We Must, We Must, We Must Study Your Bust

Feature image via The Courier Mail

Boobs. Melons. Bazongas. Yabbos. Tittays. You have them. Scientists want to study them.

Teams at the University of Gloucester and the University of Portsmouth conducted a study that started with a bunch of ladies taking off their bras. Dr. Joanna Scurr et al. sought to relate can characteristics to mammary motion. They put 48 volunteers with a range of cup and band sizes on treadmills sans support; voluntits were measured to see how far and fast the boobs bounced as the women ran.

via Galakospeculoos

So what did this landmark study discover? Surprise! Bigger boobs bounce more than tinier tatas! The scientists said their discoveries on bare-breasted kinematics could be applied to the design and construction of better built bras. Additional Portsmouth research showed larger bosoms tend to sag and belong to women with higher BMIs. Gee, you’d think you could’ve come to both of those conclusions by merely looking down.

Exquisite Form Ad via LuLu’s Vintage

You may titter, but there is so much more to discover in the Land of Knockers. Brassiere designers, athletes, scientists and boob-endowed ladies are curious!

Wanna know what happens when you run wearing nothing but reflective pasties? Besides getting weird looks, you’ll also be a less effective runner. Sports bras compress your breasts so that they contribute less to overall body weight, which decreases impact on the body and reduces the risk of injury.

Still confused if your bra is the breast it can be? Scurr et al. wanted to see what cause your mammaries to move the most. Turns out it’s a two-step star jump! So armed with that knowledge, jump around in the dressing room next time you’re bra shopping to ensure it’s doing its job.

Do you jiggle ’til it hurts? Researchers found your boobies will bounce no matter what you wear. Wear a better fitting bra that reduces motion in all three planes to slow your jugs down and lessen the pain.

Want to know what the best material is for building a better sports bra? Turns out the jury’s still out on that one. All we know is that stiffer fabrics tend to be better.

Bottom line: boobs are interesting no matter what. So if you feel like unclasping, walking, jumping or running, there’s someone out there who wants to study you. You know, for science.

Science Confirms Reading Fiction Is Making You A Better Person

HAPPY BECAUSE OF BOOKS

We’ve known for a long time that language is integral to how our brains work and how we perceive the world around us. Words are how we communicate with each other, and also how we communicate and process thoughts and ideas within our own brains. And plenty of people, from your eleventh grade English teacher to your aunt who gave you a copy of White Fang three years in a row without remembering the year before, will tell you that books can make you a better person. This week, some new science seems like it may confirm at least some of that.

A Stanford professor, Joshua Landy, has some new research that calls into question the common assumption that reading fiction does something to strengthen our emotional, moral or empathic muscles, but argues that instead reading fiction is great exercise for our mental skills. And not just in the sense that reading teaches us new words and what characters who live in faraway parts of the world eat for breakfast, but actually stretching our brain cells to be better at things like logic, reaching better understanding through metaphor and comparison, and even “achieving peace of mind,” according to Landy.

Within the works of the renowned Irish novelist Beckett, Landy found a method for achieving peace of mind. The general idea, Landy explained, “is that certain philosophical questions have a way of tormenting people.” Since they can’t be solved, we have to find a way of putting them out of our mind.  By systematically juxtaposing competing hypotheses throughout his trilogy – “Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable” – Beckett trains the reader to get beyond the hope for solutions to intractable problems.

Perhaps even more interestingly, Landy says that we can best focus on the potential benefits of reading by moving away from the model of literary interpretation, or as he calls it, “the quest for the message.”  Instead of spending time trying to wrest some hidden meaning from a text or figure out what a text is “trying to say,” as is sometimes the project of classrooms from middle school through higher education, readers might be better off “lingering over passages, contemplating ideas between reading sessions and re-reading passages after some reflection.” That is, following the process that most people do when they’re reading for pleasure.

Back in March, a New York Times piece talked about the possible function of mirror neurons (which are also, intriguingly, a recurring theme in the most recent profile of Fiona Apple) in the act of reading. When we read about someone getting on a plane, parts of our brain also fire as if they are getting on a plane themselves; when we read a sensory description, like the smell of smoke, the parts of our brain that would smell smoke in real life light up. In short, as the NYT says, “the brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.” None of these observations about books are necessarily news to those who love reading them, and of course there’s an ineffable quality that books bring into our lives that science has yet to explain. We don’t come back to our favorite books a dozen times or more because of the “mental skills” we gain from it — but in a world that doesn’t always appreciate books as much as it should, it’s nice to know.

Valerie Weiss Is A Scientist Who Makes Movies: The Autostraddle Interview

Feature Image Courtesy of PhD Productions

If you’re getting your career cues from romantic comedies, you’ll likely come away with the idea that women work exclusively in the food, fashion, media, publishing or event planning industries. Now, I’m not saying I’ve not done my fair share of pouring coffee and writing online fashion articles, but I’m also a scientist. And scientists? Well, we just don’t get the same amount of screen time. Scientist-turned-writer/director Valerie Weiss is hoping to change all that with her new film, Losing Control.

Losing Control stars Miranda Kent as Samantha, a cute Ph.D. student who desperately needs her negative control to work in order to finally get her doctorate. Along the way, she also attempts to scientifically prove that her current boyfriend is The One. Though Weiss’s movie is without a doubt a heteronormative romcom that takes typical comedy swings at every religion, creed and culture, it also taps in to something that — being both a woman and a scientist — I found deeply familiar. I had a chance to talk with Weiss about straddling the science/art divide, creating realness and exploring relationships on film.

VALERIES WEISS. COURTESY OF PHD PRODUCTIONS

Weiss on growing up interested in biology and theater:

I grew up with an interest in the arts; I started acting when I was about nine years old and I loved it. I got a strong message from my parents that, “That’s great, but what are you going to do for a living?” When you hear that at a very young age, you internalize it and it makes you very fearful of taking a professional risk like that.

So when I was in tenth grade I fell in love with biology. I think what I loved about theater was this quest to figure out what’s at the heart of a relationship. Why do things work the way they are? Why do people act the way they do? And then, suddenly, biology seemed like it was answering the same questions. I felt like for the first time I had a full picture of the way the world was.

On higher education and career:

I went to Princeton and majored in molecular biology, but minored in theater and dance. I loved both though, I loved being in the lab. And I wasn’t ready to make a decision.

I still had that feeling, I guess, deep inside me that I loved the arts but it’s not a career. So I decided to go to grad school, and started my Ph.D at Harvard studying biophysics. While I was writing my dissertation, I made my very first film. Two weeks after we wrapped production I had to defend my thesis and then I never did another experiment again. I decided to make films.

On making a film about a woman scientist:

People thought that was so cool, but then when I’d pitch to studios they’d say, “So what does she do? She invents the perfect potion to find the perfect man?” or “She clones him?” Their understanding of how you could use science in an interesting way was so limited and so distasteful to me. When you’re a real scientist you’re like, “There’s so much that’s cool about science!” so why not use what’s really there? That doesn’t help inspire someone to become a scientist when it’s all fake. I really wanted it to be an authentic portrayal of a scientist of a woman scientist, because you never see that in the media.

FROM LOSING CONTROL. COURTESY OF PHD PRODUCTIONS

On the importance of role models in the media:

When I went to grad school 50% of the class was female. These were women who had relationships and were real women and I wanted to see that on screen.

