The latest on ovulation

There is now a pile of research demonstrating that the ovulatory cycle affects female preferences and behavior. Specifically, when ovulating, women find stereotypically masculine males more attractive, place a higher premium on confidence, fantasize about men other than their partners more often and so on. (See Gangestad et. al. [pdf] for a review). And, perhaps most memorably, Geoffrey Miller and colleagues demonstrated that lap dancers' tips are highest (pdf) when they're fertile. (Earning Miller and co an Ig Nobel).

The latest paper (press release here) in this area is by Martie Haselton and Greg Bryant at UCLA on how womens' voices become more high pitched and feminine during ovulation. The abstract:

Recent research has documented a variety of ovulatory cues in humans, and in many nonhuman species, the vocal channel provides cues of reproductive state. We collected two sets of vocal samples from 69 normally ovulating women: one set during the follicular (high-fertility) phase of the cycle and one set during the luteal (low-fertility) phase, with ovulation confirmed by luteinizing hormone tests. In these samples we measured fundamental frequency (pitch), formant dispersion, jitter, shimmer, harmonics-to-noise ratio and speech rate. When speaking a simple introductory sentence, women's pitch increased during high- as compared with low-fertility, and this difference was the greatest for women whose voices were recorded on the two highest fertility days within the fertile window (the 2 days just before ovulation). This pattern did not occur when the same women produced vowels. The high- versus low-fertility difference in pitch was associated with the approach of ovulation and not menstrual onset, thus representing, to our knowledge, the first research to show a specific cyclic fertility cue in the human voice. We interpret this finding as evidence of a fertility-related enhancement of femininity consistent with other research documenting attractiveness-related changes associated with ovulation.

Encephalon #57

The 57th edition of Encephalon is out at Mind Hacks. Highlights: PodBlack Cat on superstition; Songs From the Wood on the fascinating phenomenon of infantile amnesia; Sharp Brains with an interview with cognitive neuroscientist Michael Posner (about self-regulation and other topics); and Pure Pedantry on the neuroscience of hypothesis generation.

Great edition!

Picture: Science Worldwide

Talking of science in the developing world... New Scientist features a series of maps distorted to reflect some metric, like the proportion of rain falling in a certain area. The picture below shows the proportion of scientific papers published in 2001 by authors living in particular territories:


As you can see, the United States, Western Europe and Japan dominate, and Africa lags far behind. We have work to do...

Quote: Feynman on science

A great quote from Richard Feynman, from "The Value of Science":

It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed, and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

Yet another skeptical blog

Remember the Skeptologists TV show (which I mentioned before) that is currently under development? Well, the whole cast plus one of the producers have launched a group blog called Skepticblog. The contributors are: Kirsten Sanford, Michael Shermer, Phil Plait, Ryan Johnson, Mark Edward, Yau-Man Chan and Steven Novella. Now that's the who's who of skepticism right there...

I must say that I am a tad worried about Steve though. He now has four blogs, two podcasts, a full-time job and a family. How the hell does he do it?

Audio: The rise of therapeutic nihilism about depression

Therapeutic nihilism - the belief that we have no effective medical cures at all, or no cure for some condition - has recently arisen about clinical depression. Most famously, University of Hull professor Irvin Kirsch and colleagues argued in a recent meta-analysis published in PLoS Medicine that, when previously unpublished data are taken into account, there is no evidence that antidepressants have clinically significant benefits over placebo. (It is important to note that there is a strong placebo effect, so in a sense we do have a somewhat effective remedy - it's just not pharmacological).

The 36th Maudsley Debate (mp3 here), held at King's College London, considered this question in the form of the motion "This House Believes Antidepressants are no Better than Placebo." Irvin Kirsch and Joanna Moncrieff (of University College London) argued for the motion and Lewis Wolpert (of King's College) and Guy Goodwin (of Oxford) against. From my lay perspective, Kirsch won the debate hands down. While I thought Goodwin raised a bunch of interesting methodological points, I don't think they were decisive and he did commit several fallacies (the appeal to consequences, most prominently). Moncrieff's argument, on the other hand, was rather weird and somewhat beside the point. And Wolpert, I thought, was pretty bad: he was impassioned and entertaining, to be sure, but his substantive argument was shot through with fallacies and factual inaccuracies.

In any case, give the debate a listen. What do you think?

(Via The Mouse Trap).

SA Bloggers Survey

News24, Afrigator and Amatomu are running a survey of South African bloggers. I suggest my fellow SA bloggers participate - it will certainly be interesting to see the results. As a sweetener, there are a bunch of prizes for participants, including the possibility of your blog being featured on News24. (That should drive some nice traffic).

(Via: Ewan's Corner)

Mouse Party

Mouse Party is an awesome little animation that teaches the basics of the neuroscience of addiction. The animation is part of a set of educational resources on the science of addiction, which is itself one part of the broader Learn.Genetics site. (There is also Teach.Genetics website, but it's still in beta). By the way, the Inside a Cell animation, part of the Amazing Cells suite of materials, is pretty cool too.

All these resources were created by the NIH-funded Genetic Science Learning Center at the University of Utah.

(Hat tip: Hugh).