKER-POPE, September 19, The New York Times

Here’s a September celebration you probably didn’t know about: It’s National Single and Unmarried Americans Week.

But maybe celebration isn’t the right word. Social scientists and researchers say the plight of the American single person is cause for growing concern.

About 100 million Americans, nearly half of all adults, are unmarried, according to the Census Bureau — yet they tend to be overlooked by policies that favor married couples, from family-leave laws to lower insurance rates.

That national bias is one reason gay people fight for the right to marry, but now some researchers are concerned that the marriage equality movement is leaving single people behind.

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New Tick-Borne Disease Is Discovered
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., September 19, 2011, The New York Times

A new tick-borne disease that may be stealthily infecting some Americans has been discovered by Yale researchers working with Russian scientists.

The disease is caused by a spirochete bacterium called Borrelia miyamotoi, which is distantly related to Borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme disease.

B. miyamotoi has been found — albeit relatively rarely — in the same deer tick species that transmit Lyme, and the Yale researchers estimate that perhaps 3,000 Americans a year pick it up from tick bites, compared with about 25,000 who get Lyme disease.

But there is no diagnostic test for it in this country, so it is not yet known whether it has actually made any Americans sick.

The same short course of antibiotics that normally cures Lyme also seems to cure it.

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Study of Baby Teeth Sees Radiation Effects
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

Men who grew up in the St. Louis area in the early 1960s and died of cancer by middle age had more than twice as much radioactive strontium in their baby teeth as men born in the same area at the same time who are still living, according to a study based on teeth collected years ago by Washington University in St. Louis.

The study, published on Dec. 1 in The International Journal of Health Services, analyzed baby teeth collected during the era when the United States and the Soviet Union were conducting nuclear bomb tests in the atmosphere. The study seeks to help scientists determine the health effects of small radiation doses, and to say how many people died from bomb fallout. There is very little reliable data on the relationship of radiation to cancer at low doses, so scientists instead use extrapolations from higher doses, which introduces large uncertainties into their calculations.

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Rings in Sky Leave Alternate Visions of Universes
By DENNIS OVERBYE, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

Last month a pair of physicists startled the world by claiming that they had managed to see through the Big Bang and glimpse evidence of previous incarnations of the universe in an analysis of radio signals from the sky.

The evidence, said Roger Penrose of Oxford University and Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan State University in Armenia, takes the form of concentric rings caused by the collisions of supermassive black holes in earlier versions of our universe and imprinted, like ripples on a pond, on a haze of microwave radiation widely thought to be left over from the Big Bang that started our own cycle of time about 13.7 billion years ago.

Now, however, two other groups of astronomers looking at the same data have concluded that the rings, though real, are part of the current universe we already know and love.

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Anthropology Group Tries to Soothe Tempers After Dropping the Word ‘Science’
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

The battle of the anthropologists — those who hew closely to scientific tradition versus those who take a more humanistic approach — flared again Monday, as the organization that represents both sides tried to patch things up.

The American Anthropological Association had caused a stir by dropping the word “science” from its long-range plan, angering the evidence-based anthropologists who worry about their field’s growing too soft. All three mentions of the word “science” were excised, and two were replaced by the phrase “the public understanding of humankind.”

On Monday, the association issued a statement of clarification, saying it recognizes “the crucial place of the scientific method in much anthropological research.”

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Musk Oxen Live to Tell a Survivors’ Tale
By NATALIE ANGIER, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

Among the various large, charismatic and visibly winterized mammals that one might choose as a mascot for life in the Arctic belt, polar bears are, let’s face it, too hackneyed, reindeer too Rudolph, caribou too Sarah Palin’s target practice, and woolly mammoths too extinct.

There’s a better choice, though few may have heard of it. According to Arctic biologists, the quintessential example of megafaunal fortitude in the face of really bad weather is the musk ox, or Ovibos moschatus, a blocky, short-legged, highly social ungulate with distinctively curved horns and long hair that looks like shag carpeting circa 1975.

