Today's 60 Second Science Podcast is brought to you by the anole family of lizard, because I caught hundreds as a youth:
Reptile Sex Determination Is Hot Topic
Full transcript after the jump...
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Goddammit, squirrels. One more show of sudden genetic superiority, and I'm going to have to lobby to have you put on the Terrorist Group Watch List.
To protect their winter stores of nuts, gray squirrels have learned how to stage fake burials so that thieves will get stumped when looking to heist their precious cargo of various nutmeats. Dr. Michael Steele of Wilkes University in Pennsylvania found that about a fifth of all nut burials are fake. The incidence goes up when the squirrels believe their stores are under particular threat.
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It's rare that you see evolution in action — the only time I've seen it happen is when I evolved larger muscles to fend off all the ladies who find me immensely attractive. What, are you calling me a liar? Fair enough.
Biologists think they might be seeing evolution in action with African and Indian elephants: Both species' tusk size has been reduced dramatically in recent in history. In the last 150 years, tusk length has decreased by half, and Oxford University researchers think it's because of poaching.
Typically, the largest tusks belong on the largest elephants, who use those gigantor tusks to intimidate other males and become successful with females. But with the largest animals getting killed for their tusks, the little guy gets a better chance with the ladies, and thusly his offspring have smaller and smaller tusks.
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Ah, infidelity: Some Americans call it 'sinful,' the Spanish call it an 'adventure,' and Mormon fundamentalists call it Thursday. A new study shows evidence that 20 percent of all long-term relationships start when one party is already involved with someone else.
Psychologists who polled 16,000 individuals in 53 countries as part of the International Sexuality Description Project found the figure holds up across age groups and with couples who are married, living together or dating.
In North America, 62 percent of men and 40 percent of women say they've attempted to entice another's mate for a short-term fling. Some 47 percent of men and 32 percent of women say they've succumbed to such attempts. The more sexual equality in a culture, the closer women come to matching men in the number of poaching attempts.
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I always knew feces was the key to complex life -- why do you think the best jokes involve poop? Scientists have long sought to explain the evolutionary explosion of life that occurred 500 million years ago during the Cambrian period; this population boom eventually gave rise to the ancestors of complex life. Biogeochemist Graham Logan argues that feces-producing creatures, which actually arrived about 40 million years before the start of the Cambrian, were the key that enabled single-celled organisms to expand.
Before pooping creatures, bacteria consumed most of the available oxygen. Plankton produced oxygen slowly, but bacteria would consume most of it in order to digest dead plankton. The dearth of oxygen didn't allow for much multicellular development.
Then the crappers came to the rescue.
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Man, have I learned this the hard way, through multiple face slaps and restraining orders. Still, new research backs up what the courts have been telling me for years:
The sway of a woman's hips is not intended to impress men. So say researchers who have found that women have the sexiest walk during the part of the monthly cycle when they are least fertile. The finding implies that women use a variety of signals to advertise their fertility to men, using some signals to advertise when they are ovulating and others to conceal the fact.
And here I was, thinking strippers taught me everything I needed to know about evolutionary biology.
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Geoffrey Miller of the University of New Mexico wins today's Unsung Genius Award (UGA) for getting out of the lab, hitting the streets and taking his research to truly hallowed ground: the strip club. Humans were thought not to go into estrus like other mammals, but by measuring strippers' tips, Miller and his team of intrepid lap-dancees found that tips rose and fell to match the corresponding dancer's ovulatory cycle. Hot and informative!
Surveying strip-club lap dancers, who perform erotic dances for for cash, they found that tips vary by an average of 45 percent depending on the time of the month, corresponding to the length of the ovulatory cycle. That’s the one-month cycle in which a ripe egg is released from the ovary, becoming available for fertilization.