Not just in the news, but through fiction and narrative if we’re really going to impact young people to want to do it. If you don’t see examples, if you don’t see role models –I’m sure you see this with the gay community in your publication — You feel a little lost. You feel like you don’t know if what your feelings are are valid. You feel a little crazy for wanting to do that. So it’s very important to have those role models.

I think that [making a romantic comedy about a scientist] might make a bigger difference than other stuff out there. If you want to learn what science is about intellectually there’s always textbooks. But lifestyle, I think, is the missing link for a lot of women who want to become a scientist because they don’t know what it looks like. Where do you live if you’re a scientist? How much money do you make if you’re a scientist someday? Do you take vacations? Do you have kids? I think that this movie is one more step in that direction in terms of showing a lifestyle.

On what it means to be a working woman in a relationship:

[In the film, there’s a line that says] “Today it’s complicated.  There’s women’s careers, and housing’s too expensive for a bi-adult family…” and I think that’s kind of true.  Women are raised to have it all, to have a career, to have kids but nobody had ever though about, well can we actually make that happen? What happens if both parents work and if both want to have big careers? It kind of like, “It takes a village.”

In the movie I really wanted to show a lot of different ways to have relationships and also different ways to figure out this idea of being with one person.  The idea of polyamory was always very interesting to me especially living in Boston and being a scientist. It’s almost like there’s a village right there in a polyamorous relationship. I wanted to explore that as another viewpoint to [finding] perfection in a relationship.

FROM LOSING CONTROL. COURTESY OF PHD PRODUCTIONS

On creating scientific realness in the movie:

I was lucky enough to get an empty lab where we could shoot so we wouldn’t disturb anyone, but that meant I had to fill it. I was literally putting the test tubes where they should be and labeling everything because I think those details are what help you access a world. When I watch CSI or some of the TV shows about science they’re so clearly fake. And, as a scientist, I can’t even really watch them because it’s just like, “That’s dumb.”

I think when everyone watches movies they want to buy in emotionally. You feel like if the world isn’t authentic it’s really hard to trust the emotional life of a character. There’s a lot of absurdity in my movie, but I wanted everything that wasn’t absurd to be so ridiculously real so that when the absurdity happened you could go on the fun ride of the absurdity.

FROM LOSING CONTROL. COURTESY OF PHD PRODUCTION

On her future in film:

Right now we’re in seven cities and we know audiences love [Losing Control] because they laugh start to finish in a predictable way. We’re really excited about that, but we need more people to see it and on a modest marketing budget it’s really word of mouth. Our goal is to have it play as widely as possible.

I have a film called Overstuffed that I’m working on right now that’s about three strange siblings who, due to various life crises, need to move back home with their hoarder father. It’s all about getting rid of stuff to become a family again and it has a few scientist characters in it. I have some other projects as well, but I’m just excited to keep working and I have lots of different things I get to think about. That’s the most exciting part of being a filmmaker.

Losing Control will be showing in Cambridge, Ma through April 12, opens in Los Angeles, Tempe and Tacoma April 13th and opens in Modestom, CA April 20th. See here for showtimes and additional details.

Dinosaur News! Were Your Favorite Prehistoric Beasts Actually Aquatic?

LIZZ’S TEAM PICK

Dinosaurs are the coolest ever. Massive 100-ton reptiles with massive tails, ruling the massive world. Some we can picture on four legs, their elongated necks supporting their small heads as they peacefully dip for a drink at a watering hole. Or agile two-legged beasts running around collapsing trees in the forest, pouncing on scurrying prey. But were they really frolicking through the forest? Independent research biologist Brian J Ford says no way. Ford proposed in the science publication Laboratory News that dinosaurs were primarily aquatic creatures.

FROM FORD'S ARTICLE

Ford suggests that the weight would have been too great for a land dinosaur to realistically bare. Additionally, he finds fault in the idea that dinosaurs would have evolved to hold their massive tails off the ground, and yet we see no dragging marks in dinosaur tracks. Ford proposes, instead, that large dinosaurs lived in 15-30 foot lakes with the majority of their body underwater, similar to the the way crocodiles or hippopotamuses immerse themselves.

From Ford’s Article:

We thus have a set of factors that makes the largest dinosaurs seem impracticable as a product of evolution. They are massive, whereas their surviving spoors suggest that they cannot have been so heavy or they would have sunk into the mud across which they walked. They also developed colossal caudal structures which, in conventional portrayals, are held aloft and do not drag on the ground. Finally, and crucial to my understanding of how dinosaurs are supposed to have functioned, they typically evolved to walk erect, thus forcing the hind limbs alone to bear the burden. An adult T. rex is reckoned to have had a mass of up to seven tonnes, which must have been supported by a single limb when the animal moved…. There are many controversies that remain, yet most of the paradoxes that surround the study of the dinosaurs are resolved by making this change in concept. Dinosaurs look more convincing in water, and the physics stands up more soundly. All the while we were speculating in science on those remarkable creatures, this single, crucial factor eluded palaeontologists: dinosaurs were aquatic.

Ford’s ideas have been met with push-back from the paleontological community. Says Dr. Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, “This idea was very popular from around the 1920s, but since the 1960s we have demonstrated with the help of engineering work on load-bearing structures, that dinosaurs had more than enough muscle strength in their legs to get around easily on land. They were engineered for it.”

FROM FORD'S ARTICLE

I’m not going to pretend to be any sort of remote expert on dinosaurs, but I do think they’re cool and we would probably be friends if we ever met. Regardless of where the science lands on this one, Ford’s article is a fascinating read and an interesting exercise in changing one’s imagination viewpoint. At the very least, it’s worth watching Ford’s adorable video introduction.

Eleven Things You Wish You Knew About Honeybees

I am not a person who likes bugs. I refuse to go camping out of fear that I’ll wake up with a spider dangling half an inch above my face. Ants marching in a straight line make me want to pull out a magnifying glass and fry them one by one as they come towards me. I’ve been known to take showers in the middle of the night after waking up from nightmares involving cockroaches lying eggs in different crevices in my house and body.

But bees? Bees are fascinating! Cute, even. I recently went on a road trip with my friend, Molly, to visit her family — including her bee-keeping dad, Jack — in New England. After two days of eating honey on toast, on spoons, and on a giant pancake, we got to go out and play with the bees.

The Dutch Baby Pancake

I spent the entire 30 minute ride out to the farm pestering Jack with questions like a kindergardener.

Where do you get bees? They come in the mail.

How much honey do you get every year? Two years ago we harvested 15 gallons but last year we only got 2.

Have you ever been stung? Yes. 

We went to two of his hives, one where the bees had died from not having enough to make it through the winter (although, bafflingly, an entire lower drawer of honeycomb had been entirely ignored by the bees who ate from bottom to top and died in droves near the top) and another mean-ass colony who were still alive and kicking in 15 degree weather. After an afternoon spent poking around the hives, I went home with a plan for my retirement, a jar full of Jack’s Gold, and a head full of bee knowledge that I can’t wait to tell you about.

1. Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start. In this case, I feel like that would be at the notes I took for all you apiphobes (or melissophobes, although that one sounds a little more like someone afraid of people named Melissa than someone afraid of bees) out there: bees only sting when they’re threatened. And for good reason: honeybees have a barbed stinger that sticks in human skin, separating their abdomen from the rest of their body and killing them when they use it. Unless you’re an EpiPen-carrying member of the Allergic-To-Bees club, bees actually suffer more than you do from a sting.