Ovibos’s common name is only partly justified. The males do emit a musky cologne during mating season, but the animal is not an ox. Nor, despite its back-of-the-nickel silhouette, is it a type of buffalo either. Its closest living relations are thought to be goats and sheep, but taxonomically and metaphorically, the musk ox is in an icy cubicle of its own. Once abundant throughout the northern latitudes worldwide, today they are found only in Arctic North America, Greenland and pockets of Siberia and Scandinavia. The musk ox is a holdover from the Pleistocene, the age of the giant mammals memorialized in natural history murals everywhere — the mammoths and mastodons, the saber-toothed cats, the giant ground sloths, the 400-pound beavers. Yet while a vast majority of the frost-fitted bigfoots disappeared at the end of the last ice age, 10,000 years ago, Ovibos hung on, as stubbornly as the ox it is not.

Scientists are now seeking to understand how, exactly, the animal has managed to persist through repeated climate shifts and habitat upheavals. Researchers see in the musk ox’s story clues to help guide efforts to conserve other large land mammals now at risk of extinction. They also hope to raise the profile of a species they consider magnificent, at once stalwart and supple, a page of living prehistory whose social and behavioral complexities they have just begun to decode.

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Poisoned Debate Encircles a Microbe Study’s Result
By DENNIS OVERBYE, , The New York Times, December 13, 2010

The announcement that NASA experimenters had found a bacterium that seems to be able to subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus — an element until now deemed essential for life — set off a cascading storm of criticism on the Internet, first about alleged errors and sloppiness in the paper published in Science by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues, and then about their and NASA’s refusal to address the criticisms.

The result has been a stormy brew of debate about the role of peer review, bloggers and the reliability of NASA, at least as it pertains to microbiological issues, almost as toxic as the salty and arsenic waters of Mono Lake in California, from which Dr. Wolfe-Simon of the U.S. Geological Survey scooped up some bacteria last year.

Seeking evidence that life could follow a different biochemical path than what is normally assumed, Dr. Wolfe-Simon grew them in an arsenic-rich and phosphorus-free environment, reporting in the paper and a NASA news conference on Dec. 2 that the bacterium, strain GFAJ-1 of the Halomonadaceae family of Gammaproteobacteria, had substituted arsenic for phosphorus in many important molecules in its body, including DNA.

But the ink had hardly dried on headlines around the world when microbiologists, who have been suspicious of NASA ever since the agency announced that it had found fossils of microbes in a meteorite from Mars in 1996, began shooting back, saying the experimenters had failed to provide any solid evidence that arsenic had actually been incorporated into the bacterium’s DNA.

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In a Single-Cell Predator, Clues to the Animal Kingdom’s Birth
By SEAN B. CARROLL, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

The Environmental Protection Agency is worried about a lot of things in our water — polychlorinated biphenyls, dibromochloropropane, Cryptosporidium parvum — to name just a few of the dozens of chemicals or organisms they monitor. However, in nearly every creek and lake, and throughout the oceans, there is one important group of multisyllabic microbes that the E.P.A. does not track, and until recently, most biologists heard and knew very little about — the choanoflagellates.

Before you spit out that glass of water or dunk your swimsuit in Clorox, relax. These tiny organisms are harmless. They are important for other reasons. They are part of the so-called nanoplankton and play critical roles in the ocean food chain. Choanoflagellates are voracious single-cell predators.

The beating of their long flagellum both propels them through the water and creates a current that helps them to collect bacteria and food particles in the collar of 30 to 40 tentaclelike filaments at one end of the cell.

There can be thousands to millions of choanoflagellates in a gallon of sea water, which may filter 10 to 25 percent of coastal surface water per day. Choanoflagellates in turn serve as food for planktonic animals like crustacean larvae, which are consumed by larger animals, and so on up the food chain.

Theirs is a humble existence compared with the larger, more charismatic residents of the oceans like lobsters, fish, squids and whales.

But recent studies suggest that these obscure organisms are among the closest living single-celled relatives of animals. In other words, choanoflagellates are cousins to all animals in the same way that chimpanzees are cousins to humans. Just as the study of great apes has been vital to understanding human evolution, biologists are now scrutinizing choanoflagellates for clues about one of the great transitions in history — the origin of the animal kingdom.

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Birds Do It ... We Do It ... and No One Knows Why
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

Everyone yawns, but no one knows why. We start when we are in the womb, and we do it through old age. Most vertebrate species, even birds and fishes, yawn too, or at least do something that looks very much like it. But its physiological mechanisms, its purpose and what survival value it might have remain a mystery.

There is no shortage of theories — a recent article in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews outlines many — but a dearth of experimental proof that any of them is correct.

