Daily Loaf

Until recently there has been relatively little research that combats or supports the common conservative argument that gay couples are unfit foster parents. As reported in a recent New York Times article, the studies on gay parents are finally coming in, proving what half of the nation already suspected: gay parents provide the same quality of upbringing as their straight counterparts, with a few improvements.

The findings are reported in Abbie E. Goldberg’s new book, Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children, which analysis more than 100 academic studies on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

In this over-medicated age, drug companies continue expanding their empires into the farthest realms of human behavior, developing chemical cocktails for whatever ails us: if depressed take Prozac, if scatterbrained take Adderall, if sleepless take Ambien, if impotent take Viagra… Now researchers are searching for drugs that will help you stay in love.

Consider how people often attribute their inability to remain in a relationship to psychological reasons, saying such things as, “I’m not happy anymore,” or “the spark is gone.” In a sense, a lack of love is simply a chemical imbalance, which theoretically can be corrected. Someday soon drug companies may develop a prescription pill that helps you stay in love the same way Rogaine sustains hair. Read the rest of this entry »

A recent article, “How Men Select Women,” sums up the science of what men look for in female mates. I’ve synthesized the information down to a blog-sized bite. Please note that these finding are based on averages, and that a wide variety exists on each side of every claim. Averages simply give us a language for talking about attraction. If you find you don’t match all of these criteria, which is pretty much everyone, rest assured there are many people who will have a thing for your differences.

High reproductive value: Men are attracted to younger women who have more fertile years ahead of them, or a high “reproductive value.” Read the rest of this entry »

Dr. Pek Van Andel had a common idea: to film sex. However, because Andel is a scientist and not an amateur porn director, he had to mask his desire in a scientific project that would garner public funding. Thus was born the scandalous video, “Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Male and Female Genitals During Coitus and Female Sexual Arousal.”

While you won’t find this title at your local adult video story, it’s on Youtube. Why, you may ask, is a video of intercourse available on Youtube, and CL for that matter? Aside from the fact that this video is less sexual than an emaciated celebutant in a blurry sex tape, what is portrayed in the video in no way resembles the common image of sex. After watching what looked like two beating hearts pounding together, I had serious doubts about if what I was doing in my marital bed even constituted sex. Read the rest of this entry »

A new study in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology found that female fruit flies prefer to keep intercourse short because they get a reproductive boost from shorter sex.

Male fruit flies prefer sex to last longer, which leads to a struggle between mating flies.

“After about a minute and a half (of mating), the female begins kicking and struggling,” says Kirsten Klappert, of the Swiss Federal Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Celebrating Independence Day or creating environmental disaster? – Kelly Rothwell looks at the littered aftermath of Fourth of July celebrations and wonder why, instead of giving back in celebration of their freedom, people decide to light off fireworks, leaving mass amounts of debris in the water and on the beach.

Local Food: Dinner in, and from, the garden at Gateway Organic Farm – Chef Gui Alinat gives information about Gateway Organic Farm’s next “Dinner in the Garden” event, an incredible local foods experience featuring nine Bay area chefs.

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Back in 2007, when Congress passed a law setting more stringent rules on the manufacture of light bulbs, a lot of people sounded the death knell for Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb. Australia got rid of them, along with a few other countries, and news articles and blog entries in the United States dubbed the planned phasing out as a full-on “ban.” Now, with President Obama’s most recent call to make lighting more efficient in homes and businesses, it again seems that the incandescent bulb will go the way of the dodo in the name of energy savings.

Or will it? It seems that some folks are instead using this governmental push for efficiency as the kick in the pants they needed to finally stop making outdated products. Read the rest of this entry »

What’s the buzz on the latest issues in the Green Community? Check out what you may have missed this last week:

Steps to becoming greener: Reducing your waste, reusing and recycling: Joshua Poll gives some useful tips for ways to start reducing, reusing, and recycling things you thought you could just throw away.

Genetically engineering cows that will produce less methane, reducing greenhouse gases: Geneticists in Canada are trying to engineer a cow that produces less methane, resulting in less greenhouse gases, reports Brian Roberts.
Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, so this might be a little daunting for some, but what does it really take to generate homebrewed electricity?

If you are a little handy, have a few power tools, and really want to get off the grid, check out the videos husband and wife team Dan and Denise Rojas have put together at their site, Green Power Science.
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Have you ever heard the Vietnam-era quote, “war is not healthy for children and other living things?” It is a staunchly obvious and painstakingly reasonable appeal that cuts to the ethical core and casualties of war.  I read an article this week that reminded me of it, but instead of war, the murderous culprit in this story is climate change.

A new report by the Global Humanitarian Forum (GHF) says that global warming already kills about 300,000 people a year.  If that projection is not startling enough– or if you have more of an economic mind, and are not much swayed by stacks of human figures—the report also says that climate change costs around $125 billion in economic losses annually.
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This new and exciting strain of swine influenza has Mexico running in circles looking for a US Citizen to blame for the epidemic.  The CDC is running in circles hoping that this flu strain is just a late bloomer and will not become an historic event that exposes the limited control Public Health actually has over the public’s health; and the rest of us, hungry for yet another reason to fret, hang on every word that is being scrawled or belched about this airborne death. Read the rest of this entry »

A frenetic energy pulsed through the line of people wrapped around the second floor of USF’s Marshall Student Center the other night, complete with crazed college-age fans squealing in delight as they discussed the man they were about to watch.

Some major celebrity? No. Just a person that these students grew up with. A trusted TV friend. The white-jacketed brainiac who taught us how to create an exploding volcano out of some baking soda and vinegar.

That’s right: It was Bill Nye, the Science Guy.

About 800 people jam-packed the Marshall Center Ballroom to see the University Lecture Series speaker on Tuesday night, and another 500 overflowed into a separate room where the lecture was being broadcast live. At first, sitting five or six rows from the stage, I felt like I was attending a tween-infested Hannah Montana concert, not a lecture by one of America’s most famous geeks. (My friend, a self-proclaimed biologist, informed me that Nye truly is a “diva” in his own right.)

In anticipation of the Science Guy, there was clapping, stomping, chanting (”Bill! Bill! Bill!” “Nye! Nye! Nye!”) and a few kids in the second row started The Wave. But the loud, stadium-style antics didn’t hide the fact that the audience was primarily composed of hardcore science nerds. Every time Nye mentioned a particular profession, 10-20 kids would “Woo!” in support. (Losers for the night: Physicists, who got a big yell from only one really geeky guy. Really, it was kind of sad.)

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Let’s talk about some books that don’t look like books – at least not like the books they really are. These are stealth books.

Flip through The Stuff of Life (Hill and Wang, $14.95) and you think it’s a comic book.

It has comic-like drawing, none of the dark stuff that infuses graphic novels. But once you get into it, you see it’s a genius way to to teach science.

Maybe your school had budget cutbacks. Even back in the Seventies, we had those. My chemistry class was taught by a math teacher, because we couldn’t afford a chemistry guy. And in college, I was one of those students who attended only enough classes to pass the course. Another missed opportunity.

So those of us who are science-deficient for one reason or another need the comic book approach.

In The Stuff of Life, writer Mark Schultz and illustrators Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon (amazingly, not related) take us through all of that stuff we should know … the stuff we wish we knew.

Back in high school, that was always the rap on science and math. “I’m never going to use this,” kids used to say.  That was before they made the great discovery that there’s tremendous pleasure in just knowing.

What Schultz cooked up to make this so interesting is an alien called Bloort 183. He’s been sent to Earth to research its genetic history and report back to the home planet. Read the rest of this entry »