2. Swarms of bees are also less terrifying than they initially seem. A swarm is more mass exodus than killing machine and is usually a fairly calm process. Swarming is how bee colonies grow and reproduce. Every spring, some colonies decide to split off when they get too big. Since the hive can only have one queen at a time, the queen prepares by laying eggs in special “queen cups” that will be fed royal jelly by the workers so they will become fertile. Then those ever-diligent workers stop feeding the queen so that she can lose enough weight to fly out with her swarm.

After they leave, the first queen who hatches will fly out with the drones and then come back and decide if she wants to stay in her new digs. If she leaves she’ll take more of the colony with her, but if she stays, she’ll kill all her sister queens by stinging them before they hatch. Which makes me reconsider calling swarms “less terrifying” because infanticide is not exactly the stuff of daydreams. Let’s go with “less threatening to you and yours.”

3. If that’s not enough to convince you, consider this: you can pretend to be a spaceman when you’re wearing a bee suit.

One small step for man

4. Something else about bee safety: smoking is good for you! Not smoking smoking, but bee smoking, the kind of thing you do when you want to go near a beehive but wish the bees would just calm their little selves down a little. Why? Well, bees kind of freak out when they smell smoke because they’re pretty sure that where there’s smoke, there’s fire. And you know that game: what would you take with your if your house was burning down? Bees know their answer by heart and it’s only one thing: honey. So when you smoke bees, they gorge themselves on honey so that they can fly far, far away without passing out. Unfortunately, all that eating means that flying and/or stinging is not really an option. It’s kind of like if a robber tried to steal your family’s television after Thanksgiving dinner. We’d like to think that we’d be poised and ready to strike, but in reality we’ll probably make a few feeble attempts at standing up before pathetically resigning ourselves to sitting on our couch and watching as a stranger hauls off with our TV.

5. Now on to the marvelous things bees do with their bodies. For example: secrete wax! All the cells that make up honeycomb are identical hexagons. They’re built to store honey and pollen and hold eggs and larvae (this word is the reason I could never study bugs). Bees have to eat more than 8 pounds of honey to make 1 pound of wax, so beekeepers usually keep the honeycomb and return it to the hive after harvesting the honey. Despite being ultrasensitive (they can tell when their queen dies because she stops giving off pheromones), bees don’t mind using honeycomb from another hive. It’s just like moving into a house instead of having to build a new one every time.

Via: Molly

6. She works hard for the honey! The average bee produces around 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. To look at it from another angle, it takes a hive of bees the equivalent of 1 and a half orbits around the earth to make 1 cup of honey.

7. Before we go any further, let’s let Isabella Rossellini give us a refresher on bee sex.

8. Aren’t you glad you’re not a bee? If you were, you’d be assigned a job based on how old you were. Baby bees spend their first two days cleaning out the honeycomb, starting with the cells they were born in, and keeping the unhatched larvae warm. They spend the next 9 days feeding the larvae, first the oldest and then the youngest. 12 to 17-day-old bees build the comb, carry food, and remove dead bees from the hive. They turn into guards for the next 4 days, protecting the hive from predators, and then spend the rest of their life — 6 weeks — collecting pollen, nectar, and water.

9. Since all the bees in a hive are related to the queen, the disposition of the colony depends on the queen. Some beekeepers who find themselves with a particularly nasty colony will remove the queen and replace her with a new one in hopes that she won’t be quite as mean. Since the lifecycle of a bee is only 6 weeks, it doesn’t take too long until a new temperament takes over.

The Angry Bees

10. Remember how I said they’re super sensitive? Bees can see color, but not the same way that we do. Their eyes can see a wider portion of the spectrum than ours can and so ultraviolet patterns on flowers that are invisible to us act as landing pads to guide bees to their centers.

What bees see: the colors on the second flower aren't real (bees can't see red) but the pattern is

11. Bees have a special dance that they do to tell their friends where the food is. This is amazing for a couple of reasons: a) The dance is called a “Waggle Dance,” which I’m going to assume was named by a scientist who harbored a secret desire to write for children’s shows. b) The bee is using vector calculus to explain to the other bees where the food is located. I don’t even know what vector calculus is. And c) Bees know that the earth is round. In fact, they’ve known that the earth is round since before Christopher Columbus accidentally landed in the Caribbean. I bet bees already know that gay marriage won’t destroy the human race.

Jack as a human, Me as an Alien

Sarcasm is Better for Your Brain Than Sincerity

Brittani’s Team Pick

Right now out in this world of ours, scientists and other people with degrees are researching sarcasm. That’s good for us web dwellers since the internet is fueled by unabashed vitriol, unicorns, and sarcasm. It’s like interweb fossil fuel or something.

“For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.”

Turns out, sarcasm is exercise for your brain and the patience of the person you’re talking to! People sometimes think sarcasm is a tool we use to hide our social ineptness and/or assholish proclivities, but actually it’s just because we’re really really smart. There are moments when I think it’s weird that sarcasm is a thing to hang your hat on but then I remember there are a lot of different ways to be funny and I haven’t figured the rest of them out yet. I’m so good at it, my friends call me starcastic (jk I don’t have any friends). Sometimes while employing sarcasm, it bypasses humor and it’s just a sad look into my soul.

But look at how interesting this part is. You should probably read the whole thing and then give an expert opinion on whether or not this is why Lizz’s Mad Libs are so funny

“There appear to be regional variations in sarcasm. A study that compared college students from upstate New York with students from near Memphis, Tennessee, found that the Northerners were more likely to suggest sarcastic jibes when asked to fill in the dialogue in a hypothetical conversation.”

Talking About Neurosexism Nirvana

Carolyn’s Team Pick:

In a talk with the Australian Broadcasting Company, Cordelia Fine discusses how we build social assumptions based on misinterpretations of scientific studies.

“If you thought sexism was a thing of the past, then think again says psychologist and writer, Cordelia Fine. In this often highly amusing talk, she argues that the notion that there is an immutable biological difference between the male and female brain is just another form of sexism: neurosexism. And Cordelia’s on a mission to discredit the science behind it.

After her excoriating attack, Cordelia goes on to warn of the dangers such ideas can have on the path to greater equality between the genders.”

The discussion is based around Fine’s book, Delusions of Gender, which is a pop-science deconstruction of numerous scientific studies and their interpretations that shows how social expectations play a much stronger role in research results than actual research does.

If you haven’t read the book yet (and it came out a year ago so you should’ve), this discussion will make you want to. But the book is really dense, and this talk is only 45 minutes! It’s like Intro to Neurosexism nirvana. You should watch it here:

While Delusions of Gender questions female/male-based biological essentialism, it does not address the difference between sex and gender and has no real discussion of anything outside of the gender binary. Nevertheless, Fine’s discussion reveals some of our cultural scientific illiteracy and just how often science is used to back up pre-existing ideas, and it is definitely worth 45 minutes of your time.

Top Ten Radiolab Episodes to Make You Smarter and Possibly Happier

I’m a bit of a podcast fiend. I learned about the wonder that is Radiolab from overhearing a bunch of people at a party giddily discussing a recent episode of the show involving mind controlled bugs and I was completely intrigued.  And I’m pretty positive you will be too.

From their website:

Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we’ll feed it with possibility.

