Macho hugs

If you were to ask me whether men or women are more likely to kiss and makeup after a fight, I'd confidently say that women are more inclined towards this than men and I would be wrong. A team of anthropologists who studied hugging, hand-shaking and other sorts of cuddly contact after fierce sports competitions found that men were much more likely to perform these acts and that they tended to engage in them for longer than women.  

The whole reason for this research was to determine how men living in tribal settings are able to work together following the sorts of violent tests of dominance that are common in these sorts of places. Unfortunately for us, the researchers were not able to get permission from their university to have spear duels on their campus to explore this question so they had to settle for studying athletes after playing tennis and ping pong instead. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here. 

Salted vault

Bounty stored within?

Image courtesy of Rob Lavinsky

It is relatively easy for us to work out how much oxygen is found in the air available on the planet today but determining what the air was like millions of years ago is considerably more difficult. Researchers have traditionally looked at the surfaces of iron-bearing rocks and studied how much the iron has rusted. While this works, it is not ideal and the search has been on for a better method. Now a team is revealing that they have found one in the form of salt.

When ocean water evaporates, beautiful cubic salt crystals get left behind and drops of water are sometimes trapped inside them. The researchers behind the new work speculated that tiny traces of ancient air might get trapped with the water inside these crystals and that analysis of this air might allow them to identify how much oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide was present in the atmosphere long ago. They tested this idea out in the lab with salt crystals that they collected from numerous sites all around the world and the results are simply sublime. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this here.     

Portable vaccine factories

Getting vaccines to the developing world is tricky since many of them are temperature sensitive and require carefully controlled refrigeration throughout their long journey from the facilities where they are made to the impoverished regions where they are badly needed. Many have argued that it would be better to move vaccine production facilities closer to the places where the vaccines are heavily distributed but this is not as simple as it sounds. Genetically modified cells are often responsible for the creation of the proteins found in vaccines and there are a zillion rules and regulations controlling their use and transport. These laws are sensible since these critters could truly cause a lot of ecological damage if they were to escape into the wild but the red tape is so thick that it is nearly impossible to move these cells across international borders. Now a team is revealing that they've found a clever way around this problem by effectively breaking these genetically modified cells into their component parts for transport such that they wouldn't be able to do much of anything even if they did escape. You can read full coverage of this research in my article in The Economist here.  

Love and marriage

Is frequent sex a key ingredient required in maintaining marital bliss? Psychologists have debated this topic for decades and the data on the matter are about as divided as they come. Roughly half of the studies exploring the this query reveal evidence that sex makes married partners more satisfied with one another and roughly half show that sexual frequency has not effect whatsoever. Now a new study aimed at studying why the conflict itself exists is arguing that all of the controversy is arising form the fact that psychologists are asking the wrong questions.

The new work started off by doing what all other studies have done. It gathered up married couples, asked them how often they had sex and then gave them a whole bunch of surveys that well known to measure marital satisfaction. All of this provided precisely the same unclear picture that has been seen time and time again. However, where the new work differed was in the addition of an automatic partner attitude test.

This test measured instant feelings. It started by presenting participants with a series of words and asking them to rate on a seven point scale how positive or negative each word was as quickly as they possibly could. Periodically, an image would flash up on the screen before more words were shown. Sometimes this picture was of the participant's spouse, sometimes it was of a hot member of the opposite sex, sometimes it was of a neutral image like a tree. 

What the researchers found was that participants ranked words more positively after they saw an image of their spouse if they had frequent sex with them but did not do so if they have infrequent sex. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this subject here. 

Beer biology

If only we had some Japanese sake yeast.

Researchers who just finished studying the genetics of 167 yeasts commonly used in brewing have started using their findings to create new beer flavours. Their latest experiment involved taking some genes from a yeast that is traditionally used to make aromatic Japanese sake and adding them to an incredibly efficient brewer's yeast that has the nasty habit of sometimes leaving the ales with an unpleasant spicy flavour. The end result was the creation of a new beer brew that has a hint of sake to it. You can read more in The Economist article that I wrote on this subject here.