It is interesting to see what they state as their aims in the light of Richard’s blog and recent discussion about science writing skills of scientists that stemmed from that blog. I didn’t see any that say that they are there to teach students how to write clearly and effectively. Most say they are there to allow students to learn about peer review, to reward students for hard work they’ve done doing the research or to showcase the quality of undergraduate research at the university.

Although undergraduate research journals are popular in the USA, they have only recently started publishing in the UK, based at the University of Chester (Origin), University of Leeds (Biolog-e), University of Surrey (SURJ), University of Nottingham (BURN), and nationwide by Oxford Journals (Bioscience Horizons).

But are these not perfect places for students to learn how to write clearly both for other scientists (undergraduate journals) and for the public (student popular science magazines)? I would say I learned a lot while writing and editing for student science magazine BlueSci. Initially I was very upset with the changes editors made to my, as I then thought, perfect articles. Later on, with experience in editing I realized that when student scientists write about something they’re passionate about they can make a fallacy of thinking that their writing is as good as their understanding and passion for the subject. This is often not true even when they try to write for popular science outlets.

Going back to learning writing as part of the science degrees; at Oxford we had tutorials each week which meant writing at least an essay or two per week. For keen students this was an ability to really review the topic and write solid 2-3,000 word articles. For the less keen this meant a hassle of putting together a 1,000 word essay. Apart from this, writing experience was minimal. A few lab reports and a dissertation at the end, none of which we were specially trained to write before we actually had to do it.

As a graduate student I had an opportunity to supervise some undergraduates for some of their biology courses. I was horrified to find that second year and even some final year students were never told to list references at the end of their essay. Since many of these supervisions are often similar and somewhat boring for students, I thought I’d make it interesting and get them to read some science blogs and practice writing about their course in blog style article.

The task was to read some blogs on specific topic and then choose the one that really intrigued them and comment on it as they would on a blogging site. Then they should attempt writing a brief blog on the topic from their course. Unfortunately my enthusiasm somewhat surpassed theirs when it came to doing this…Only two of the five students I set this assignmet actually did it. Even these two didn’t submit it thinking this was not important and more or less irrelevant to their course. They were there to get some facts out of me, not to learn about how great blogging was for science. Is this why web 2.0 is failing in biology as Martin reports?

It is nice to know that some people work to encourage science writing even in schools. For a good example of this see the Canadian science journal for school kids Eye on Science.

Science communication might be of interest to blogers, but I’m afraid they don’t mention blogging at all:

”Scientists increasingly see communication with the public as an essential part of their work. But it is hard for them to communicate directly with non-scientists, so researchers normally have to go through the broadcast and print media. What are the pressures on journalists reporting on research, from editors demanding ‘sexy stories’ on one side and researchers denouncing hype on the other? How far should journalists go in simplifying and popularising complex issues? Maybe a little humour could help? And can scientists improve the underlying scientific understanding of the population by becoming more involved in schools?”

They also have some interesting stuff for the pupils and students:

They say the current university-based science is not functioning properly in these countries because of the remnants of the old system and mediocre, ageing academics are hindering progress of the younger scientists. As a way forward they see establishments of small, focused research institutes, the kind that have been popping up all over Eastern Europe in the last couple of decades. In these, international collaborations, especially with expatriots, and international peer-review and funding may be the way forward for excellence in science in Eastern Europe.

It’s a big site for a small country; journalists, scientists and students from Croatia and abroad can come to blog and collaborate through this portal.

There is a heated debate at the moment (16 comments in last 2 hours) about the newspaper article I bloged about a few days ago how cure for cancer is about to be found in Croatia. The nice thing is the author of the paper is there arguing her way and explaining the need for and rise of sensationalism and ‘tabloidism’ in not just the newspapers but also in journals such as Nature.

Image from the Slobodna Dalmacija article

This week I read two brief ‘reports’ on science in Croatia in Slobodna Dalmacija and Vecernji List.

As an aspiring science journalist I was glad to see that someone is finally asking scientists in Croatia about their work and potential applications. But as a Croatian I was dissapointed with the way the articles were written and intrigued by the comments after one of them.

The second article reported on a young chemist who tested a few chemicals and found some anti-cancerogen activity in vitro but is now short of funding for in vivo experiments.