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Rare Albatross Expands Its Breeding Grounds
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

Two pairs of the short-tailed albatross, thought to remain only on two Japanese islands, have been found nesting on Kure Atoll and on Midway Atoll, American wildlife refuges in the Hawaiian Islands.

Until now, the last remaining breeding colonies of the birds were thought to have been on the Japanese islands. The total adult population of the species is only about 3,000.

The new finding brings hope that the bird might propagate beyond Japan, said Jessica Hardesty Norris, director of the Seabird Program at the American Bird Conservancy, a conservation organization.

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Using Waste, Swedish City Cuts Its Fossil Fuel Use
By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL, , The New York Times, December 13, 2010

KRISTIANSTAD, Sweden — When this city vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil fuels, it was a lofty aspiration, like zero deaths from traffic accidents or the elimination of childhood obesity.

But Kristianstad has already crossed a crucial threshold: the city and surrounding county, with a population of 80,000, essentially use no oil, natural gas or coal to heat homes and businesses, even during the long frigid winters. It is a complete reversal from 20 years ago, when all of their heat came from fossil fuels.

But this area in southern Sweden, best known as the home of Absolut vodka, has not generally substituted solar panels or wind turbines for the traditional fuels it has forsaken. Instead, as befits a region that is an epicenter of farming and food processing, it generates energy from a motley assortment of ingredients like potato peels, manure, used cooking oil, stale cookies and pig intestines.

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Before You Lift a Weight, Get Some Advice
By JANE E. BRODY, The New York Times, December 13, 2010

It seems unfair when people get hurt while trying to do something good for their bodies. But that is exactly what happened to nearly a million Americans from 1990 to 2007 when they sought to improve their strength and well-being through weight training — exercises done with free weights or on gym equipment called resistance machines.

To be sure, these injuries are less common than, say, those linked to running, cycling or competitive sports. But a national study, published online in March by The American Journal of Sports Medicine, revealed that these mishaps are on the rise and that they spare no body part, gender or age group.

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Difficulties in Defining Errors in Case Against Harvard Researcher
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, October 25, 2010

The still unresolved case of Marc Hauser, the researcher accused by Harvard of scientific misconduct, points to the painful slowness of the government-university procedure for resolving such charges. It also underscores the difficulty of defining error in a field like animal cognition where inconsistent results are common.

The case is unusual because Dr. Hauser is such a prominent researcher in his field, and is known to a wider audience through his writings on morality. There seemed little doubt of the seriousness of the case when Harvard announced on Aug. 20 that he had been found solely responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct.

But last month two former colleagues, Bert Vaux and Jeffrey Watumull, both now at the University of Cambridge in England, wrote in the Harvard Crimson of Dr. Hauser’s “unimpeachable scientific integrity” and charged that his critics were “scholars known to be virulently opposed to his research program.”

Also last month his principal accuser outside of Harvard, Gerry Altmann, allowed that he may have spoken too hastily. Dr. Altmann is the editor of Cognition, a psychology journal in which Dr. Hauser published an article said by Harvard to show scientific misconduct.

When first shown evidence by Harvard for this conclusion, Dr. Altmann publicly accused Dr. Hauser of fabricating data. But he now says an innocent explanation, based on laboratory error, not fraud, is possible. People should step back, he writes, and “allow due process to conclude.”

Due process, in this case, includes an independent inquiry by the Office of Research Integrity, a government agency that investigates scientific misconduct. Its inquiries take seven months on average, ranging up to eight years, says John Dahlberg, director of the agency’s investigations unit.

Under Harvard’s faculty policy, the university cannot make known its evidence against Dr. Hauser, nor can he defend himself, until the government’s report is ready. That leaves both in difficult positions. Harvard has accused a prominent professor of serious failings yet has merely put him on book leave. Dr. Hauser, for his part, cannot act publicly to prevent the derailment, at least for the moment, of his rising scientific career.

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Encased in Amber, a Trove of New Species
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, October 25, 2010

An amber excavation in western India has led to the discovery of more than 700 ancient insects, arachnids and crustaceans, and many plant, floral and fungal remains.

“We have at least 100 new species of insects, possibly many more,” said David Grimaldi, one of the study’s authors and an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

The specimens are estimated to be about 50 million to 53 million years old. The area was then a lush tropical rain forest, similar to the forests found today in Borneo and other parts of Southeast Asia.

