Category Archives: science & medicine

More sex increases chances of pregnancy

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Believe it or not!

Some men should have sex every day to maximise the chances of getting their partner pregnant, researchers say.

Actually, this is not just stating the obvious, nor is it some guys making shit up to get more sex,

It is known for couples with fertility problems to abstain from sex for several days to boost sperm numbers before trying to conceive.  However, researchers have found this might result in poorer quality sperm.  Dr Allan Pacey, the secretary of the British Fertility Society, said that while not having sex allowed the numbers of sperm to build up, there was a “trade-off” between quality and quantity.

“This research shows that when you put people on a daily ejaculation regime, it reduces the figure for DNA damage.”

The conclusion of the researchers was that if a couple was initially trying to get pregnant, an interval of two to three days was probably advisable – whereas a man with high DNA damage and a “decent” sperm count should try more often.

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Australians scale new heights in obesity

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Actually, I don’t think that is the best metaphor for something like obesity. Shouldn’t it be more like Australians stretch for new breadths (or circumferences) in obesity?

According to a list issued by the Forbes organisation, Australia ranks 21st fattest country, 70% of people being regarded as overweight or obese. We aren’t as big a bunch of fatties as Americans, who came 9th, with 74%, but we’re fatter than the Poms, 28th, 64%. The gold goes to Nauru, in the South Pacific, with 94% of its population being fatsos.

There are 1.6 billion overweight adults in the world, according to WHO.

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Too much Simpsons, not enough work

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Rather than reducing greenhouse gas emissions, the US wants scientists to research technology to block sunlight, as a means of halting global warming. Scientists have previously estimated that reflecting less than 1 per cent of sunlight back into space could compensate for the warming generated by all greenhouse gases emitted since the industrial revolution. Possible techniques include putting a giant screen into orbit, thousands of tiny, shiny balloons, or microscopic sulfate droplets pumped into the high atmosphere to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption.

This comes in a response to a UN report prepared by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Actually, there’s some pretty scary stuff in the report, including:

  • projections for average global temperature rise from 1990 to 2100 will expand slightly, with a new range of one to 6.3 degrees. The 2001 report’s range was 1.4 to 5.8 degrees.
  • the increase was more likely to be three degrees or higher, with a 10 per cent chance of a six-degree rise by the end of the century.

According to Professor Stephen Schneider, one of the panel members:

“Hell, we buy fire insurance based on a 1 per cent chance,” he said. “If we’re going to be risk averse … we cannot dismiss the possibility of potentially catastrophic outliers and that includes Greenland and West Antarctica [ice sheets breaking up], massive species extinctions, intensified hurricanes and all those things. “There’s at least a 10 per cent chance of that. And that to me for a society is too high a risk … My value judgement when you’re talking about planetary life support systems is that 10 per cent, my God, that’s Russian roulette with a Luger.”

Here’s one way the sunblocking could be achieved.

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Wonder if thats where the idea came from?

(Actually, I wouldn’t dismiss the idea of reflecting some sunlight back into space out of hand, it may work. But I think it should be additional to, not a substitute for serious reductions in emissions.)

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Breasts

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More on the essential research front.

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A new study has found that Australian women’s breasts are getting bigger. This comes from bra maker Berlei which says it needs to make larger bras, and for the first time, sports bras come in E and F cup sizes. The increase in breast size is attributed to changes in diet, and the contraceptive pill.

With the bigger boobs comes the issue of “breast bounce”. According to the Berlei spokeswoman, larger breast sizes meant women were more likely to experience breast bounce when they exercised. Tests carried out at the Australian Institute of Sport found that wearing the right bra size would reduce breast movement and more woman would be able to play sport in comfort. (How good would it have been to have been part of that research team?)

Funnily enough, the “new” study also seems to have made similar findings in China, England, New Zealand, just to name a few.

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Science at work

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The annual science awards that academia awaits with bated breath were announced this week – the Ignobel Awards.

And there’s even some local flavour this year with an Australian team winning a mathematics prize for calculating the number of shots a photographer must take to almost ensure that nobody in a group photo will have their eyes closed. Congratulations to Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes of CSIRO for this earthshattering research! Apparently the guts of it is, for groups of less than 20, you divide the number of people by three if there’s good light or a decent flash, and two if the light’s bad.

Hopefully they did some real research while on the government payroll at CSIRO, and the work they got their prize for was done on their own time.

Other noteworthy scientific achievers awarded prizes included:

  • PEACE – Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing a teen-ager repellent – a device that makes a high-pitched noise that is annoying to teen-agers but inaudible to most adults; and for later using the technology to make cellphone ringtones that teenagers can hear but not their teachers.
  • ACOUSTICS – D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand of Chicago’s Northwestern University for a 1986 experiment aimed at discovering why the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard is so irritating.
  • MEDICINE – Francis Fesmire of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine and the team of Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven of Bnai Zion Medical Center in Haifa, Israel who both published studies entitled “Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage.”

Regarding the last one, I think I’ll stick to the tried and tested remedies for hiccups, like breathing into a paper bag, rather than sticking a finger up my arse.

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Big head does not equal big brain

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Researchers in Queensland have discovered that there is no link between head size and intelligence. Nor are people with the biggest brains the most intelligent.

I wonder if anyone has researched the correlation between other body parts and personal characteristics. For example, everyone knows that foot size is directly correlated to a number of other highly desirable attributes.

That reminds me, whenever I pack a suitcase, my damn shoes take up half the space before I even start on other stuff.

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DIY Surgery

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A couple in Framingham, in the US, had a thriving home based plastic surgery business going. However, after a patient died during a home made liposuction, they were charged with practicing medicine without a license. Luiz Carlos Ribeiro and Ana Maria Miranda Ribeiro, the enterprising couple, pleaded not guilty.

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