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In what may feel like a flashback to the porn wars of the '60s, a new study investigates the link between a country's relative gender equality and the degree of female "empowerment" in the X-rated entertainment it consumes. Researchers at the University of Hawaii focused on three countries in particular: Norway, the United States and Japan, which are respectively ranked 1st, 15th and (yikes) 54th on the United Nations' Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). To simplify their analysis, their library of smut was limited to explicit photographs of women "from mainstream pornographic magazines and Internet websites, as well as from the portfolios of the most popular porn stars from each nation." Then they set out to evaluate each image on both a disempowerment and an empowerment scale, using respective measures like whether the woman is "bound and dominated" by "leashes, collars, gags, or handcuffs" or "whether she has a natural looking body." Their hypothesis was that societies with greater gender equity will consume pornography that has more representations of "empowered women" and less of "disempowered women." It turned out the former was true, but, contradictory as it may sound, the latter was not. "While Norwegian pornography offers a wider variety of body types -- conforming less to a societal ideal that is disempowering to the average woman -- there are still many images that do not promote a healthy respect for women," the researchers explain. In other words, Norwegian porn showed more signs of female empowerment, but X-rated images in all three countries equally depicted women in demeaning positions and scenarios. This, the researchers surmise, "suggests that empowerment and disempowerment within pornography are potentially different constructs." So, gender equality is accompanied by sexual interest in a broader range of beauty types but not a decrease in porn's infantilization of females, use of dominating fetish gear on women or any of the other characteristics th

"But, "one has to be cautious. This is exciting science in rodents, but you can't just extrapolate to humans," says Emeran Mayer, a gastroenterologist and neuroscientist at UCLA's Center for Neurobiology of Stress who was not involved in the new study. Drug and food companies that make probiotics - beneficial bacteria taken in a pill or eaten in food such as yogurt - hope the products can help relieve depression, improve weight loss and cure other conditions, but there is little evidence in people that probiotics can accomplish those goals, Mayer says. "It's almost like science fiction; you can imagine the most amazing things because so little is known about it," he says. But, "So far there's really no evidence that probiotics affect emotions in humans." "

The book is about networked science: the use of online tools to transform the way science is done. In the book I make the case that networked science has the potential to dramatically speed up the rate of scientific discovery, not just in one field, but across all of science. Furthermore, it won't just speed up discovery, but will actually amplify our collective intelligence, expanding the range of scientific problems which can be attacked at all. But, as I explain in the book, there are cultural obstacles that are blocking networked science from achieving its full potential. And so the book is also a manifesto, arguing that networked science must be open science if it is to realize its potential. Making the change to open science is a big challenge. In my opinion it's one of the biggest challenges our society faces, one that requires action on many fronts. One of those fronts is to make sure that everyone - including scientists, but also grant agencies, governments, libraries, and, especially, the general public -- understands how important the stakes are, and how urgent is the need for change.

December 9th, 02005 - Sam Harris"The View From The End Of The World"This is an audio only presentation. This talk took place in the Conference Center Golden Gate Room, San Francisco. Quote: With gentle demeanor and tight argument, Sam Harris carried an overflow audience into the core of one of the crucial issues of our time: What makes some religions lethal? How do they employ aggressive irrationality to justify threatening and controlling non-believers as well as believers? What should be our response? Harris began with Christianity. In the US, Christians use irrational arguments about a soul in the 150 cells of a 3-day old human embryo to block stem cell research that might alleviate the suffering of millions. In Africa, Catholic doctrine uses tortured logic to actively discourage the use of condoms in countries ravaged by AIDS. "This is genocidal stupidity," Harris said. Faith trumps rational argument. Common-sense ethical intuition is blinded by religious metaphysics. In the US, 22% of the population are CERTAIN that Jesus is coming back in the next 50 years, and another 22% think that it's likely. The good news of Christ's return, though, can only occur following desperately bad news. Mushroom clouds would be welcomed. "End time thinking," Harris said, "is fundamentally hostile to creating a sustainable future." Harris was particularly critical of religious moderates who give cover to the fundamentalists by not challenging them. The moderates say that all is justified because religion gives people meaning in their life. "But what would they say to a guy who believes there's a diamond the size of a refrigerator buried in his backyard? The guy digs out there every Sunday with his family, cherishing the meaningthe quest gives them." "I've read the books," Harris said. "God is not a moderate." The Bible gives strict instructions to kill various kinds of sinners, and their relatives, and on occasion their entire towns. Yet slavery is challenged nowhere in the New or

