News

We're still evolving

“Charles Darwin famously studied evolution in the Galapagos Islands,” Carolyn Johnson writes in The Boston Globe. “Now a team of scientists has chosen a decidedly less exotic locale to study the subject – Framingham. Residents of the Boston suburb have long participated in a landmark study of their cardiovascular health, which has shown that smoking and high cholesterol increase risk of heart disease. Now data compiled for the heart study are providing evidence of human evolution in action – and have led researchers from Yale University, Boston University School of Medicine and the University of Pennsylvania to predict that the community's next generation of women will be slightly chubbier and shorter and have lower cholesterol. Evolution occurs because organisms with advantageous traits are more likely to survive and pass on those traits to their offspring …” Researchers found several traits in Framingham women who had more children – being shorter and chubbier, having a first child at an earlier age, experiencing menopause later and having lower blood pressure or cholesterol.

Male concubines?

“Derrick Hayes's wife, an oncology nurse, makes twice the money he does in his job as a juvenile corrections officer in Columbus, Ga.,” writes Brian Alexander, author of America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction . “And since she brings home much of the bacon, he wants to make sure he's offering her some perks, too. He leaves affectionate notes around the house for her and tries to keep the house tidy. And he wants to make sure he shines in one special area. Since she is ‘handling certain areas of the relationship' like making most of the money, he said, ‘you've got to handle your business.' By ‘business,' Hayes means sex. ‘You've got to be creative. You've got to be good!' As more and more women in the U.S. out-earn the men in their lives, or become the sole breadwinners, men are trying to figure out how they fit into the relationship, including in the bedroom.”

Source: MSNBC.com

Marital bliss

“The secret to a happy marriage for men,” BBC News reports, “is choosing a wife who is smarter and at least five years younger than you, say U.K. experts. These pairings are more likely to go the distance, particularly if neither has been divorced in the past, according to the Bath University team.” Their work, based on a study of more than 1,500 couples, is published in the European Journal of Operational Research.

Oh, not now

“Researchers in Germany have come up with an iPhone app that allows motorists to drive a car using their mobile phone,” Ananova.com reports. “The iDriver app converts the iPhone into the real-life equivalent of a video game controller, capable of directing a two-ton minivan, reports The Daily Telegraph. The app has separate buttons for accelerate and brake, along with a steering wheel that exploits the iPhone's motion-sensitive capabilities.” The remote-control app, which is not commercially available, is the brainchild of artificial-intelligence researchers at the Free University of Berlin.

Our greatest need?

“When I was in college, I loved studying philosophy,” William Saletan writes for Slate online magazine. “If I were put in charge of a philosophy class for a day, I'd break the students into groups of three and give them the following problem to work out: Which is more important – food, sleep or sex? The exercise is really about what ‘important' means. But my instinct is to go with sleep, on the grounds that if you try to avoid all three, sleep is the one that will overtake you first. By that standard, it's the one you need most.”

A lawn of compassion

“As the unreal flight of the balloon boy from Fort Collins [Colo.] has descended into a legal struggle between lawyers and law enforcement, a drive for compassion for the Heene family has begun,” The Denver Post reports. “Cheri Foster, 50, and her daughter Tamara Failla, 25, are organizing the Fort Collins Care Movement to show compassion for the family at the centre of the high-profile alleged hoax.” The women, who said they've never met the Heenes, were urging residents to drop notes of concern on the family's lawn on Monday. “They might have made a mistake, as we all have done and will continue to do,” Ms. Failla told the Fort Collins Coloradoan newspaper. “So rather than condemn, let's come together and raise this family up with our support. Let's remind them that they are not alone.”

Thought du jour

“The folly which we might have ourselves committed is the one which we are least ready to pardon in another.”

– Joseph Roux (1834-86)