The comments on the story seem to be of three basic types:

1) the ones attacking the sensationalist title: “At the tracks of cure for cancer” and invalidating the importance of the reported research by the young scientist

2) the ones saying the scientist should emigrate and become famous in the UK, USA or similar

3) the ones about conspiracy theory where pharmaceutical companies are blocking anyone from finding cure for cancer because it’s not in companies’ interest

I think the comments give a general picture of Croatian society as a whole:

1) scientists and educated people who can form an educated opinion about a scientific issue (minority)

2) general public who believes anything they read, if they understand it, about science and then blame the politicians for the lack of funding and opportunities; they also believe it’s all ‘milk and honey’ abroad (majority)

3) loud minority of people with strong opinions that are often very misinformed and twisted (minority)

Both articles go for the silly approach that Croatian society suffers from: the ‘we’re the best in the world but people don’t realize it’ syndrome. If our sportmen are not winning medals, scoring goals in the European football league or one or two of our intrenational actors are not starring in some obscure Holywood movie then our scientists are creating tornadoes, turning water into biofuel and finding cure for cancer.

“We even create tornadoes” is the title of the first article I mentioned above; “the cure of cancer could be found in Croatia” states the other article. When individuals in Croatia do something good we all want to be part of it: we’ve done it, we’re great!

I’m afraid until everyone starts doing their bits for the society and until we stop having false pretences for being acknowledged as the best country for everything we won’t even make it to the EU let alone anything else. Perhaps many Croatian scientists are doing exciting and relevant research; it might be a while until journalists manage to find the right stories to report and to do it properly.

Map of Croatia from: http://www.island-cres.com/Croatia-Map.jpg

” Welcome to the eleventh issue of BlueSci, your science magazine!
Instead of diving straight in to tell you about what you can read in this issue, I will first tell you about the articles we did not publish. These are the excellent articles submitted by our readers, but there was just not enough space to publish them all this time round.

Among the topics discussed in these articles are the ethical issues surrounding the pollution, kidney transplants and graduate research funding; paranormal research; evolution of human sexuality and cuckoo trickery; defence of the natural selection theory; role of genomics and micro-antibodies in cancer research…If these sound interesting, read on, because we have included equally intriguing articles and worked with authors to make them an informative and easy read for you.

Focusing on synthetic biology, a new field of bio-engineering at whose forefront in Europe are the researchers from the University of Cambridge, we bring you an insightful discussion about the benefits and fallbacks of this fascinating field in our Focus section.

The Arts and Reviews article reviews the science fiction art and discusses just how good sci-fi is in predicting development of new technologies. How our diet and life-style affect our health features in the A Day in the Life of… where Dr Rosemary Hall explains her work and research interests.

History article brings you etymology of the word ‘scientist’, which was coined in Cambridge at a revolutionary time for science. Initiatives article looks into new plagiarism software used by the University of Cambridge while Away from the Bench article brings you adventures of an african rock-art archaeologist. As usual, there is a host of complementary online material: films, podcasts, extended articles and further information about the topics covered.

I hope you enjoy the new issue as much as we enjoyed preparing it.”

Global orgasm for peace is an interesting anti-war organisation that organises this global orgasm effort. Whether you believe the science behind it or not, why not join in just for the fun of it?

You can read more about it at various news websites.

Merry Christmas :)

When it comes to science though, which plays a crucial role for lots of the issues touched upon in the movie, it seems a bit off. Opening scene is especially disapointing, it states something along the lines of “All the laws of nature say bees cannot fly” Wrong. This gets re-iterated later on in the film when Barry, the lead character, says he doesn’t care about what we humans think we understand about bees-he can fly even though we think in principle he shouldn’t be able to (according to our science). Well, wrong again, Barry.

The problem is exposed in the scene where Barry attempts to fly a plane after accidentally knocking down both of the pilots..He says something along the lines of:”Planes are just like bees, only bigger.” Well, no they’re not. Planes don’t flap their wings, bees do, and do so very quickly. It is the wing movements that allow the bees and other insects to fly. The so called unconventional aerodynamics of insect flight result from various movements of the wings.

Of course, a simple calculation modelling bee on a plane with stationary wings will tell you bees are too fat to fly with their tiny wings. Yes, if they flew like a plane, not moving their wings. But they don’t-they do move their wings. Scientists do understand how insects fly and bees are not too big for their wing size to fly-it’s a misconception.

