The end of Sex Week and the start of SciFoo

Posted on July 30, 2010July 17, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

I hope you enjoyed Sex Week (in a purely intellectual way, of course). I’m now off to a confab called SciFoo, which I’ve heard a lot about over the years and am now finally able to attend. Each year, Google and O’Reilly Media bring together a motley crew of scientists, writers, and others, and basically tell them to make up a conference on the spot. There are a whole bunch of people on the attendee list that I’ve waited years to meet in person, so it will definitely be worth the trip to California. But if there are any SciFoo vets out there with advice for making the most of the experience, I’d love to hear it.

I will try to report on my experience, either in a measured reflection next week, or in a torrent of half-baked tweets.

The End of Sex Week: Darwin, Sex, and Dada

Posted on July 30, 2010July 17, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

[This is the last post for Sex Week]

The animal kingdom is filled with wild extravagances, and a lot of them have something to do with sex. Hermit Fiddler crabs wave their claws, swordtail fish flash their swordtails, manakins leap and buzz their wings. Darwin considered these displays so important and so puzzling (“the sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me feel sick!” he wrote to a colleague), that he dedicated half of a book to the subject.

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Sex Week continued: Water strider blues

Posted on July 29, 2010July 17, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

[This is my third post of Sex Week]

Here’s a song for the male water strider, from the days when Rod Stewart could do no wrong:

In my first two posts for Sex Week, I wrote about the delights of courtship: the alluring, informative fragrance of yeast and the seductive buzz of electric fish. These signals stir the opposite sex into action–to creep towards a fellow fungus, or to head-butt a prospective mate. But in many species, the actual consummation that all that courtship leads up to does not turn out to be a blissful union. Instead, some males will use all kinds of force and subterfuge to prolong their mating and raise the odds that their sperm fertilize their mate’s eggs. And the females? In some species, they very often just want to get away.

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Sex Week continued: when love shocks

Posted on July 28, 2010July 17, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

[This is my second post of Sex Week]

In the sexual universe, all sorts of things can feel good, even if we humans have a hard time imagining how they can bring any pleasure. Electricity, for example, may be nothing for us beyond a painful shock. But for some fishes, it is the essence of desire.

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Gonna Have A Fungal Good Time [With Apologies to James Brown]

Posted on July 26, 2010July 17, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

If yeast could sing, it might sound something like this.

This single-celled fungus–for which we should give thanks for bread, beer, and wine–can reproduce in several ways. Most of the time, it produces buds that eventually split off as free-living cells of their own. Its daughters are identical to itself, carrying the same two sets of chromosomes. Sometimes, however, life get rough for yeast, and they respond by making spores, each with only one set of chromosomes. Later, when times get better, the spores can germinate. In some cases the yeast cells that emerge just grow and divide. But they can also have sex. One yeast cell merges with another one, combining their DNA to produce a new yeast cell with two sets of chromosomes.

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