Wow, I haven’t done one of these in a while since my Economist subscription lapsed. I only renewed it fairly recently. Anyway, here are the three most interesting science related news items that I’ve seen in October, with one of them from The Economist. Let’s start with that one first.
The biological causes and effects of homosexuality is one of the perennial questions when you try to explain human nature in scientific terms. The most obvious of these questions is why homosexuality, since it can in large part be attributed to genetic causes, persists when common sense dictates that homosexuals shouldn’t be in a good position to pass along their genes to the next generation? A recent article highlights one possible answer: genes that make men more feminine and genes that make women more masculine confer a reproductive advantage to the person who possesses them, so long as they do not actually push them into homosexuality.
As explained by Brendan Zietsch and his colleague at the Queensland Institute of Medical Research in Brisbane, Australia, the number of sexual partners reported by an individual correlates with his or her “gender identity”. In other words, more feminine men and more masculine women report more sexual encounters with members of the respective opposite sex than normal. By studying statistics on twins of whom one is homosexual and the other is not, the researchers also found that heterosexuals with a homosexual twin have more sexual encounters than heterosexuals with a heterosexual twin, thereby providing a plausible explanation of why genetically caused homosexuality persists even though homosexuals don’t have children to pass their genes on to.
Next up is a report from The Guardian on the discovery of a tree fungus that appears to naturally produce hydrocarbon-like chemicals. The fungus which was found inside the ulmo tree in the Patagonian rainforest produces a range of chemicals that scientists are virtually identical to the fuel-grade compounds of existing fossil fuels. Other organisms, especially algae, have been found to produce similar chemicals, but so far none have been able to match the high energy density of those produced by this fungus, which the lead scientist doing the work, Gary Strobel of the University of Montana, has called “mycodiesel”. He claims that modern diesel engines would be able to use this “mycodiesel” without any modification.
Even more promisingly, the food that the fungus consumes to produce this fuel is simple cellulose, which is a common waste product of many industries. Companies have tried to produce fuel from cellulose, usually by using enzymes to convert it to sugar first, but being able to mass produce biofuels from cellulose using the fungus is a huge stepstone that could have lasting ramfications for the entire fossil fuel industry.
Finally, one of oddest news that I’ve seen in a while, Juan Escobar, a graduate student of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that it is possible to get quite a lot of x-rays out of, of all things, peeling ordinary Scotch tape off its roll. The experiment was built on findings by Russian scientists more than 50 years ago who reported detecting x-rays when Scotch tape was peeled off glass. Escobar and his colleagues succesfully collected enough x-rays from peeling a roll of Scotch tape in a vacuum chamber to create an x-ray photo of a finger.
Lest ordinary office workers become overly wary of using Scotch tape, he explains that the phenomenon only works in a vacuum. The things you learn everyday!