Then, all the bees in the film have 4 legs. In real life it’s 6. All the nectar collecting bees in the film are males. In real life male bees do no work-females collect all the nectar and pollen. In film a bee gets one job for a lifetime (“they work you to death”). In real life bees progress through various jobs as they mature. Also, the film doesn’t mention production of propolis which is used in human diet and cosmetics; it’s too honey-centered.

Then they are the miraculous scenes of pollen bringing back to life all the flowers and dying plants…boy, will kids who see this movie struggle with their botany classes.

To be fair there were some correct bits such as that all bees are cousins (not strictly correct but on the right track), they produce honey and collect pollen, they pollinate flowers, sort of have special vision to detect flowers, cannot fly in the rain, their school years are turned into days in the movie (Barry spends three days in high school, three days at univeristy) which would be more accurate given the short life span of a bee.

It’s funny how this film has an amazing potential to acutally teach some biology to viewers without negatively affecting the storyline, yet no-one seemed to think it would be a good idea to make the science accurate. In stark contrast to this is the graphic novel series for kids Clan Apis which likewise describes adventures of a bee hero-this time a female, Nyuki, but with the engaging story also delivers biology to the readers.

They quote a lot of research to argue how nature created us to avoid people with similar immunity genes in order to avoid inbreeding and produce healthier babies..they offer to help us with this choice for some reason (I guess the reason is so they can make money during this process).

The founder is an engineer who ‘spent years on researching about what scientists have discovered about human chemical attraction’. I’m a biologist and I think it would be difficult to spend more than couple of days to get a good feel for what scientists have discovered about human chemical attraction: really not all that much.

Although I’m all up for research on evolution of human sexuality, is this the way the society is going to misinterpret the results?

The study looks at 17-19th century Sami people from Finland which were under influence of natural and sexual selection as natural fertility and mortality rates applied, argue the authors.
However, further back in our history we must have been even more at the influences of nature.

Assuming that people lived shorter in our evolutionary history than they do now and that women reached puberty and sexual maturity later than they do now, to achieve this age difference man would have to be around 30 years old in order to marry a reproductively mature woman who is 15 years younger than him.

Now is it just me or would this be some 15 years of reproductive potential wasted for this man? I find it difficult to believe that benefits of him being so much older would be enough to outweigh the costs of not reproducing for such a long time. We have to assume that such an older man would have the better resources to support children, but wouldn’t life span be much shorter in those days and wouldn’t 30 year olds be quite old in those days?

Image of Sami people from around 1900:

For those of you who fancy a quick trip to a beautiful European city for some pre-Christmas experience here’s an idea that ties in nicely with a cool event as well. City: Belgrade, Serbia. Cool event: 11th Underwater Film Festival.

One of the entries is Cinequarium is also available as podcast on BlueSci magazine website and we also discussed it on BlueSci’s Forum

The line-up of films looks pretty impressive. It’s cool to see how many film festivals there are around the world showing all sorts of intriguing scientific productions. Have a look at my article on SCINEMA an Australian based science film festival that travels around landing in the UK this year. Science documentaries in general are also quite popular at the moment..

For those of you who fancy a quick trip to a beautiful European city for some pre-Christmas experience here’s an idea that ties in nicely with a cool event as well. City: Belgrade, Serbia. Cool event: 11th Underwater Film Festival.

One of the entries is Cinequarium is also available as podcast on BlueSci magazine website and we also discussed it on BlueSci’s Forum

The line-up of films looks pretty impressive. It’s cool to see how many film festivals there are around the world showing all sorts of intriguing scientific productions. Have a look at my article on SCINEMA an Australian based science film festival that travels around landing in the UK this year. Science documentaries in general are also quite popular at the moment..

This is how it’s supposed to be working:

It reminds me of a swimsuit that was modelled on shark skin to reduce friction. Swimmers really believed it gave them an edge over other swimmers, yet the speeds at which they were swimming were nothing like those of sharks and hence rendered their swimsuit useless apart from hiding their private bits…

Why is this so important? Is cuckoldry so common in humans? Several studies support the idea that women have been rather promiscuous throughout our evolutionary history. The reason for this might be the fact that promiscuous females give birth to healthier young. Indeed, an article in January’s issue of Current Biology brings us further evidence of this: a small marsupial mammal ‘antechinus’ females who are more promiscuous sire healthier offspring. The reason is, when the female is inseminated by sperm from several males, the most competitive sperm fertilizes the egg. It just happens that the males who have more competitive sperm also father healthier offspring; they are better quality males, genetically speaking.

