Three articles all on the subject of biology for this month. Science news website LiveScience had an article this month with a controversial angle: it cites a new study published in Psychopharmacology which found that male mice liked to fight for no reason other than to fight. The experiment involved first placing a male and a female pair of mice in a cage, then removing the female one and introducing another male “intruder” mouse. After the initial fight, the scientists arranged for the cage to be rigged such that when the mouse nose-poked a specific trigger, the intruder mouse would be able to return to the cage. They found that the resident mouse would actually do this often, suggesting that it regarded fighting as a sort of reward. The scientists then treated the mice with a drug known to block the effects of dopamine in parts of brain involved in rewards and found that this had the effect of reducing the mice’s tendency to nose-poke the trigger.

The controversy in this case comes from the researchers’ argument that the results would be equally applicable to humans as the reward pathway in humans and mice are similar and that aggression is highly conserved in vertebrates in general and mammals in particular. I believe that this remains to be proven but would not find it surprising if true. In any case, if indeed this were proven true, it would reinforce the usefulness of activities like sports and games to vent the natural aggression of human males.

Next, in a report in Reuters Health, Dr. Ed Diener of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Campaign and his colleagues claim in a new publication in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science that being too happy may not be a good thing. They appear to have made a statistical analysis of six previous studies on happiness and life outcomes and found that those people who rated their own happiness at moderate levels made more money than those who report maximum levels of happiness. He also suggests that moderately happy people live longer than extremely happy people and end up being better educated. He speculates that this might be because very happy people have little incentive to take more effort to improve their lives or take extra care of their health. Happiness itself if it were to take the form of being ecstatic all the time, might even take a toll on people’s cardiovascular systems.

Intriguingly however, the same report also notes that the very happiest people also have more stable intimate relationships than only moderately happy people, so it’s not as if being extremely happy is all that bad.

Finally a report also published in Reuters that touches upon the world of sports. South African Oscar Pistorius had both of his legs amputated below the knee when he was 11 months old because he was born without fibulas. Today however, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, can not only run but can apparently compete at running at the Olympic level. His lower legs have been replaced with carbon fiber blades which according to a study by Professor Peter Bruggerman of the German Sport University at Cologne, allows him to run at the same speed as able-bodied sprinters while using 25 percent less energy.

Due to this finding, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has banned Pistorius from competing in the Beijing Olympics this year while acknowledging that Pistorius, as someone who was born without the ability to walk and trained himself to be sprinter, epitomizes perfectly the ideals of the Olympic spirit. Sport, faced with all sorts of challenges from technology in the form of doping, hormone treatments and now this, is having a hard time sticking to the ideal of natural humans competing fairly and equally.

Personally, I agree with The Economist when it says that sport should be prepared to throw the doors wide open to technologically-enhanced athletes. Sports thrive only because there are spectators and fans willing to pay to support it. It stands to reason that technologically-enhanced athletes would be capable of more spectacular and amazing sporting feats and that there is a natural market for it. It would be better if it were officially allowed and regulated for maximum safety and fairness. After all, natural sports is already highly unfair as science has proven that genes and natural talent play a defining role in sporting ability. Allowing greater use of technology would only help to close this natural gap, so what could be fairer than that?