What Shortens A Mother's Life?

A collection of the weird, the trivial, the funny, and the dumb

The Mating Game

PARIS

    Women who are seeking a man in a big city take an especial interest in the size of his wallet, according to study into the urban mating game. Researcher Kevin McGraw at New York's Cornell University collected lonely-hearts ads from newspapers in 23 US cities of various sizes, and sorted them according to the priorities that women sought in their prospective partners.

    In the biggest cities, women tended to rate wealth higher, saying they sought a partner who was "financially stable," a "professional" or even more bare-facedly, "rich." In smaller cities, though, they tended to rate emotional qualities higher, pitching for a partner who offered "companionship" or a "long-term relationship."

    McGraw says that bigger cities mean more wealth, and women set their mating sights according to what is available and what their needs are. "A middle-class woman in New York might have higher resource demands simply because of a higher cost of living," he says.

    The cities studied by McGraw ranged from Los Angeles, with a population of 3.5 million people, to Montgomery in Alabama, which has a population of 350,000. The study is published in full in a specialist journal, Ethology.

The Son Factor

HELSINKI

    While sons are more coveted than daughters in a number of cultures around the world, pregnant women hoping for a son might want to reconsider now that a Finnish study has concluded that giving birth to sons shortens a mother's life span.

    Samuli Helle, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Turku in Finland, found while researching historical data that a mother's life span was on average cut short by 34 weeks for every son to which she gave birth, while it was extended by 23 weeks for every daughter. "The more sons a mother produced, the shorter her life span, while daughters increased her longevity," Helle said.

    He studied birth and marriage statistics for 375 Sami women-the indigenous population of Lapland- between the 17th and 19th centuries to find out how having large families affected the mothers' life spans. Even though Helle studied historical data, he said he believed his findings were to some extent still valid for women in modern societies.

    While the study, published in Science, found that a mother's longevity was not related to the number of children she bore, it concluded that the gender of her children did significantly affect her life span.

    "One possible explanation for the shortened life span while having boys might be that they are more physically demanding to bear and rear than daughters, since they are larger when born," Helle said. He attributed the extended life span for mothers who gave birth to daughters to the fact that daughters were better at helping their mothers in the home, making food and looking after younger children.

Proof Of Passion

PARIS

    A British inventor has come up a condom package aimed at protecting a would-be Romeo from accusations of rape by proving that a woman wanted to have sex with him. The gadget patented by David Morrow of Lancashire, northwestern England, comprises a foil-wrapped condom packed inside a foldout inner sleeve and an outer carton.

    The consenting parties jointly pull out the inner sleeve and open it to release the condom. They then record their fingerprints on a special surface on the sleeve, which is then slipped back into the outer carton as a record of mutual consent. Date marks also let people record the time of consent. New Scientist described the invention as "a sad sign of the times."

Brewed Intelligence

PARIS

    Clever rats tend to become heavy drinkers of alcohol, a finding that suggests a link between learning and excess drinking, a Canadian study says.

    A team led by Brian Smith of Montreal's Concordia University assessed 60 male rats for 19 days, grading the rodents' ability to navigate a maze to find a reward of honey-flavored rice. The rats were then exposed to alcohol for five days.

    The rats that figured out the maze quickest also drank the most alcohol, according to the study, reported in New Scientist. The researchers suggest that these rats, as good learners, quickly linked the smell and taste of alcohol to its feel-good factor. That implies that factors other than genes, brain chemistry, and environment contribute to heavy drinking, they say.

    Behavioral traits such as learning ability could be an additional risk factor, they argue. "When you're young and experimenting with alcohol, you get drunk a lot, you throw up and then you have hangovers," Smith said. "But as people get older, most learn to know their limits." A minority, though, continue to drink excessively and "improved learning skills" may be one of the factors that prompts them to do this.

Next To Godliness

PARIS

    Devout Roman Catholics appear to be vulnerable to obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a maniacal drive for hygiene that can cripple their everyday lives, a study says.

    Sufferers from OCD are often convinced that their surroundings are riddled with germs and in extreme cases can spend up to eight hours a day cleaning and scrubbing to banish the thought. least five million Americans and a million Britons are believed to suffer from the syndrome.

    Scientists led by Claudio Sica at Italy's University of Parma compared Catholic nuns and priests with committed lay Catholics and with others who had virtually no religious commitment. Each person was asked to document mild OCD symptoms, such as intrusive mental images or worries. The more devout Catholics reported more severe symptoms.

    The study, published in full in Behavior Research and Therapy, leaves open the question as to why there is an apparent link between religious devotion and OCD. Some psychiatrists suspect the cause is genetic. But opinion is divided as to whether the urge is exacerbated by a strict religious upbringing-in which actions are seen as either right or wrong and black or white-or whether people with these characteristics are drawn to a religious lifestyle and devotion to God.

More than just pompoms?

WASHINGTON

    Japanese and US researchers have discovered the relative merits of cheerleaders extend far beyond their short skirts and perky ponytails: Such encouragement actually triggers something in the brain to help athletes perform.

    In a study in the journal Science, the researchers used primates to discover a signal in a brain area involved in motivation that strengthens a task, resulting in successful completion and a reward. As the primates worked harder-in anticipation of the reward they would receive for good work-the signal emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex grew stronger.

    Researchers believe further study of that part of the brain could uncover abnormal brain functions such as obsessive compulsive disorder and could go a long way in explaining the reasons behind drug addiction. "It makes sense that there is such a signal that varies with degree of reward expectancy that keeps you on-task performing a long sequence of behaviors," said Barry Richmond of the US National Institutes of Health, which conducted the research jointly with the Japanese National Institute of Science and Technology.

    "Our speculation is that this signal never resolves for conditions like (obsessive-compulsive disorder)," Richmond said. "Or in the case of addiction, a drug has the effect of satisfying the signal."

    The primates in the study performed poorly at tasks when they had no expectation of reward. So, researchers concluded that feelings of increasing anticipation experienced over work completed in stages toward a predicted outcome may be traceable to the reward expectancy signal. "There is a substantial behavioral difference between knowing for certain what will happen in each successfully completed trial versus knowing the overall reward rate without knowing the outcome of each trial for certain," Richmond and his Japanese colleague, Munetaka Shidara, concluded.

    The researchers did not, however, determine the role fuzzy pompoms play as cortex motivators in professional athletes.

69 Cents For Penis Repair

BANGKOK

    Thai men injured in attempts to enlarge their penises need not shell out an arm and a leg for corrective medical treatment. Doctors at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn Hospital said penis repair is now an operation accepted under the kingdom's new 30-baht-per-visit (69 cents) universal health care scheme.

    "It is not expensive and is covered by the 30-baht medical care scheme as it can be categorized as an operation to cure a disability," Dr. Sirichai Jindarak said. Sirichai told The Nation daily that three to four patients per month were seeking treatment at his hospital alone for their wounded private parts, in most cases damaged in penis enlargement procedures gone awry.

    The remedy is an hour-plus operation in which parts of the scrotum are grafted onto the penis. The penile patch-up evolved from earlier techniques by doctors in South Korea, where penile enlargement procedures are popular, the reports said.

    Sirichai warned men against injecting artificial substances such as liquid silicone or olive oil into their penises to enlarge them, saying the process has led to several cases of deformities and brought a high risk of cancer.