So, one might wonder if there is sperm competition in men, and indeed there is some support for this idea. Interestingly, women also actively choose their partners. This may have biological input as well. Not only visual features such as symmetry of the man’s body and face but also olfactory cues play role in whom a woman chooses as her sexual partner. There is some evidence that women can smell the differences in underlying immune system genes such as HMC genes in men and also prefer men as mates according to those different genotypes.

However, so far there has been little real evidence that there are pheromones in humans. Pheromones are molecules produced by one individual which can alter the behaviour of another individual. However, new research published in the Journal of Neuroscience successfully identified a potential pheromone from men’s sweat. A molecule, androstadienone, found in men’s sweat, sperm and saliva has been found to have an effect on women after they sniff it. This effect is an increase in levels of a certain hormone-cortisol. This further resulted in women feeling well and sexually aroused.

So there is a whole set of characters, from eye colour to smell, that can influence mate choice in humans. Evolutionary biology is a tool to make sense of all these different bits and pieces of peculiarities in our sexual behaviour.

A new research from Norway published in an intriguing peer reviewed journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology finds that blue-eyed men prefer blue-eyed women. Women showed no such preference for any eye-colour in men regardless of their own eye-colour. Men with other eye colours showed no such consistent preference for any eye colour in women. An interesting question, which is also the title of this article, is: Why do blue-eyed men prefer women with the same eye colour?

The researchers suggest this happens because the blue eye colour can be used as a cue of paternity. Basically, if both man and woman have blue eyes all of the children they have together will also have blue eyes. This happens because of the way eye colour is inherited. However, brown-eyed couple could easily have blue eyed and brown-eyed kids.

So, blue-eyed men can be more certain that the kids they have with blue-eyed women are really theirs and protect themselves from cuckoldry in this way. No such mechanism of assessing child’s heredity exists for men with brown eyes. The conclusion is that this preference for blue-eyed women is an evolved adaptation that allowed blue-eyed men to detect extra-pair paternity by children’s eye colour and so protect themselves from cuckoldry.

Controversial?

Men are traditionally considered to be providers who go out to get the food (money is the equivalent in the modern societies) while the women stay at home to rear the babies. One reason is perhaps our biology. For example, women can breast feed and men cannot; hence women must breast feed babies, right? Well, not really. It appears that men are also capable of breast feeding. If you ever wondered why men have nipples this may not be the answer to the question but it certainly appears one possible use of those nipples.

Men have most of the physiological parts to produce milk and if treated with prolactin hormone they can be stimulated to lactate. Starving men who then start eating normally again are also commonly recorded to lactate. This is apparently even recorded in the Bible (Job21:24).

Virgin women, non pregnant women and menopausal women can all be stimulated to lactate by touching their nipples. Mechanical stimulation of nipples leads to surges of prolactin in both women and men so potentially; men could be induced to lactate simply by touching their nipples. In his book Why is sex fun? The evolution of human sexuality Jared Diamond present a clear case for the fact that men can physiologically lactate and that males of several domestic and wild animals, including humans, have been observed to spontaneously lactate. It is possible then, yet most men don’t do it. Would they do it if they knew they could? Somehow I doubt it.

Women have traditionally been regarded as more peaceful gender and there are numerous plays, novels and similar works of art that explore the idea of a society made up entirely of women. Recent results from researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne demonstrated that it is possible to produce sperm cells by using bone marrow cells of adult men. It should then also be possible to produce sperm by using women’s bone marrow cells.

The only catch there is that sperm produced in such a way would only ever have an X chromosome present in it and therefore would only be capable of producing daughters. This would lead to an all-female society!

Some species of lizard have been thought to exist solely as females who still need lesbian sex in order to stimulate the reproduction by parthenogenesis. It is interesting to think whether human males will also become obsolete with the advance of modern fertilization technology that allows women to conceive without having sex and in the future perhaps even without having any men around to donate sperm. This is an idea that is vigorously discussed in an opening cafe scene of Roger Dodger, a film whose poster says “sex is everywhere”.

