Science Odds and Ends

If you’ve ever had a good, long look at the human phallus, whether yours or someone else’s, you’ve probably scratched your head over such a peculiarly shaped device. Let’s face it—it’s not the most intuitively shaped appendage in all of evolution. But according to evolutionary psychologist Gordon Gallup of the State University of New York at Albany, the human penis is actually an impressive “tool” in the truest sense of the word, one manufactured by nature over hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution.

Sometimes a trait is just a “by-product” of other adaptations. But in the case of the human penis, it appears there’s a genuine adaptive reason that it looks the way it does. Thus, in a theoretical paper published in the journal Evolutionary Psychology in 2004, Gallup and coauthor, Rebecca Burch, conjecture that, “A longer penis would not only have been an advantage for leaving semen in a less accessible part of the vagina, but by filling and expanding the vagina it also would aid and abet the displacement of semen left by other males as a means of maximizing the likelihood of paternity.”

For the first time, scientists have been able to paint a detailed chemical picture of how a particular strain of bacteria has evolved to become resistant to antibiotics. The research is a key step toward designing compounds to prevent infections by recently evolved, drug-resistant "superbugs" that often are found in hospitals, as well as in the general population.

More than 30 years after they left Earth, NASA's twin Voyager probes are now at the edge of the solar system. Not only that, they're still working. And with each passing day they are beaming back a messages any one of which could contain an unexpected discovery about the cosmos.

No one knows exactly how many more miles the Voyagers must travel before they "pop free" into interstellar space. Most researchers believe, however, that the end is near. "The heliosheath is 3 to 4 billion miles in thickness," estimates Stone. "That means we'll be out within five years or so."

These are the conclusions of a new article by University of South Florida psychologists Jennifer K. Bosson and Joseph A. Vandello. The paper is published in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Interestingly, people tend to feel manhood is defined by achievements, not biology. Womanhood, on the other hand, is seen primarily as a biological state. So manhood can be "lost" through social transgressions, whereas womanhood is "lost" only by physical changes, such as menopause.

Who judges manhood so stringently? "Women are not the main punishers of gender role violations," says Bosson. Other men are.

Bosson says that this area of research gives psychological evidence to sociological and political theories calling gender a social, not a biological, phenomenon.

Researchers this morning confirmed what former National Football League player Dave Duerson must have feared when he shot himself in the abdomen back in February, killing the 51 year old who had starred for several teams as a safety. An autopsy study showed that Duerson’s brain was riddled with classic signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a form of brain damage that is becoming an increasing concern among athletes in violent contact sports. Duerson’s form of suicide was apparently carefully chosen to preserve his brain as he had texted his family that he wanted the organ to be examined at the Boston University Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE).

Collisions that cause concussions and even lesser hits appear to spur the development of CTE. A major goal of CSTE is to develop methods to diagnose and monitor CTE during life. Only then, CSTE’s Co-Director Robert Stern noted, can researchers evaluate ways to avoid the brain damage or reverse it.

In the modern era our most ancient myths have to be recast in a vocabulary we understand and that means science. Watching Thor, the newest addition to Marvel's universe of comics turned into movies (and its next step towards the long awaited Avengers movie), you can see the explicit binding of mythic and scientific narratives. Equally apparent is a second kind of movement: the use of myth as an artistic expression that can open new perspectives on scientific truths.

As the great scholar of myth Mircea Eliade recognized, Hollywood's business has always been myth propagation. What is both new and fascinating, however, is the way myths now become braided with the language of science (consciously or unconsciously) so that we in a scientific culture can hear them. Thus Bifrost, the "burning rainbow bridge" linking realms becomes a mix of divine architecture and an element of general relativity (a worm-hole or Einstein-Rosen bridge). When you watch the film, be particularly mindful of the stunning visualization of Asgard — realm of the gods. Hanging above the golden realm is a starscape that is, literally, right out of modern science.

As an astronomer, I couldn't miss the variegated interstellar clouds in hues of cobalt and magenta that make up much of the film's cosmic background. They are taken right out from images captured by telescopes like Hubble, Spitzer and Herschel. Visualizing star-forming clouds in this way is more than just entertainment. It's a process by which the fruits of scientific cosmos building move from the rarified realm of theory into the imaginative resources of the culture as a whole.

It's not just that myth can find new expression in the language and concepts of modern science. The narratives of science itself can also find new ways of making themselves known to the culture through myth.