When a cycad is ready to reproduce, it grows a large colorful cone, rich with pollen or seed. It signals its readiness by radiating heat or sending out attractive odors to pollinators, who travel back and forth. Once fertilized, the seed-rich cone is ripped apart by hungry seed carriers (who've included over the years, not just birds and insects, but dinosaurs, pterosaurs, bats; these trees have been eaten by just about everybody). But what if you can't find a mate? The tree in London (and its clones that are now growing in botanical gardens all over the world) is a male. It can make pollen. But it can't make the seeds. That requires a female. Researchers have wandered the Ngoya forest and other woods of Africa, looking for an E. woodii that could pair with the one in London. They haven't found a single other specimen. They're still searching. Unless a female exists somewhere, E. woodii will never mate with one of its own. It can be cloned. It can have the occasional fling with a closely related species. Hybrid cycads are sold at plant stores, but those plants aren't the real deal. The tree that sits in London can't produce a true offspring. It sits there, the last in its long line, waiting for a companion that may no longer exist.

It's not quite Cyclops, the sci-fi superhero from the X-Men franchise whose eyes produce destructive blasts of light, but for the first time a laser has been created using a biological cell. The human kidney cell that was used to make the laser survived the experience. In future such "living lasers" might be created inside live animals, which could potentially allow internal tissues to be imaged in unprecedented detail. It's not the first unconventional laser. Other attempts include lasers made of Jell-O and powered by nuclear reactors (see box below). But how do you go about giving a living cell this bizarre ability? Typically, a laser consists of two mirrors on either side of a gain medium - a material whose structural properties allow it to amplify light. A source of energy such as a flash tube or electrical discharge excites the atoms in the gain medium, releasing photons. Normally, these would shoot out in random directions, as in the broad beam of a flashlight, but a laser uses mirrors on either end of the gain medium to create a directed beam. As photons bounce back and forth between the mirrors, repeatedly passing through the gain medium, they stimulate other atoms to release photons of exactly the same wavelength, phase and direction. Eventually, a concentrated single-frequency beam of light erupts through one of the mirrors as laser light.

"How many mammal species live in the forest? It sounds like a simple question, but the actual distributions of shy, small or rare mammals are often murky, confounding conservationists seeking to protect them. Yet a paper published online on Tuesday in the journal Molecular Ecology explores a new way to track biodiversity: by capturing flies that feed on carcasses. The flies' stomachs offer DNA diaries of their recent meals, giving scientists clues to which animals live and die in the forest. "The animals are there, but you just don't see them," said Fabian Leendertz, a wildlife epidemiologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and an author of the paper. "Those flies will find them and will tell us what is there"

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s, but it has not yet materialized. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos.

"What they found here was a negative correlation. The MORE serotonin transporters you had, the less likely you were to reject unfair offers. The authors interpret this to mean that people with lower levels of serotonin transporter had a harsher sense of "fairness", than those with higher levels of serotonin transporter, and were more inclined to reject unfair offers. Why could this be the case? The authors looked at the personalities of the individuals. You might think that people with more aggressive personalities (or at least a tendency to get offended) might be more likely to reject unfair offers, but it turned out that this wasn't the case. Instead, it was people with more peaceful personalities, but stronger measures of trust, were more likely to reject the unfair offers. The authors believe that the people with higher trustfulness had higher standards of behavior, and thus were more likely to reject unfair offers, even if the rejected ended up badly for them"

"I simply cannot believe that John Cook of Skeptical Science and psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky managed, in just 8 pages, to create something as magnificent as their new Debunking Handbook. It is packed not only with wonderful graphics, but also with a clear explanation of why many attempts to defeat misinformation fail, and what steps must be taken to do a better job. The core issue, of course, is one that I've written much about-too many scientists assume that that facts win out on their own, but that isn't actually true"

""Experiments with amoebae that usually live as individuals but must also join with others to form multicellular bodies to complete their life cycles showed that cooperation depends on kinship. If amoebae occur in well-mixed cosmopolitan groups, then cheaters will always be able to thrive by freeloading on their cooperative neighbors. But if groups derive from a single cell, cheaters will usually occur in all-cheater groups and will have no cooperators to exploit. A multicellular body like the human body is an incredibly cooperative thing," Queller says, "and sociobiologists have learned that really cooperative things are hard to evolve because of the potential for cheating. "It's the single-cell bottleneck that generates high relatedness among the cells that, in turn, allows them to cooperate, " he says."

