Greetings after a week of vacation!
Bet you never saw those words in that particular combination. Here’s the story:
Recently two scientists put together a new hypothesis about the evolution of the female orgasm. They argue that female mammals had orgasms, or at least precursors of them, 150 million years ago. And it started out with a function that was lost in our ancestors long ago. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, August 12, 2016”
The New York Times, August 1, 2016
An eye is for seeing, a nose is for smelling. Many aspects of the human body have obvious purposes.
But some defy easy explanation. For biologists, few phenomena are as mysterious as the female orgasm.
While orgasms have an important role in a woman’s intimate relationships, the evolutionary roots of the experience — a combination of muscle contractions, hormone release, and intense pleasure — have been difficult to uncover.
Continue reading “Scientists Ponder an Evolutionary Mystery: The Female Orgasm”
It’s a little disturbing to realized that this is my last newsletter of July. Time is moving too fast. But at least I have accumulated a few things to offer you from the past week…
I’m forever grateful that the good folks at Stat let me go a bit crazy in writing about my genome. Now at last the whole three-part beast is online, complete with my Neanderthal genes and inner viruses. If you haven’t read it yet, now you can just binge through it like a night of “Breaking Bad.” Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, July 29, 2016”
STAT, July 28, 2016
Psychiatrists have been using hypnosis on patients for decades — to help them reduce their pain or kick a smoking habit, among other reasons.
But what, exactly, is happening to the patients’ brains when they are in a hypnotic state?
To tackle that question, David Spiegel, a psychiatrist at Stanford University School of Medicine, and his colleagues recently decided to scan patients’ brains and see if hypnosis left a mark. It did.
Continue reading “In patients under hypnosis, scientists find distinctive patterns in the brain”
The New York Times, July 27, 2016
The first large study of North American wolf genomes has found that there is only one species on the continent: the gray wolf. Two other purported species, the Eastern wolf and the red wolf, are mixes of gray wolf and coyote DNA, the scientists behind the study concluded.
The finding, announced Wednesday, highlights the shortcomings of laws intended to protect endangered species, as such laws lag far behind scientific research into the evolution of species.
The gray wolf and red wolf were listed as endangered in the lower 48 states under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s and remain protected today, to the periodic consternation of ranchers and agricultural interests.
Continue reading “DNA Study Reveals the One and Only Wolf Species in North America”