The overall incidence of head and neck cancers have fallen in the U.S., according to a recent review by the American Cancer Society. Even so, cancers affecting the tonsils and tongue are on the rise, and the human papillomavirus seems to be the culprit. How do you get HPV on your tonsils and tongue? Oral sex with an infected partner.
Luckily, cancer rates going up is not a reason for anyone to stop going down. Only 10,000 cases of oropharyngeal cancers will be diagnosed this year in a country of 300 million, so giving head obviously isn’t a death sentence. And there’s more good news. The most oncogenic variety of HPV is strain 16, one of the four strains in the new Gardasil vaccine. If protecting themselves from cervical cancer wasn’t enough, women now have one more reason to go in for the shot. Women, protect yourself and your partners from throat cancer: get your vaccine today!
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A new study by researchers at George Mason University found that married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends. The study surveyed 17,000 people in 28 countries and found that unmarried, cohabitating couples report a more egalitarian division of household chores than their married counterparts. Couples who see men and women as equals are more likely to divide housework equally, but married men with an egalitarian view of gender still do less housework than their wives.
Researchers’ take: “Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples—even couples who see men and women as equal.” Radical feminist take: Marriage is a patriarchal system designed to oppress women. Next research question: See if cohabitating couples who later marry divide the housework differently after the blessed event.
Read the full published paper.
Read the press release.
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Can you look at this picture without stifling a yawn? I doubt it. Yawning is extremely contagious. Sometimes even hearing the word “yawn” is enough–I yawned three times typing these last four sentences.
Researchers from Birbeck College in London showed 49 children video clips of people either yawning or simply opening and closing their mouths. Half of the children were autistic; the other half were non-autistic– “neurotypicals”, as it were. Both groups yawned at the same low rate while watching videos of people who were not yawning, but the neurotypical kids yawned twice as often as their autistic peers when the videos showed actual yawns. For autistic kids, yawns aren’t catching.
Catching a yawn seems to be based in part on a capacity for empathy, which is disrupted in people with autism. This might explain why autistic kids are slower to yawn that their neurotypical peers. But no one really knows why humans yawn in the first place. Ph.D. thesis, anyone?
Read the full story from nature.com.
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I just finished reading James Watson’s The Double Helix. In it, Watson gives his own version of the events leading to the discovery of DNA’s 3-dimensional structure. Here’s how it went down:
In 1951, Rosalind Franklin was using X-ray diffraction to photograph DNA. In November of that year, James Watson went to a talk by Franklin on the structure of the molecule. By his own account, Watson didn’t take notes, misremembered the water content of DNA by an order of magnitude, and made a model that was completely inside-out.
Using more of Franklin’s data (probably without her knowledge), James Watson and Francis Crick spent the next two years elucidating the helical structure of DNA. Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962, along with Franklin’s supervisor Maurice Wilkins. By that time, Franklin herself was dead of ovarian cancer, a disease that may have been brought on by her work with X-rays.
What did James Watson have to say about the woman whose insights were so critical to his discovery?
“By choice she did not emphasize her feminine qualities. Though her features were strong, she was not unattractive and might have been quite stunning had she taken even a mild interest in clothes. This she did not. There was never lipstick to contrast with her straight black hair, while at the age of thirty-one her dresses showed all the imagination of English blue-stocking adolescents.”
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I’ve been re-reading bits of The Moral Animal:The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. I was seriously enthralled with evolutionary psychology the first time I read the book and I really loved it. Now it just seems pompous and speculative. But a redeeming feature is the author’s detailed anecdotes about Darwin’s personal life.
After Darwin got back from his famous journey on the Beagle, it was time for him to think about settling down. The author of The Moral Animal describes Darwin’s private journal:
“The document has two columns, one labeled Marry, one labeled Not Marry, and above them, circled, are the words ‘This is the Question.’ On the pro-marriage side of the equation were ‘Children–(if it Please God)–Constant companion, (&friend in old age) who will feel interested in one, object to be beloved &played with.’ After reflection of unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with ‘better than a dog anyhow.’”
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