A COMMON parasite can increase a women’s attractiveness to the opposite sex but also make men more stupid, an Australian researcher says. About 40 per cent of the world’s population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii, including about eight million Australians.
Human infection generally occurs when people eat raw or undercooked meat that has cysts containing the parasite, or accidentally ingest some of the parasite’s eggs excreted by an infected cat. The parasite is known to be dangerous to pregnant women as it can cause disability or abortion of the unborn child, and can also kill people whose immune systems are weakened.
Until recently it was thought to be an insignificant disease in healthy people, Sydney University of Technology infectious disease researcher Nicky Boulter said, but new research has revealed its mind-altering properties. “Interestingly, the effect of infection is different between men and women,'’ Dr Boulter writes in the latest issue of Australasian Science magazine.
“Infected men have lower IQs, achieve a lower level of education and have shorter attention spans. They are also more likely to break rules and take risks, be more independent, more anti-social, suspicious, jealous and morose, and are deemed less attractive to women.
“On the other hand, infected women tend to be more outgoing, friendly, more promiscuous, and are considered more attractive to men compared with non-infected controls.
“In short, it can make men behave like alley cats and women behave like sex kittens'’.
Boulter said the recent Czech Republic research was not conclusive, but was backed up by animal studies that found infection also changes the behaviour of mice. The mice were more likely to take risks that increased their chance of being eaten by cats, which would allow the parasite to continue its life cycle. Rodents treated with drugs that killed the parasites reversed their behaviour, Dr Boulter said. … - news
Monday, January 15, 2007
The Case of Earth’s Incredible Shrinking Field
Earth’s magnetic field has been monitored carefully since the 1830s, when the German polymath Karl Friedrich Gauss invented a way to measure its intensity. Since then, the field has decayed at the startling rate of about 5earthf1.gif percent per century …. British geophysicist David Gubbins and his colleagues have [examined] data hidden in the logbooks of ships that navigated the planet’s oceans in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. The results have allowed Gubbins to build a remarkable picture of the behavior of Earth’s magnetic field in the centuries before detailed measurements were possible. …
It turns out that measurements of the direction of the field relative to the position of the sun were common between 1590 and 1840. “Mariners made extremely accurate measurements, because their lives depended on it,” says Gubbins. Over the past 20 years or so, he and others have been mining this data from the many thousands of ships’ logs that have survived in museums and archives, an endeavor that has occupied a steady flow of graduate students. Gubbins says there are 50 000 measurements alone in the records of the British East India Company, which had a monopoly on sea trade between Britain and India for much of the period that interests him.
Gubbins has now combined these data with the paleointensity measurements to calculate that Earth’s field was probably stable prior to 1840, or at least decaying at a much slower rate than it is now.
So what caused the sudden decline after 1840? Gubbins says it is due to regions of reversed magnetic field flux appearing in the Southern Hemisphere in the late 18th century, probably as a result of small thermal changes in Earth’s core. The field’s abrupt drop is consistent with other studies, he says. Data from older rock analyses suggest that the intensity of Earth’s field has declined by as much as 40 percent over the past 2500 years, at an average rate of 1.6 percent per century. That’s much slower than the current rate… “It’s just coincidence,” he says, “that today’s period of rapid change began at about the time we became able to measure it.” - spectrum
Earth’s Magnetic Field Weakening in Stages
The planet’s magnetic field flips—north becomes south and vice versa—on average every 300,000 years. However, the actual time between reversals varies widely. The field last flipped about 800,000 years ago, according to the geologic record. Since 1840, when accurate measures of the intensity were first made, the field strength has declined by about 5 percent per century. If this decline is continuous, the magnetic field could drop to zero and reverse sometime within the next 2,000 years. - Natlgeo
What was going on 800,000 years ago? The Chinese* Used Hand Axes for one. (* Pretty misleading statement since there was no China at that time and this was Homo erectus, not Homo sapiens.) According to the BBC, 10,000 years after that, humans mastered fire. (* Again, Homo erectus.) The first creation and use of stone tools by hominids appears around 2.5 million years ago in the archaeological record. The most accepted view among anthropologists is that our species, Homo sapiens, originated in the African savanna as early as 250,000 years ago. So, no “modern human” has ever witnessed or survived a reversal of the Earth’s magnetic field.
Since the magnetosphere shields the surface of the Earth from the charged particles of the solar wind, will all life on Earth be fried in as the shields drop? Wiki says this:
“Some speculate that a greatly diminished magnetic field during a reversal period will expose the surface of the earth to a substantial and potentially damaging increase in cosmic radiation. However, homo erectus and their ancestors certainly survived many previous reversals. There is no uncontested evidence that a magnetic field reversal has ever caused any biological extinctions. A possible explanation is that the solar wind may induce a sufficient magnetic field in the Earth’s ionosphere to shield energetic particles even in the absence of the Earth’s normal magnetic field…”
Can birds see the planet’s magnetic lines?
Many birds, especially those that migrate, can use the “Earth’s magnetic field to stay their course during long flights. Scientists still aren’t sure how they do it, but one recent study suggests birds might have a form of synesthesia that lets them “see” the planet’s magnetic lines as patterns of color or light that is overlaid on their visual surroundings. Humans must rely on familiar landmarks or the sun’s position to locate North, and many can’t even manage that. - livesci.
This may be new research with birds, but the idea of humans “Seeing” the lines of the Earth’s power is something I read years ago in a Carlos Castaneda book.