“Really! I was born that way! I swear!” A new species of shark was discovered in California recently, called the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark. It’s part of a group known as big black chimeras, and members of the species have actually been laying around pickled in museums since the 1960s—but only recently have scientists realized that the black ghostsharks were in fact a separate species.
One possibility is that past scientists were too distracted by the sharks’, er, highly unusual feature that they lumped them in with the other chimeras.
Douglass Long, author of the study (PDF) detailing the new species, described the shark to National Geographic News:
Male chimeras…have retractable sexual appendages sprouting from their foreheads. These organs, which resemble a spiked club at the end of a stalk, may be used to stimulate a female or to pull her closer—though these are still assumptions, Long said.
So basically these guys have a mace swinging from their forehead that they use to club female sharks. Talk about a remarkable trick of animal mating.
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Image: MBARI
You might remember the story that broke in early August saying that the Centers for Disease Control had greatly underestimated the number of Americans who become infected with HIV each year. The CDC had said the total was about 40,000; after correcting a mistake in their method of counting, the new estimate was 56,300, a 40 percent increase.
In response to this alarming new number, condom company One made a special delivery to both John McCain’s and Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters: 56,300 condoms. One says the shipments are campaigns’ to do with as they wish, but the company encourages them to donate the condoms to community centers or non-profit organizations.
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It’s a tough life being stuck in the zoo, especially for those looking for love. Animals might have one or two members of the opposite sex to choose from, maybe more if they’re lucky. But in this Internet age, when a Capricorn from Seattle and a Libra from South Carolina can connect on via a Web dating service, why shouldn’t animals have their own site?
Zoos had shared information about their animals before, trying to match them up the best way possible, but now the Zoological Information Management Systems has taken the process into the 21st century. The approximately 150 participating aquariums and zoos can not only see the size and weight of the eligible critters, but also read about their temperament.
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Not too long from now, men will scurry out to the car on the first chilly morning of autumn, jump inside, and enjoy the warm embrace of heated leather seats. But that warm feeling might have an unpleasant side effect—lowering one’s sperm count.
German scientists studied 30 men (subscription required), measuring their scrotal temperature after they had sat in a car seat for 90 minutes. Those who sat in heated seats measured an average of about 99.1 degrees Fahrenheit, up from about 98 degrees for men in plain old unheated seats. The scrotum is located outside the body because sperm production requires a lower temperature, and even a slight raise like the one in this study could interfere with that, the researchers say.
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Science: It sure can make those family relationships confusing.
A 61-year-old Japanese woman has given birth in Japan, which is extraordinary enough given her age. But this was no normal birth—the baby was her own grandchild. The Nagano hospital says the woman served as a surrogate mother for her own daughter, who does not have a uterus.
News reports are saying that the baby was born last year, despite the fact that the hospital didn’t announce it until today. That delay could have a lot to do with the attitude toward in vitro fertilization and surrogate births in Japan. They’re legal, but most hospitals and clinics won’t do them because the Japan Society of Obstetrics and Gynecology has banned its members from using the procedure. However, the doctor who runs the Nagano clinic in this case was booted from that organization a decade ago for providing in vitro fertilization for unmarried couples.
The hospital has not even divulged the baby’s sex, but says the birth went off without a hitch. Now all they have to do is figure out whose mother belongs to whom.
Image: iStockphoto
Soon, any woman hoping for a smart, tall Swede to be her sperm donor might just have to leave the U.S. to make it happen.
Since 2005, the Food and Drug Administration has made it essentially impossible to import sperm donations from Europe into the United States, the Washington Post reports, because of fears over the pathogens that cause mad cow disease and its human equivalent, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. And now, the last of the European sperm we imported before the embargo will soon be gone.
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Some have argued that homosexuality is unnatural because the biological purpose of sex is for reproduction, and gay couples can’t conceive children in the “natural” way. But as it turns out, homosexuality might actually be related to increased fertility and reproduction, though not in a way you might expect.
A team of Italian researchers led by Andrea Camperio-Ciani had been working on solving the Darwinian paradox of homosexuality—that is, if being gay is hereditary, and gay people have fewer or no children, homosexuality should have vanished from the gene pool. In 2004, the team studied Italian families and found that the female relatives of gay men were more fertile than average women. After using a series of computer models to analyze that data, the scientists released a study this week saying that homosexuality in men is genetically connected to women who have high fertility. In their model, male homosexuality has to be governed by two genetic loci—particular fixed positions on a chromosome—and at least one locus and maybe both must be on the X chromosome, meaning it’s passed down from mother to child.
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We thumb through real estate listings and drive around neighborhoods to find the best place to live, but some birds have it easier—they just listen to songs.
Male black-throated blue warblers sing to their newborn chicks in the autumn, probably trying to teach the young ones to sing themselves. But biologist Matthew Betts from Oregon State University, along with two Canadian colleagues, studied the warblers in New Hampshire and found that the song of males who successfully reproduced is also a cue—when other males hear it, they assume that location must be a good place to nest, and so they’ll try to return there the next year. Not only that, the scientists say, but eavesdropping on the songs other warblers can override the birds’ other senses.
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Forget looking for a “gay gene”: fruit flies, the favorite insects of geneticists for a century, need a particular gene to keep the males straight.
A team of scientists led by Manyuan Long at the University of Chicago call it the sphinx gene, and it is present only in fruit flies. Long’s grad student Wen Wang identified the gene back in 2002, and now two other former students, Hongzheng Dai and Ying Chen, have discovered its purpose. When Dai and Chen turned off the gene, the males looked and acted ordinary, at least until they were placed in each other’s company. When that happened, the genetically engineered flies spent 10 times more time pursuing other males than normal fruit flies. Long says that the gene evolved about two million years ago to prevent male flies from inhibiting mating by spending too much time with each other.
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Here’s some new ammunition for the mommy wars: the largest study ever done on the subject of breastfeeding and intelligence has found a correlation between “prolonged and exclusive” breastfeeding and smarter babies.
The study, authored by Michael Kramer from the Montreal Children’s Hospital, started by identifying about 17,000 Belarusian mothers with newborns. Half of the mothers were given a UNICEF/World Health Organization course—which advised long and continuous breastfeeding—while the other half were left alone to breastfeed at whim. The research team then tracked down about 14,000 of the children six and a half years later to give them IQ tests and examine their school evaluations in reading, writing and math.
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