First, meet your hosts Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwhich.

Radiolab hosts Jad Abumrad (left) and Robert Krulwich

I also want to give a shout out to producer Lulu Miller, who seems like someone I want to befriend but is mysteriously difficult to Google.  This bio describes her as follows: “Miller studied history at Swarthmore College, and first fell for radio while working as a woodworker in Sunset Park. She lives in Brooklyn where, when her bike’s not getting stolen, she’s riding it.” I know, right?

The podcasts are available for download and they will likely consume all your ear and brain space once you give the show a listen. Subscribe to the Radiolab podcast here. Some of the episodes are hour length, and some are shorts.

Begin your new found addiction with my fave top ten episodes!

10. Talking to Machines

Get your geek on with some robots! This show explores relations between humans and machines. Remember Furbees? I always thought they were kind of creepy and they make an appearance on this show being, well, kind of creepy.

Radiolab Synopsis:

“We begin with a love story–from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives…and that’s chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.”

9. The Good Show

Jad and Rob decide to dig around and see if they can figure out what compels some people to care and take self-sacrificing actions for others like jumping in front of a moving train or taking on an angry bull.

Radiolab Synopsis:

“The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?”

8. The Bus Stop (Short)

photo by: by sabine7 / July 3, 2005

This story is by Lulu Miller and highlights a simple solution (a lie!) to a disturbing and troubling common problem for Alzheimer patients.

7. A Flock of Two (Short)

African parrots are wicked smart. Learn more about that and check out how Sadie reminds Jim to keep calm and carry on.

Radiolab Synopsis:

“Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk–it jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. But with the help of Sadie, his pet African Grey Parrot, Jim found an unlikely (and seemingly successful) way to manage his anger. African Grey Parrot expert Irene Pepperberg helps us understand how this could work, and shares some insights from her work with a parrot named Alex.”

6. Cities

Samuel Herman Gottscho

Living in New York City and now Brooklyn has changed my life. So tell us science, what makes cities so special anyway?

Radiolab synopsis:

“There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can’t explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who’s walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that’s slipping away.”

5. The Loneliness of the Goalkeeper (Short)

REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski

This one is for you, Hope Solo. What’s it like to be inside your head? This episode of Radiolab considers what it might be like to be the goalkeeper and what types of people are drawn to this loneliest of roles on a soccer team.

4.  Sleeping

Why do we sleep, anyway? And also: hear a man who ho, ho, hos like Santa when he has night terrors. Dolphins make an appearance.

Radiolab Synopsis:

“Every creature on the planet sleeps–from giant humpback whales to teeny fruit flies. What does it do for us, and what happens when we go without? We take a peek at iguanas sleeping with one eye open, get in bed with a pair of sleep-deprived new parents, and eavesdrop on the uneasy dreams of rats.”

3. Parasites

So yeah, kinda gross. But really, really interesting! And apparently great conversation at a party.

2. Animal Minds

photographer Brian Skerry and assistant Mauricio Handler

Lots of good stories in this episode, but the story about a human and whale interaction may leave you speechless. It made me cry. There, I said it.

Radiolab synopsis:

“When we gaze into the eyes of a wild animal, or even a beloved pet, can we ever really know what they might be thinking? Is it naive to assume they’re experiencing something close to human emotions? Or is it ridiculous to assume that they AREN’T feeling something like that? We get the story of a rescued whale that may have found a way to say thanks, ask whether dogs feel guilt, and wonder if a successful predator may have fallen in love with a photographer.”

1. Falling

credit: explodingdog.com

This episode is seriously my favorite. In just one episode they manage to discuss falling in love, the science of cats surviving after jumping out of windows and also have both Brian Greene and Neil deGrasse Tyson as guests on the show. Listen, tell your friends. You’re welcome!

Radiolab Synopsis:

“There are so many ways to fall—in love, asleep, even flat on your face. This hour, Radiolab dives into stories of great falls. We jump into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, upend some myths about falling cats, and plunge into our favorite songs about falling.”

What are your favorites?

Book About Futuristic SciFi Lesbian Romance from 1906 Exists

Rachel’s Team Pick:

Based on your comments in general on this fine website — and “you” here represents the collective readership — you are into books in general, often scifi/fantasy in specific, and stuff about lesbians. If this is indeed the case, this may be relevant to your interests.

io9 has helpfully unearthed something which they are calling “the first lesbian science fiction novel.” It was written in 1906 by a Turkish Armenian who emigrated to America in 1877 and apparently worked at least some time as “photoengraver.” Neat! His scifi lesbian book, The Anglo-American Alliance, appears to be the only book he’s ever written, and even without the lesbians it sounds neat (minus the clearly and blatantly racist and colonialist parts, which are not neat, even if they are unsurprising given the time period):

The Anglo-American Alliance, set in the future of 1960, has two plots. The first is a detailed history of a 20th century in which the United States and the United Kingdom are the major powers on Earth, colonialism is still in force (Great Britain having colonized central Africa in the 1920s), and technology has advanced in a limited fashion: prenatal sex determination and suspended animation are now possible, a germicide for laziness has been developed, benefitting “the negroes of the Southern States” [sic], and an enormous telescope has discovered “vegetation and moving objects” on Mars and Venus. A Persian astronomer, Abou Shimshek, has found an “ice lens” which allowed him to discover a new planet on which live a race of telepathic, furred, electric-wheel-riding aliens.

I think my favorite part is “set in the future of 1960.”

>

THIS IMAGE MOSTLY TOTALLY UNRELATED, IS IN FACT A STILL FROM THE FILM "LA NAVE DE LOS MONSTRUOS"

But also: lesbians! Check out:

…the romance between Aurora Cunningham, the daughter of Great Britain’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs,” and Margaret MacDonald, the daughter of an American senator. Aurora is beautiful, blonde, blue-eyed, gentle, and has a speech impediment: “a typical English maiden.” Margaret is Aurora’s “very antithesis. She was somewhat taller, with sparkling black eyes and raven hair, of imposing dignity and carriage, but withal the equal of Aurora in the matter of natural gifts and accomplishments. She had, moreover, a captivating frivolity and aggressiveness which almost bordered on masculinity.”

Spoiler alert: Margaret and Aurora are madly in love, but well aware that their romance is too dangerous to carry on publicly. At some point they have to part for some reasons involving graduating from school, and swear to never have an “alliance” with a man but to love each other for ever and ever. UNLESS they can find a  “Vivisectionist and Re-Incarnator” and turn one of them (obviously Margaret, were you even reading up above) into a man so they can be married. Which, duh, is what happens. So! The Anglo-American Alliance becomes the “first science fiction novel with a pair of lesbian lovers as heroines, one of whom becomes science fiction’s first transgender hero,” as io9 puts it. Fascinating, no? And this is the first I’ve heard about it! What have you learned today? I learned that I want to see La Nave de los Monstruos.

*feature image also largely unrelated, is in fact still from The Queens of Outer Space.

Why The Gay Squid Actually Isn’t

Via Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute

A species of deep-sea squid has been found to have a lot of gay sex. In a study called “A Shot in the Dark: Same-Sex Sexual Behaviour in Deep-Sea Squid,” researchers noted that the squid (Octopoteuthis deletron) are the first spineless masses of invertebrates found to mate equally with males and females — really, with any other squid they see.