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Why Sisterly Chats Make People Happier
By DEBORAH TANNEN, The New York Times, October 25, 2010

“Having a Sister Makes You Happier”: that was the headline on a recent article about a study finding that adolescents who have a sister are less likely to report such feelings as “I am unhappy, sad or depressed” and “I feel like no one loves me.”

These findings are no fluke; other studies have come to similar conclusions. But why would having a sister make you happier?

The usual answer — that girls and women are more likely than boys and men to talk about emotions — is somehow unsatisfying, especially to a researcher like me. Much of my work over the years has developed the premise that women’s styles of friendship and conversation aren’t inherently better than men’s, simply different.

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Astronomers Say They've Found Oldest Galaxy So Far
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS, October 20, 2010

WASHINGTON (AP) — Astronomers believe they've found the oldest thing they've ever seen in the universe: It's a galaxy far, far away from a time long, long ago.

Hidden in a Hubble Space Telescope photo released earlier this year is a small smudge of light that European astronomers now calculate is a galaxy from 13.1 billion years ago. That's a time when the universe was very young, just shy of 600 million years old. That would make it the earliest and most distant galaxy seen so far.

By now the galaxy is so ancient it probably doesn't exist in its earlier form and has already merged into bigger neighbors, said Matthew Lehnert of the Paris Observatory, lead author of the study published online Wednesday in the journal Nature.

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Neanderthals’ Tools Were Their Own Work
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, September 27, 2010

Neanderthals living in southern Italy 42,000 years ago developed bone and stone tools, decorative ornaments and pigments on their own, not through interactions with Homo sapiens, according to Julien Riel-Salvatore, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Denver.

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Polar Sidekicks Earn a Place on the Map
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD, The New York Times, September 27, 2010

Late by almost a century, cartographic immortality is being accorded the dogs and ponies who bore much of the burden, and in most cases gave their all, in the 1911-12 race between the Norwegian Roald Amundsen and the Englishman Robert Falcon Scott to be the first to reach the South Pole.

The frozen poles, south and north, were the outer space of that day, a mystery and a challenge, and getting there first had fired up personal and national rivalries not unlike those in the race to the Moon in the 1960s. Amundsen’s team got to the South Pole first, by five weeks. Scott and his men starved and froze to death on their return trek. In death Scott was hailed the hero, long eclipsing Amundsen in romanticized history.

Today’s map of Antarctica is sprinkled with the names of the two of them and other explorers and scientists, affixed to plateaus and valleys, seas and ice shelves. Even their benefactors and other notables, including now obscure European royalty, are acknowledged. But nowhere is there a tip of the hat to the canine and equine contributions, which historians and polar experts agree were, in the case of the dogs at least, indispensable in early Antarctic discovery.

That is changing, in a modest way, as the result of a United States Air Force colonel’s inspired campaign and in anticipation of next year’s centennial celebration of the Amundsen-Scott achievements.

Beginning this week, as aircraft resume supply runs in what passes for springtime after the bitter austral winter, aeronautical maps of the primary route used by all air traffic between New Zealand and McMurdo Station in Antarctica will bear names of 11 of Amundsen’s sledge dogs and Scott’s ponies.

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A Finding on Malaria Comes From Humble Origins
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 27, 2010

It has taken 10 years for Dr. Beatrice H. Hahn to build the world’s most comprehensive treasury of great ape dung samples.

And now it has yielded an unexpected gem: The most dangerous form of malaria originated in gorillas, not chimps, as had long been believed.

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Helping Cats to Make Their Way Back Home
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, September 13, 2010

Less than 2 percent of cats in animal shelters make it back to their owners, whereas about 15 to 19 percent of dogs are returned, and one reason is that more dogs wear collars.

Putting collars on some of the country’s 88 million cats may help change this situation, according to a new study published in The Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association.

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Biotech Company to Patent Fuel-Secreting Bacterium
By MATTHEW L. WALD, The New York Times, September 13, 2010

A biotech company plans to announce Tuesday that it has won a patent on a genetically altered bacterium that converts sunlight and carbon dioxide into ingredients of diesel fuel, a step that could provide a new pathway for making ethanol or a diesel replacement that skips several cumbersome and expensive steps in existing methods.

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Tug of War Pits Genes of Parents in the Fetus
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, September 13, 2010

Under Mendel’s laws of inheritance, you could thank mom and dad equally for all the outstanding qualities you inherited.

