The 7 coolest #science things that happened in the last 7 months

It’s been a while. Here are the coolest science things that happened in the last 7 months:

 November 12, 2014 / the Philae lander

10 years and 6.4 billion kilometres after it was first launched, the Rosetta spaceship reaches its hyperbolic trajectory with the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Rosetta then Russian-doll launches a smaller landing ship called the Philae lander across the remaining 22 kilometre gap. The lander alights upon the speeding comet, both travelling 15 kilometres per second. The robot expends its primary batteries in 57 hours, motoring around the comet at 1.1mph and beaming back nuanced information on the surface composition of comets. As the sun sets on where Philae has landed, the lander falls asleep, another lifeless hunk of carbon 673 million kilometres from the sun

UPDATE: Philae has re-awakened! The comet’s trajectory has brought it closer to the sun, and solar energy has begun trickling through Philae’s panels and into its batteries. It will soon begin drilling into the surface of the comet and sending back information about the comet’s innards.

December 26, 2015 / Big (DNA) Banking

Some Stalin-grad students at Moscow State University secure funding to create a ‘genetic Noah’s Ark‘: a databank of DNA from every plant and animal on Earth. Except, ostensibly, the gay plants and animals.

January 29, 2015 / the ahuizotl gene

2015 is the UN-declared ‘International Year of Soils’! If ‘Year of Soils’ doesn’t get your crank a-turning, just think about the fact that fruit fly lifespans can now be extended by 60% by activating certain genes that destroy unhealthy cells.

What would you do with another 48 years? I’d try to finally make it to In-and-Out Burger

/learn how skin heals

February 9, 2015 / bionic foliage

The world’s first bionic leaf comes to life. This biochemical hijack allows researchers to efficiently convert solar energy into isopropanol, a potent biofuel. Isopropanol has about the energy density of ethanol (~20 megajoules/litre), but historically has been too cost-intensive to produce.

March 2, 2015 / what does light look like? 

For the first time ever, quantum mechanics is photographed. Light is captured as a simultaneous wave and particle, and that’s what light looks like ^

/here’s how the did it

April 10, 2015 / CERN + Large Hadron Collider (LHC)

The Large Hadron Collider, a giant quantum bicycle tube buried in north-east Europe, comes back online after a two-year hiatus. Back in 2012, the collider showed us a boson that looked exactly like the predicted Higgs-boson. It’s postulated that new higher energy runs will start to show us more and more new particles.

May 18, 2015 / old blind mice

UC Irvine neurobiologist Sunil Gandhi restores the vision of old, blind mice by implanting embryonic tissue into their visual cortexes. The implanted neurons spur a complete rewiring of the visual cortex by inducing a state of neuroplasticity that is normally only present in young, developing mouse brains. I have one eye, and I can’t WAIT to see what they’ll come up with next.

Stay tuned.

Estrogen Likely Gives Women A Higher Pain Tolerance Than Men

Estrogen imbues women with the ability to conceive and foster the spark of life, and the capacity to withstand the pain of childbirth. Does the pain protection offered by estrogen give all women a higher general threshold of pain?

womenonit.com

Pain and estrogen

There is a scientific concensus that women perceive pain differently than men. This difference is due in part to the activity of 3 hormones that we collectively call ‘estrogen’: estradiol, estriol, and estrone.

Estrogen likely contributes to an increased pain threshold in women- it increases opioid and endorphin production, and elevates the concentration of neurotransmitters like serotonin and dopamine at the point of nerve synapse. Estrogen also increases the number of neurotransmitter receptors, which allows more of these pain-killing molecules to bind and activate. Women can chemically cope with pain in a way that men cannot.

Estradiol levels skyrocket to over a thousand times their normal during birth. This increase stimulates a massive chemical harmony of opioid and endorphin activity, allowing mothers to better withstand labour and birth pain.

Seems simple, right? Estrogen is a wonder-drug and women are badasses because they have 5x more of it coursing through their veins than men.

seriouslymen.com

Why we can’t say ‘women definitely have a higher pain threshold than men’:

Like everything #science, this is not black and white.