It’s really easy to be excited about this, the same way it’s easy to be excited when people find gay penguins (!). Or lesbian koalas! Or gay black swans! Or gay big horn sheep! Or lesbian albatrosses! Bottlenose dolphins and bonobo chimps are the most common examples, possibly because they have a lot of other similarities to humans, and possibly because they are cute, but there same sex behaviour has been documented in over 1,500 species.

Finding “gay” animals is also an easy way to argue against homophobic creationists, because look, if the dolphins/bonobos/penguins are sometimes gay, then it must be OK that people are sometimes gay, too. This argument was used in a Supreme Court decision to strike down sodomy laws in 14 states. Looking at animal behaviour can also lead to an argument that being gay is genetic (though now we have human-based studies for that).

However, using terms that apply to human behaviour don’t fit when applied to animals. According to Lindsay Young, a scientist behind the discovery that many female albatrosses are into chicks, whether or not an animal is gay doesn’t have anything to do with her research: “‘Lesbian,” she told [the New York Times], ‘is a human term,’ and Young — a diligent and cautious scientist, just beginning to make a name in her field — is devoted to using the most aseptic language possible and resisting any tinge of anthropomorphism. ‘The study is about albatross,’ she told me firmly. ‘The study is not about humans.'”

We can’t use human terms to apply to animal research, because the squid isn’t actually bisexual in the way that we think of “bisexual,” it’s just doing what it needs to do to have the greatest chance of survival, which in this case is attempting to have sex with any other squid it sees, regardless of gender (which is difficult to determine in any case. Of the 108 squid captured for the study, scientists could only identify 39 of them.) According to the New York Times,

“Little is known about the details but it seems that the male ejaculates a packet of sperm at the mating partner, and the packet turns inside out, essentially shooting the sperm contained in a membrane into the flesh of the partner, where they stay embedded until the female (if the shooter has been lucky) is ready to fertilize its eggs. If males are the recipient of these rocket sperm, they are just stuck with them. It is the kind of mating that would make a good video game.”

While it’s probably possible to launch on an extended metaphor about how this relates to gay people, I’m not going to. Hendrik Hoving, the researcher behind the findings, “fended off that notion [of gay squid], reiterating that the squid has no discernible sexual orientation, and that a tentacled invertebrate that shoots sperm into its mate’s flesh really has nothing to do with human behavior.”

But there’s something much more important to celebrate when studies like this take place. One of the reasons that we keep “discovering” animals with same-sex behaviour is that for years, scientists would just not mention it (this is called observer bias). According to the New York Times,

“This kind of behavior among animals has been observed by scientists as far back as the 1700’s, but [psychology and neuroscience professor] Mr. Vasey said one reason there had been few books on the topic was that ‘people don’t want to do the research because they don’t want to have suspicions raised about their sexuality.'”

For instance, before Frans de Waal’s Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape was published in 1997, scientists who studied bonobos would never talk about sex, which bonobos engage in almost hourly, and would instead do things like publish a photo of two females having sex and write that they were being affectionate.

The flip side of the bias that makes us read two male penguins with an egg as gay also used to mean that scientists would omit same-sex behaviour from their results, or not even notice it. It’s one thing to be excited about a “gay” squid, but the really exciting thing here is not that the squid are having same-sex sex, but that scientists are talking about it.

Science Wants Gay Mormons to Talk About Being Gay Mormons

Mormons! You remember them, right? They’re the ones who gave all that money to Prop 8, tried to shut down Autostraddle 1.0, are having their moment, and (some of whom) are working hard to reconcile gay and Mormon differences. And now, a new study is poised to be the first large-scale body of research that looks at the gay Mormon experience.

Researchers Renee Galliher, a psychology professor at Utah State University, and Bill Bradshaw, a biology professor at BYU, are working together to “[separate] truth from myth in the gay Mormon experience. They also share a hope that the data gathered will provide insight and understanding that can be useful to Mormon church leaders and families.” Using an online questionnaire, they hope to gather data from 1,000 individuals from all (gay Mormon) walks of life.

While Galliher is neither gay nor Mormon, Bradshaw is an LDS member and the father of a gay son. Dr. Bradshaw runs Family Fellowship, a kind of Mormon PFLAG, and has given lectures in the past to support the idea that homosexuality is intrinsic (aka not a choice). While his ideas sound far from revolutionary to my ears, they provide support for gay LDS members who have experienced rejection from the church, their family members and their friends.

As easy as it is to vilify the Mormon church, it’s important to remember that those who belong to it aren’t a totally monolithic lot. John Dehlin, a graduate student at USU (and currently “inactive” LDS member) who is helping with the research, runs MormonsForMarriage.com and has produced podcasts that celebrate diversity within the LDS community.

Since I’m guessing that opinions on the LDS church around these here parts range from just tolerant to loathsome, it’s worth asking why we’re talking about some guy who thinks it’s rad that not all Mormons live in little boxes made out of ticky-tacky. First: there are countless gay Mormons who are being affected by the church’s policies every day who deserve our solidarity. Second: the church has 14 million members, billions of dollars, and some serious political clout. The tide might be turning in favor of LGBT rights in secular society, but the LDS church and other religious institutions are standing in the way of progress — and the fact that their funding and political support was a MAJOR factor in the passing of Prop 8, it’s very worthwhile to think about what we can do to help them become more openminded. Despite how silly its religious tenets may seem to people outside the church, the LDS power structure doesn’t seem like it’s going anywhere soon.

People like Dehlin and Bradshaw are vital to our struggle because they have the opportunity to create change from the inside. They speak the language (I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t talk about “struggling with homosexual attraction” without throwing up), know the secret handshake, and are trusted by the community. In the same way, Galliher and Bradshaw’s study just might provide opportunities for more honest discussion about queer issues. Here’s to hoping that the voices of 1,000 gay Mormons don’t go unheard.

Anti-Gay Groups Misrepresent 98% Of The Data They Use Against Us

his hair seems 46% less gay than it did before therapy

At a DOMA Senate Judiciary Committee hearing earlier this week, Senator Al Franken called out Focus on the Family’s Tom Minnery for misrepresenting research in his testimony.

Minnery had tried to use a 2010 study by the Department of Health and Human Services to support his own argument that children who are in families with opposite-sex parents do better than those who aren’t. Instead, Franken read the study and pointed out that the study found that children with married adoptive or biological parents, regardless of gender, did better.

Franken: It says that nuclear families, not opposite sex married families, are associated with those positive outcomes. Isn’t it true, Mr. Minnery, that a married same sex couple that has had or adopted kids, would fall under the definition of nuclear family that you cite.

Minnery: I would think that the study, when it cites nuclear family, would mean a family headed by a husband and wife.

Franken: It doesn’t. The study defines a nuclear family as one or more children living with two parents who are married to one another, and are each biological or adoptive parents to all the children in the family. And I frankly don’t really know how we can trust the rest of your testimony if you are reading studies these ways.

It would be nice to think that Minnery’s mistake comes not from willful misrepresentation but from habit — when you’re used to seeing the world in a certain way, you come to expect it to always be that way, which could be why he automatically interpreted ‘nuclear family’ as ‘family with opposite sex parents.’