But there’s long been some fine print suggesting that a mother’s and father’s genes do not play exactly equal roles. Research published last month now suggests the asymmetry could be far more substantial than supposed. The asymmetry, based on a genetic mechanism called imprinting, could account for some of the differences between male and female brains and for differences in a mother’s and father’s contributions to social behavior.

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Rape: Rights Group Calls Test to Determine Sexual Activity a ‘Second Assault’ in India
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, September 13, 2010

An international human rights group urged India last week to ban a “degrading and unscientific” test commonly performed on rape victims to see if they have previous sexual experience.

In the test, a doctor inserts fingers into the victim during the forensic examination to test for “vaginal laxity” and is expected to deliver a medical opinion as to whether she appears to be “habituated to sexual intercourse.” The group, Human Rights Watch, argued that the test constituted a second assault on a traumatized woman.

The test is required by courts in some Indian states — including those of Delhi and Mumbai, the national and financial capitals — and, according to local reports, is in the forensic examination still endorsed by the Indian Medical Association.

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Russia Finds Last-Days Log of 1912 Arctic Expedition
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, The New York Times, September 13, 2010

MOSCOW — Russian explorers said Monday that they had found a sailor’s log from aboard a legendary Arctic expedition that vanished as it sought to forge through the ice-choked Northeast Passage in 1912.

For decades, mystery clouded the fate of Georgy Brusilov, the captain of the first Russian crew to seek the elusive Arctic trade route from Asia to the West. His expedition’s disappearance inspired a generation of books and films.

But the voyagers’ remains and a journal — dated to May 1913 from aboard their vessel, the St. Anna — were found this summer on the icy shores of Franz Josef Land, Europe’s northernmost landmass.

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Moose Offer Trail of Clues on Arthritis
By PAM BELLUCK, The New York Times, August 16, 2010

In the 100 years since the first moose swam into Lake Superior and set up shop on an island, they have mostly minded their moosely business, munching balsam fir and trying to evade hungry gray wolves.

But now the moose of Isle Royale have something to say — well, their bones do. Many of the moose, it turns out, have arthritis. And scientists believe their condition’s origin can help explain human osteoarthritis — by far the most common type of arthritis, affecting one of every seven adults 25 and older and becoming increasingly prevalent.

The arthritic Bullwinkles got that way because of poor nutrition early in life, an extraordinary 50-year research project has discovered. That could mean, scientists say, that some people’s arthritis can be linked in part to nutritional deficits, in the womb and possibly throughout childhood.

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Vaccination Is Steady, but Pertussis Is Surging
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, AUGUST 16, 2010

For four weeks, my 11-year-old daughter has been coughing. It is not your run-of-the-mill summer cold, but a violent, debilitating cough that takes over her body, usually at night.

During these fits, her face turns red, and tears start streaming from her eyes. She coughs so hard she eventually starts to gasp for air, making a horrifying sucking sound that at one point had me reaching for the phone to call 911. But eventually she catches her breath. Several times she has coughed so hard she begins to throw up.

It took a few visits to the pediatrician before she finally got a diagnosis: pertussis, the bacterial disease better known as whooping cough.

That may sound surprising, since like most other children she was vaccinated against the disease on schedule, as an infant and again in preschool. But in recent years, pertussis has made an alarming comeback — even among adolescents and adults who were vaccinated as children.

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Old Maxim of Fertility and Stress Is Reversed
By RONI CARYN RABIN, The New York Times, August 16, 2010

Even as more and more fertility clinics adopt stress-management programs like yoga, cognitive therapy and biofeedback, the role of stress in infertility remains a matter of debate. Some experts still recite an old maxim: while infertility undoubtedly causes stress, stress does not cause infertility.

Now researchers suggest that the two conditions may indeed be linked.

In a study published online in the journal Fertility and Sterility, the scientists reported that women who stopped using contraceptives took longer to become pregnant if they had high saliva levels of the enzyme alpha-amylase — a biological indicator of stress.

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Steep Drop Seen in Circumcisions in U.S.
By RONI CARYN RABIN, The New York Times, August 16, 2010

Despite a worldwide campaign for circumcision to slow the spread of AIDS, the rate of circumcision among American baby boys appears to be declining.

A little-noted presentation by a federal health researcher last month at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna suggested that the rate had fallen precipitously — to fewer than half of all boys born in conventional hospitals from 2006 to 2009, from about two-thirds through the 1980s and ’90s.