Not all studies have found that women can withstand more pain when their estrogen levels are high, as we might expect. Although there is evidence that women experience temporomandibular (jaw/neck) and migraine pain more frequently and more intensely during times of low estrogen, some studies have found that women are more sensitive to other kinds of pain even at times of high estrogen.

There have also been scant few studies comparing general pain tolerance between men and women, and each is plagued with science-y problems like small sample sizes or lack of reproducibility. Some don’t include one gender, and instead use a standardized pain scale.

Some studies have even found that men have a higher tolerance to pain. One study concluded that men had a higher pain threshold because they were able to leave their hands in ice-water for a longer period of time than women.. with a cash incentive for holding your hand under longer and in a room full of other dudes.

Many men have insecurity issues rivaling the White House, and asking them to compare pain thresholds with other men is tantamount to asking them to compare penises. There a lot of social and cultural factors that contribute to pain thresholds, and we simply haven’t done the right studies yet.

Bragging rights

The implications of pain and estrogen go beyond the battle of the sexes.

wikipedia.org

Consider: a woman goes to the doctor because she crashed while drunk-mountain biking home from her buddy’s birthday kegger and tore all the cartilage that attaches her collarbone to her shoulder, as has been known to happen to people. If she has her accident in the third week of the reproductive rhythm, when her estrogen is high, she might report a different level of pain than in the first week, when her estrogen is low.

If she is prescribed a certain dosage of painkiller while she has high estrogen, the prescription may not be enough to protect her during times of low estrogen. So, while most doctors strive to treat men and women equally, they could be denying women the specificity they require to fully address their pain management.

Guys are dolls

In comparison to women, men are completely static, the hormonal equivalent of mannequins. Testosterone does fluctuate in males because of stress, exercise, etc.. but by no more than ~10%. The cycling of estrogen in the female body involves a complicated rhythm where estrogen levels soar to as much as 400% of their basal levels and then tumble to back to baseline, all in as little as a few days.

Next time you see a woman walking with a cast or squinting through the pain of a migraine, have a little sympathy- she likely has a higher pain threshold than her male counterpart, but it doesn’t make her life any easier.

Inbreeding And The Disgusted Expression on Your Face When You Read The Word ‘Inbreeding’

WAIT. THERE. RIGHT THERE. 

Hold that face. 

That disgusted grimace has roots in ancient genetics. 

You just received a directive from your DNA. 

A roll of the dice

I’m going to tell you a story about bad genes, but I need to give you a crash course in genetics first. Genetics, like dice, are governed by basic probability.

You have two copies of every gene in every cell of your body: one from Mom, one from Dad. Genes come in different versions, called ‘alleles’. It’s a bit of a crapshoot- if Mom or Dad have a recessive allele for a gene that has two alleles, they have 50% chance of sticking you with it. If both of them give you the recessive allele, your cells have no choice but to start up their little engines and start pumping out proteins based off of the blueprints of that shitty version.

Unlike normal proteins, proteins based on recessive alleles will defy regular cell signals and perpetrate all kinds of rudeness. The parts of the body that use these proteins are negatively affected, sometimes in very serious ways. 

The thing is- your sisters and brothers are also likely to get a copy of the bad version of the gene, and any babies you have with them will have a higher likelihood of exposing an ‘inbred’ trait. For a glimpse of how this can turn out, check out my post on the ugliest dog in the world, Sam, who is horribly inbred.

Luckily, the infinite sandpaper of evolution has scrubbed away all parts of your brain that are attracted to your siblings. 

DNA directives

Excluding the various sad sacks on Maury and Jerry Springer, most animals have gotten better and better at figuring out who their relatives are so they can avoid them when it comes time to breed.

For example, humans have evolved the use of olfactory clues (smells) to identify potential mates, and this includes using smells to determine which mates might be your relatives. There is also strong sociological evidence that children who grow up in close proximity display sexual aversion to one another, even if they’re not related.

So get over it. I know it’s gross, but inbreeding avoidance (that “BLECH” face) is just an indication that your DNA is working. Our ancient genetic script is looking out for us, whether we know it or not.