The anti-gay contingency, lacking any actual evidence to support their position (because their position is wrong), find a lot of ways to deliver lies to the public. This might come in the form of misleading PSAs about how gay marriage will indoctrinate children, or Yes on Prop 8’s key witness drawing all of his evidence about gay marriage’s negative effects on society from “documents on the internet.” Just today in The Daily Beast, lawyer Michael Medved concocts a giant steaming pile of nonsense about what exactly kids will be “forced to” learn about under California’s new bill requiring LGBT history being taught in schools.

When unable to use agenda-driven “research” or unable to completely make shit up (like, say, in a formal Senate Committee hearing), there’s yet another way to sneak untruths into the conversation: drawing false claims from respected research or generally mis-representing where your evidence is coming from. In this particular type of discourse, this exact issue seems to happen constantly. And it’s usually not as funny as Al Franken made it.

Here’s some examples of this action in action (some of which came from Pam’s House Blend’s great roundup on this topic):

+ Earlier this year, the Family Research Council’s Peter Sprigg published an article in the Christian Post in which he claimed that research “demonstrates that family structure matters for children, and the family structure that helps the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage.” Of the studies he cited, one didn’t explicitly address same-sex households in any form, and one was very vague about whether or not it included same-sex families.

+ Dr. Robert Spitzer, who was influential in removing homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders, has claimed that his work on whether or not people can switch sexual orientations has been hijacked by the pro-ex-gay people.

+ George Rekers, a proponent of gay conversion therapy, based numerous books and studies on the example case of Kirk, a boy who entered therapy at the age of 5 and was monitored throughout childhood and adolescence. Rekers claims the therapy worked and turned Kirk into a well-adjusted hetero-acting grown-up — a claim which is false on many levels. For starters, Kirk never became straight, obviously — and all that self-loathing about his orientation and behavior instilled in him at such a young age drove Kirk to suicide in 2003.

+ The American Family Association used work by Michael King, a University College of London professor with prolific work in depression and suicide in LGBT people, to claim that anyone who “engaged in a homosexual lifestyle” had a risk of suicide 200% higher than that of people who hadn’t. This number was indeed from King’s research, but the research in question wasn’t about engaging in a homosexy lifestyle — it was about one of the possible effects of experiencing stigma and discrimination.

+ Three weeks ago, NOM’s Maggie Gallagher (who appeared in the American Family Association’s One News Now this morning to discuss how “voters all over the state” are upset about New York’s gay marriage bill) brought up the “negative religious impacts of marriage equality” at a press conference, claiming this impact had been certified by subjective “leading legal scholars” from Harvard and Stanford. Far from it, actually — the “scholars” she cites are, in fact, scholars who participate in anti-gay activism and have ties to anti-gay hate groups.

These instances all have a few things in common, but homophobic organizations picking and choosing and improperly editing down research to extract the parts of it that they believe can benefit them while ignoring the parts they don’t like is the biggest. The best lies are the ones that are sort of true, and it’s very easy to pick a study and declare that researchers said something, because how many people are going to call you out on it? Not nearly enough. This is why it’s important to read, and why it’s important to understand what you’re reading, and why — particularly in the case of the organizations in question — it’s incredibly important to fact-check sweeping statements and studies and research and maybe question why an anti-gay group is citing a prominent generally pro-gay (or at least neutral) researcher. Franken did his homework, but not nearly enough people are doing theirs.

Talk About Your Feelings For Science!

VERONICA’S TEAM PICK:

Sometimes, just sometimes, Autostraddle exists to make the world a better place in ways besides just letting you know what’s up with Claire this week and where to buy boyshorts. Sometimes we help science happen! Like right now, when we point you towards this study on intimate relationships being conducted at Whittier College. It’s super simple and just takes 30 minutes and only involves talking about yourself/your feelings, which you love doing anyway, and just has to be in bubble format as opposed to gchat or comments or whatever. The study organizers want to have a variety of identities represented, which means you, queermos!

There are various ways that relationships can be intimate, such as spending time together, sharing personal information, expressing feelings, being physically affectionate, or engaging in sexual behaviors.  This study focuses primarily on intimate relationships that can be considered romantic or sexual.  That includes dating, hooking up, seeing someone, having a girlfriend or boyfriend, courtship, marriage, and other casual or committed relationships.

New Sexual Orientation Study Suggests You Were Born This Gay

the best part of this getty stock image is the dirt on the tomboy's face

Sexual orientation and “gender conformity” in women are genetic traits, according to a study released by researchers from Queen Mary, University of London.

Researchers Dr. Andrea Burri and Dr. Qazi Rahman based their study on the idea that there are consistent differences in the psychological characteristics of female children and male children, and on prior research that suggests those who become gay as adults have different characteristics from those who don’t (previous research suggests about a third of gender non-conforming girls and 50-80 per cent of gender non-conforming boys turn out to be gay later in life).

In the study published this week in PLoS One, a peer-reviewed science journal, Burri and Rahman looked at sexual attraction, childhood gender typicality, and adult gender identity in 4,425 female twins and found that both a shared set of genes and a shared set of environmental factors are partially responsible for gender non-conformity and female sexual orientation.

According to Psych Central, Rahman said,

“We found that there is a connection between these mental traits and how sexual orientation develops. One idea is that there is an association between these psychological traits and sexual orientation because they all develop under common biological drivers; like the development of brain regions under the influence of genes and sex hormones. We think environmental factors and genetics drive other mechanisms, like exposure to sex hormones in the womb, to shape differences in gender nonconformity and sexuality simultaneously.”

This is a good thing because it supports the idea of genetics playing a strong part in sexual orientation, which is a key argument in countering the idea, frequently supported by the anti-gay crowd, that being gay is always a choice. But it’s less good because of “substantial measurement error.” In the discussion of the study, the authors note that, despite the large sample size, there weren’t enough non-heterosexual participants; that results related to sexual orientation are “notoriously skewed”; and that some of their parameter estimates, especially for adult gender identity, were imprecise.

Nevertheless, this study is a strong piece of evidence in counteracting what is one of the most harmful myths about being gay — the idea that it’s always a choice, or a learned behaviour that can be un-learned.

Mostly, people, and by people I mean many major medical organizations, get this. The American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Medical Association have all stated variations on the following: that being gay is not a mental disorder, that people who are gay deserve the same treatment as people who aren’t, and that there are a lot of variables and factors that may or may not affect sexual orientation but that choice usually isn’t one of them.

But also, a lot of people, and by people I mean “including but nowhere near limited to various presidential candidates,” don’t get this. For instance, earlier this week, GOP presidential candidate Gov. Tim Pawlenty told Meet The Press’s David Gregory that he doesn’t think there’s any genetic basis for sexual orientation.

Gregory: Is being gay a choice?

Pawlenty: Well the science in that regard is in dispute, if scientists work on that and try to figure out if it’s behavioural or if it’s partly genetic-

Gregory: What do you think?

Pawlenty: I defer to the scientists in that regard.

Gregory: So you think it’s not a choice? […] That you are, as Lady Gaga says, born this way.

Pawlenty: There’s no scientific conclusion that it’s genetic. We don’t know that. So we don’t know to what extent it’s behavioural. That’s something that’s been debated by scientists for a long time. But as I understand the science, there’s no current conclusion that it’s genetic.

It may still be a while before a more accurate means of measuring sexual orientation and gender identity is developed, but until then studies like this one are the best evidence we have that being gay is often genetic. This argument helps us move forward quickly with civil rights but many argue that discrediting the idea that one CAN be “queer by choice” doesn’t do the community any favors, either. As Kim Ficera wrote in a 2005 article about Sheryl Swoopes coming out, “If we want to show the world that being gay isn’t a horrible thing, then let’s stop saying that we can’t help it.”