Last week, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cautioned that the figures in the presentation were not definitive. But they are already stirring a sharp debate on the Internet.

The numbers were presented to the AIDS conference by a C.D.C. researcher, Charbel E. El Bcheraoui. The presentation was not covered by any mainstream news outlets, but a report by the news service Elsevier Global Medical News, along with a photograph of a slide from the presentation, quickly made the rounds of the blogosphere.

The slide portrays a precipitous drop in circumcision, to just 32.5 percent in 2009 from 56 percent in 2006. The numbers are based on calculations by SDI Health, a company in Plymouth Meeting, Pa., that analyzes health care data; they do not include procedures outside hospitals (like most Jewish ritual circumcisions) or not reimbursed by insurance.

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Adventures in Very Recent Evolution
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, July 19, 2010

Ten thousand years ago, people in southern China began to cultivate rice and quickly made an all-too-tempting discovery — the cereal could be fermented into alcoholic liquors. Carousing and drunkenness must have started to pose a serious threat to survival because a variant gene that protects against alcohol became almost universal among southern Chinese and spread throughout the rest of China in the wake of rice cultivation.

The variant gene rapidly degrades alcohol to a chemical that is not intoxicating but makes people flush, leaving many people of Asian descent a legacy of turning red in the face when they drink alcohol.

The spread of the new gene, described in January by Bing Su of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is just one instance of recent human evolution and in particular of a specific population’s changing genetically in response to local conditions.

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Tracking the Evolution of Malaria
By SINDYA N. BHANOO, The New York Times, July 19, 2010

Malaria is an ancient and persistent disease. It wasn’t eradicated in the United States until the 1950s, and it is still devastating in developing countries around the world. The latest estimate from the World Health Organization is that in 2008 the disease killed more than a million people and afflicted 247 million others.

Scientists have long speculated about just how ancient the disease is, and when the human malaria parasite originated, with wildly varying estimates from 10,000 years to several million years ago.

Now, using statistical modeling and DNA analysis, a group of researchers report in the journal Science that ancestors of humans first acquired the malaria parasite known as P. falciparum 2.5 million years ago. But, the researchers wrote, the parasite probably did not cause disease in humans until much more recently, perhaps 10,000 years ago at the beginning of agriculture.

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Recalibrated Formula Eases Women’s Workouts
By TARA PARKER-POPE, The New York Times, July 5, 2010

If you are a woman who exercises, get ready to do some math.

Last week, researchers at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago announced a new formula for calculating a woman’s maximum heart rate, a measure commonly used by athletes to pace themselves and monitor their progress. In a study of nearly 5,500 healthy women, scientists discovered that a decades-old formula for calculating heart rate is largely inaccurate for women, resulting in a number that is too high.

The news may be a vindication to many women who have struggled to keep up with lofty target heart rates espoused by personal trainers and programmed into treadmill displays.

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British Panel Clears Scientists
By JUSTIN GILLIS, The New York Times, July 7, 2010

A British panel on Wednesday exonerated the scientists caught up in the controversy known as Climategate of charges that they had manipulated their research to support preconceived ideas about global warming.

But the panel also rebuked the scientists for several aspects of their behavior, especially their reluctance to release computer files supporting their scientific work. And it declared that a chart they produced in 1999 about past climate was “misleading.”

The new report is the last in a series of investigations of leading British and American climate researchers, prompted by the release of a cache of e-mail messages that cast doubt on their conduct and raised fresh public controversy over the science of global warming.

All five investigations have come down largely on the side of the climate researchers, rejecting a number of criticisms raised by global-warming skeptics. Still, mainstream climate science has not emerged from the turmoil unscathed.

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Clues of Britain’s First Humans
By NICHOLAS WADE, The New York Times, July 7, 2010

The last time the British Museum claimed that the earliest known human was British, some 98 years ago, its evidence was the Piltdown skull, which the British archaeological establishment did not concede was a forgery until 1953.

Researchers from the British Museum and other institutions on Wednesday announced a more modest claim, that an eroding cliff in Norfolk, England, had yielded evidence of the earliest substantial record of the human presence in Northern Europe.

The discovery of 78 flint tools, more than 800,000 years old, shows that early humans, thought to survive only in warm, Mediterranean-style climates, could penetrate much colder regions and survive with a kit of crude tools.

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