"The results are indeed worthy of attention, with Prof Taylor's team finding that in an early stage clinical trial of 11 people who were put on a diet of just 600 calories As written about in Dr Ben Goldacre's latest Bad Science column, producing a pattern from experimental data to come to a conclusion can be a 'magical' experience, but medicine is an 'imperfect art'. "We all know one atom of experience isn't enough to spot a pattern." writes Goldacre, "But when you put lots of experiences together and process that data, you get new knowledge.""

"If we are putting our time and resources into communicating science but we're not on social media, we're like a tree falling in an empty forest-yes, we're making noise, but no one is listening." "Only 17% of Americans can name a living scientist. That statistic crushes my heart.""

"He then asked a bunch of radiologists to review the slides of lungs for cancerous nodules. He wanted to see if they would notice a gorilla the size of a matchbook glaring angrily at them from inside the slide. But they didn't: 83 percent of the radiologists missed it, Drew says. This wasn't because the eyes of the radiologists didn't happen to fall on the large, angry gorilla. Instead, the problem was in the way their brains had framed what they were doing. They were looking for cancer nodules, not gorillas. "They look right at it, but because they're not looking for a gorilla, they don't see that it's a gorilla," Drew says. In other words, what we're thinking about - what we're focused on - filters the world around us so aggressively that it literally shapes what we see"

"But over the century-plus that the prize has been awarded, the Nobel Committees have increasingly seen fit to reward not discoveries, but technological innovations that enable more discoveries. After all, these might confer a greater "benefit to mankind" than any individual discovery. Two examples: PCR and GFP"

""A ship is safe in harbor, but that's not what ships are for." By Christie Wilcox | February 14, 2013 A year and a half ago, the decision to pack up shop at ScienceBlogs and begin blogging at Scientific American was an easy one. The inimitable Bora Zivkovic had assembled a blogging dream team, a group of people I respected and admired and couldn't wait to call networkmates. Under Bora's nurturing oversight, we all have flourished, and the SciAm blog network has become the most diverse and prolific science blogging network around"

"Evolution likes to keep what works best. The rest falls by the wayside. In theory, this means that the most "fit" variations, say, a color that looks poisonous or one particularly attractive to the ladies, would become the most common. By this logic, the many colors of the guppy should have conformed to a single common pattern long ago. But they haven't. Instead, the male guppies continue to show not only bright colors but also a high diversity of colors. What keeps the variety going? The rare-male effect. Female guppies prefer the males that are rare, no matter what their color pattern actually is. This effect has been documented in the laboratory in guppies and in other species like fruit flies."

"So far the treatment, known as faecal transplant, has been tested only on a drug resistant form of the bowel disease caused by the bacterium clostridium difficile. Antibiotics are unreliable against the superbug, but the transplant is 95% successful, saving patients from constant stomach cramps and chronic diarrhoea. "It sounds radical but it makes a lot of sense," said Seppelt on Thursday at a gathering of more than 4,000 Australasian anaesthetists and surgeons. "Usually patients are sufficiently miserable to go ahead, often using a donation from a relative." Healthy humans have about 100 times more bacteria cells in their gut than their own cells."

A stuffed teddy bear that appears as if it?s inhaling and exhaling was designed by researchers to comfort fussy babies in the crib, but it seems to work even better for their mothers, a new study reveals. According to the mothers? estimates of crying time, babies who spent five months snuggling with ?Breathing Bear? did not cry any less than infants who shared their crib with a regular stuffed bear, say Evelyn B. Thoman, Ph.D., and Claire Novosad, Ph.D., of the University of Connecticut. But mothers of the Breathing Bear babies reported less depression and stress and described their infants as less fussy and difficult.

Entropy can decrease, according to a new proposal - but the process would destroy any evidence of its existence, and erase any memory an observer might have of it. It sounds like the plot to a weird sci-fi movie, but the idea has recently been suggested by theoretical physicist Lorenzo Maccone, currently a visiting scientist at MIT, in an attempt to solve a longstanding paradox in physics.