It’s also important to think about what studies like this mean for the stereotyping of gender-non-conforming children as gay and conversely the stereotyping of gender-confirming children as straight. It’s a bit of a chicken/egg situation but it also sets itself up for headlines like this one from The Times of India: “tomboys are more likely to become lesbians” which is, needless to say, problematic.

What Makes a Caveman Gay?

People, historically, do a lot of things. There were artists, construction workers, community leaders, religious figures, bakers,  and families, even way back when in the days of cavemen. But a recent discovery has triggered a new question: were there gay cavemen? And did they find one? Does being buried ‘like a girl’ make you a gay dude? And also, wait, what?

Salon did a good overview of the discovery of what was rumored to be “a gay caveman.”

What, you ask, led to such an intimate conclusion about a 5,000-year-old who was “outed by the way he was buried”? Did he have an especially neat cave? Was he laid to rest with a rainbow flag and some military discharge papers? Did the markings on his grave look like they were done by Tom of Finland? No, it was because he “was buried in a manner “normally reserved only for women.” Buried like a woman. That’s so gay!

Back in the day 2,900 to 2,500 years ago, when the man Fox News called a“stone age gender bender” shuffled off the mortal coil, the ladyfolk were laid to rest facing east, accompanied by such domestic knickknacks as jewelry and pottery. Dudes, on the other hand, met their maker facing west, accompanied by manly gear like weapons, tools, a copy of Maxim and a can of Axe body spray. And as the Telegraph  explained in its report on the “first homosexual caveman,” this guy was pushing daisies facing east, with a couple of jugs for company on the journey to the afterlife.

will being buried in this make me gay?

So here you have a man buried like a woman with womanly things for entertaining people in the afterlife, right? So, is he gay? Well, the thing is, he’s dead, so you can’t ask him. And what makes that the first question?

The reality is that this gender bending does indicate something surprising and interesting, at least from this vantage point. This is the first time this has happened! So THAT’S exciting. And it must, or probably does, indicate some sort of difference, so THAT’S exciting. But again- he’s dead, and you can’t ask him. So why is this the first question? And why are the other options: that he was a “third gender” or something culturally similar, that this is a burial tradition simply not discovered yet by archaeologists, that this person was the equivalent of trans*, or that this is irrelevant or an accident, being ignored?

The controversy over a “gay caveman” is just that, a controversy. In the end, it’s pretty magnificently silly, and until it’s been backed up by other discoveries, it’s kind of just a side note anyway. But hey, what do you want to be buried with? I’m going to set aside my lace-up boots like Sid Vicious. Do you think they’ll know I’m gay?

Jeopardy Proves the End Is Nigh, Watson Will Enslave Us Soon

Concern for the post-singularity future of the human race has suddenly reached a tipping point into common consciousness, thanks to Jeopardy. If you haven’t been following the news, a supercomputer made by IBM named “Watson” is currently facing off against Jeopardy’s two all-time best players, the kind of squirrely Ken Jennings and not-very-squirrely Brad Rutter. IBM also made Deep Blue, the world’s most unsettling chess-winning supercomputer.

I’m not gonna ruin this for you, because I really think you should be concerned, so I’ve embedded the videos below for other people like me who don’t have the moving pictures on the TV. Maybe I’ve just been watching too many consecutive episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles lately (I have), but seeing Watson get a streak of answers right without breaking a virtual sweat has me alternately elated and horrified. I think I’m happy about this triumph of modern supertechnology, but my teeth are clenched in a bracing-for-our-overlords kind of way. I’ll have to side with futurist Ray Kurzweil on this one: “It is going to be more difficult to seriously argue that there are human tasks that computers will never achieve.”

The stuff early on in Episode 1 goes into some light detail about how it processes the Jeopardy prompts and arrives at an answer. It’s pretty fascinating stuff.

Episode 1, Part 1:

Episode 1, Part 2:

Episode 2, Part 1:

[Episode 2, Part 2 just aired and is in the works, according to the YouTube member who was kind enough to put these vids up]

Czech Republic’s Porn-Watching-Test is Today’s Gaydar Fail

via slap upside the head dot com

The European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), a leading human rights group, has criticized the Czech Republic for continuing to use a “sexual arousal” test on gay men seeking asylum. Applicants are hooked up to a penile plethysmograph (PPG), which measures blood flow to their junk, and then shown straight porn. Anyone who gets aroused is sent back to whatever country they came from.

In a statement, the agency said:

“There are a number of problems with this situation, even apart from the fact that the reliability of ‘phallometric testing’ is questionable, since it is dubious whether it reaches sufficiently clear conclusions to be used as evidence in the processing of claims and in possible subsequent legal proceedings. This oblique practice would in any case not be appropriate as regards people who are bisexual.”

According to the BBC, the Czech Republic’s interior minister “reacted angrily” to the claims and said that so far, fewer than ten tests have been conducted and all have had the applicant’s full written consent. Also according to the BBC, this issue first came to light after a German court refused to send a gay Iranian man to the Czech Republic because he would be subjected to the test.

The devices first came into use in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s as a way to verify that men claiming to be gay in order to avoid military service really were. PPGs have also been used to determine whether sex offenders are likely to re-offend. As many as 20% of Canadian treatment programs for adolescent sex offenders, and 10% of American ones, use penile plethysmography to determine whether treatment will be effective. Last July, a Canadian tester was charged with sexual assault. Additionally, evidence from PPGs has been proven inadmissible in both Canadian and American courts.

This isn’t the first time a government has subjected people to testing to find out whether someone is gay. In the Cold War, the Canadian government developed a “fruit machine” that they a. actually called that and b. used to determine whether federal employees had “character weaknesses” (i.e. were of a homosexy persuasion) and would therefore be security risks using a similar combination of bogus science and porn. It didn’t work for them, either (note to Americans: the science behind the test came from your country).

In 1966, researchers said that “conclusive means to identify homosexual subjects was still out of reach.”

Which doesn’t explain why people keep trying to find one anyway.

Gayness is complicated business.

There have been studies that say being gay might be genetic.

It may or may not have to do with your mother.

Or your brain structure.

Or your environment.

And gaydar can be just as complicated.

A girl in a plaid flannel shirt with skinny jeans, combat boots, and another girl attached to her by the lips is probably gay, but she could also be a hipster with a drinking problem (or both). Similarly, even though there have been lots of studies showing that more lesbians and gay men are left-handed, or that in some cases brain structure can be different for non-gay people, it takes a very special type of person to go up to someone at a bar and say hey, baby, is your anterior commissure* larger or are you just happy to see me? And, I would suggest, federal governments are not that type of person.

Simply put: there is a reason that none of the tests meant to determine whether or not someone is gay work, and that reason is that everyone is different. Right now, while there are theories about genetics and environment, no one’s too clear on what makes people go gay (though there is reasonable evidence that looking at hot girls in menswear may play a role).

And more importantly, it doesn’t matter. While it is understandable that a government sheltering those seeking asylum would want to verify the legitimacy of any claims of persecution, there is something inherently disturbing about hooking someone up to a machine and forcing them to watch porn in order to do so. Not only is it highly invasive, potentially in violation of religious beliefs, and just gross, it doesn’t even work. The rest of the European Union has stopped using phallometric testing on gay people seeking asylum. It’s time the Czech Republic did the same.