So the technology seems to have arrived for the society to start producing just women. Men will soon not be necessary even for sperm production. The question is: will we still want to keep men around and if so, why?

The images are all impressive, but I couldn’t fail to notice that as on TV, violence and agression appear far more than sex. There’re practically no images of sex but several depicting hunting, fighting, killing and eating a prey. Sure enough, killing to eat is natural, but so is having sex to reproduce, isn’t it? Perhaps the images of sex just don’t cut it artistically? I wouldn’t know, you so rarely see them at the exhibits.

The only sex-related activites depicted in some of the images are the ones where males fight to assert dominance in order to attract females. It seems sex can only make it if it somehow involves violence..

Earlier this year, Antonio Zadra, a researcher at University of Montreal, Canada, has published results of his research on how much and what kind of sex men and women dream of in the journal of Sleep. He asked 109 adult women and 62 adult men to keep diaries of their dreams for a few weeks. This amounted to 3564 deams, 292 of which included sexual content.

8% of dreams from both genders contained sexual content. Most common sexual content of dreams was intercourse followed by sexual propositions, kissing, fantasies and masturbation. Both genders experienced orgasm in only 4% of their sexual dreams. Men never dreamt of others having orgasm while 4% of the women’s orgasms were dreamt of as being experienced by someone else. Men dreamt of multiple sex partners (often unknown characters) twice as often, but women dream of celebrities or other public figures twice as often. Women dream more of sex with current or past partners (20% of dreams compared to 14% for men).

We can also look at these findings through the lens of evolutionary biology and see if what we dream fits in with how we think our sexuality evolved. Dreams might be the reflections of our daily lives in that they reflect our subconscious emotions and worries. To quote Zadra: Observed gender differences may be indicative of different waking needs, experiences, desires and attitudes with respect to sexuality…This is consistent with the continuity hypothesis of dreaming which postulates that the content of everyday dreams reflects the dreamer’s waking states and concerns — that is, that dream and waking thought contents are continuous. Does, then, what we dream conform to this idea that we evolved under polygamous, promiscuous sexual lives as some researchers would want us believe?

The results are easy to interpret from the evolutionary perspective. Both genders dream of sex equally since it is just as important for both genders to reproduce. Men profit by having as many children as possible with as many different partners, hence the higher proportion of dreams with unknown characters and with multiple partners. Women can profit by having sex with men with best genes, i.e. successful, powerful men such as the public figures and celebrities. These are also men with ability to protect them and provide with lots of resource so they can not only raise genetically fit children but also provide them with protection and resources in the struggle for existence. Also, women profit by confusing paternity of their children so more than one man thinks he might be the father. This would have resulted in more men providing for the children and less danger of aggression from past partners.

Perhaps this explains why women dream more of having sex with past partners. At the same time it is important for woman to keep her partner thinking he is the only father of her children to keep his interest, investment, protection and love. This may account for higher proportion of dreams with women’s current partners. Woman needs to play the field, keep her partner happy but stay alerted for good genes passing by. Intriguingly, women dream that some of their orgasms are experienced by others while men don’t. Perhaps this corroborates the idea of female orgasm as cryptic female choice; women are subconsciously aware of the importance of orgasms while men are still lagging behind on this one in the evolutionary race of the sexual conflict.

Or is this explanation too easy; is this pure adaptationalist fallacy sensu Gould and Lewontin? Are we too quick to see how new findings fit into our evolutionary worldview?

The only mention of science at the exhibit was a dark room showing images collected by Kinsey in the 40s as part of his ground breaking research into the taboo of human sexuality. Kinsey’s research shed light on what society saw as the dark side of human nature.

And yet, this exhibit would leave you thinking there isn’t much more to know about science of sex than you can learn from Kinsey’s explicit images. Recent CUP publication Female Infidelity and Paternal Uncertainty is an excellent example of the kind of research that has been challenging our views of human nature. Similar, freely available, review of the edgy ideas of sperm competition and various other adaptations to intense sexual selection in humans can be found in Review of General Psychology

If you’re interested in sex and society, reading this review may be as, if not more, interesting as going to the ‘Seduced’ exhibit.