*Bigger for lesbians.

Gays Make Such A Good Statistic, Someone is Studying Us Now

Lots of people have been studying us lately, probably because they want to sell us something.

A. OkCupid studies self-reported dating/mating habits of homos

OKCupid mined through their 3.2 million members to extract crucial information related to the mating habits and overall personalities of gays on the prowl and their results will not surprise a single homogay but might surprise Maggie Gallagher. Actually probs not.

Here’s the rundown:

B. National Sex Survey

Also, the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior came out last week! Some highlights:

Oral sex with a female partner in the past 90 days was rarely reported. The age group with the highest proportion of women who reported oral sex with another woman was the 18- to 24-year- old cohort of which 3.4% (N = 7) reported receiving from and 4.1% (N = 8 ) reported giving oral sex to a woman.

Among men ages 18 to 59, 4.8% to 8.4% reported having received oral sex from another man in the previous year. However, 13.8% of men ages 40–49 years and 14.9% ages 50–59 years reported such lifetime behavior.

C. Studying Footballer’s Attitudes Towards Sexuality Etc

And hey, uh, have you been curious about rugby players at all lately? Male ones? That’s good, because someone studied those too. I know right? Anyways it turns out the future is bright, i.e. traditionally hypermasculine sports are perhaps not as misogynistic and homophobic as one might imagine! (@jezebel)

+ “While there was plenty of banter about which women the players thought were hot and who they hooked up with on the weekend, put downs like “bitch”, “slut” and “fag” were rare – and when they were used, were met with reproach rather than “you go boy” backslapping.”

+ “All the players interviewed – even the two who had been observed using homophobic and sexist language – insisted they’d be totally comfortable playing alongside gay teammates, and several were critical of their coaches’ use of sexist and homophobic slurs.”

+ “It also seems significant that the study was conducted at Cambridge, a university that attracts some of the world’s brightest students, who might be more likely to think critically about gender roles. It’s not clear whether the results signal a generational shift in male sporting culture, or just the views of the next generation of left-leaning intellectuals. It also could just be a British thing – a similar study of American students in 2005 found homophobic discourse was rife amongst college athletes.”

The more you know, eh? THE MORE YOU KNOW.

Good News, Ladies: You Can Be Good At Math, Bad At Feelings

Probably you’ve always had a knee-jerk annoyance reaction when people bring up “facts” of “evolutionary psychology” like how there are fewer women in math and the sciences because our brains are wired to love puppies and rainbows and not mass spectrometry. But it’s sometimes hard to argue with those people, because they are convinced at least that they have science on their side, and sometimes all you have to argue with is “I don’t know, I have a degree in biochemistry and you dropped out halfway through a philosophy degree, so anecdotally speaking you’re full of shit.” These conversations are not often productive. BUT NOW someone has written a book that you can hold up like a magic shield of thorough research to protect yourself from those well-meaning aunts who give you books on “Men’s Brains, Women’s Brains” because “you’re getting to an age where you need to be able to understand men.” (No? Just me?) Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender has a crazy amount of real science and solid research to counteract the sloppy and poorly interpreted neurological findings that other people wave around on this topic, and I don’t know about you but I feel better already.

Aside from the girls-are-bad-at-math-and-science trope, which I feel like I personally hear more about, Fine also brings up another angle – the idea that women are naturally more empathetic and able to understand people’s feelings and emotional needs, while men are wired for watching Jimmy Kimmel exclusively and anything that has to do with anyone’s soul is completely incomprehensible. To this, Fine says that:

There is a very common social perception that women are better at understanding other people’s thoughts and feelings. When you look at one of the most realistic tests of mind reading, you find that men and women are just as good at getting what their interaction partners were thinking and feeling. It even surprised the researchers. They went on to discover that once you make gender salient when you test these abilities [like having subjects check a box with their sex before a test], you have this self-fulfilling effect. The idea that women are better at mind reading might be true in the sense that our environments often remind women they should be good at it and remind men they should be bad at it. But that doesn’t mean that men are worse at this kind of ability.

For people as obsessed with feelings as we are, we frequently feel completely incapable of understanding them – any feelings, including our own. It’s an unexpectedly huge relief to be told by someone who knows that this is okay, and that we don’t have to be emotional superstars because we’re women; it’s normal to be confused because we’re human. And since this idea is so restrictive and suffocating for men, who have to suppress all emotions because they’ve been taught that they’re never supposed to have any, it feels liberating.

Who knew that we get to be actual people no matter what gender we are? Delusions, indeed.

Street Anatomy’s Heart Beats For Art, Medicine and Queered Science

Have you ever wanted to look deeper into your own humanity? Into the depths of your human condition? Get to the nitty gritty, right down to the bones, but were always too scared off by the sometimes messy, always complex system that is the body?

Behold Street Anatomy!

This blog, whose contributors happen to be very attractive queer women (no seriously, their anatomy is really quite pleasing), was created by Vanessa Ruiz while she was getting her master’s in biomedical visualization at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Street Anatomy is dedicated to exposing the field of medical illustration in today’s youthful environment. Gone are the pages of Gray’s Anatomy (it is actually a book!) and the yellowed cadavers you had to poke at in grade 10 science. As someone who struggled to work on her own medical illustration assignment and failed miserably, I know this stuff can be grueling and exhausting to pull off, but the ladies at Street Anatomy make it happen. Joyfully.

What we have here, doc, is a reliable collection of anatomical illustrations and inside-out-art from different people, that will leave your bones aching for more and your brain thinking “well that makes sense now!”

right-click to enlarge

via iheartguts.com

See! It’s art making sense of your insides! Huzzah!

It’s pretty hard to get people amped up about the stuff we usually only see after death, but these ladies put a colorful twist on it by incorporating the newest trends in the design world. Street Anatomy combines illustrations, sculptures, fashion, photography, advertising, music and even food that reflects the quality of anatomical illustration, so there’s never a dull moment.

If you’re in the Chicago area, swing by the International Museum of Surgical Science between Sept. 3 and Nov. 19, where you can see the group exhibition, Street Anatomy, curated by Vanessa Ruiz. Seriously, these artists sound amazing:

+ CAKE, a New York City street artist with a fine art painterʼs aesthetic
+ Ryan Gerdes, a graphic designer in Portland who specializes in screen printing
+ Heather Tompkins of San Francisco, a filmmaker and illustrator who combines ink and digital media
+ Robyn Roth, a Kentucky-based tattoo artist and painter of skateboard decks
+ Jason Freeny, a corporate designer in New York who digitally creates anatomical charts of pop culture icons such as Hello Kitty and the Lego man
+ David Foox, a New Zealander who produced a collection of vinyl toys to promote organ donation
+ Emilio Garcia from Spain, a former web designer who originated the jumping brain motif now ubiquitous in a variety of 2-D and 3-D formats
+ Noah Scalin, a resident of Richmond, VA, who created a skull from found objects every day for a year and documented his work on his Skull-a-Day blog, which spawned a skull-spotting phenomenon and led to the publication of a book and an appearance by the artist on the Martha Stewart show
+ Stephen J. Shanabrook, an established contemporary artist most famous for his “Morgue Chocolates” series of candies cast from body parts.

Follow Street Anatomy on Twitter!