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Next
Event
Friday, October 24, 2008, 07:00 PM: Life Extension with Jerry Emanuelson
Jerry will be talking about his 25+ year experience with life extension treatments, including hormone injections, his longevity doctor, what treatments to ask a doctor for, how to find and guide a doctor, an interesting example of the 'medical priesthood vs. empowered patient' conflict as more healthcare treatments are about prevention/enhancement, getting his DNA scanned with deCODEme and opensourcing his genome on the SNPedia.com, and more.
More...
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Sex
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Joan Roughgarden thinks Charles Darwin made a terrible mistake. Not about natural selection—she's no bible-toting creationist—but about his other great theory of evolution: sexual selection. According to Roughgarden, sexual selection can't explain the homosexuality that's been documented in over 450 different vertebrate species. This means that same-sex sexuality—long disparaged as a quirk of human culture—is a normal, and probably necessary, fact of life. By neglecting all those gay animals, she says, Darwin misunderstood the basic nature of heterosexuality.
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They are created in their thousands, for one purpose: to die for their brothers. They are the enigmatic "parasperm", infertile sperm that can dominate the ejaculate of some flies. They measured how long sperm survived inside the reproductive tract of the female, which contains sperm-killing chemicals. They found that the more parasperm there was in the ejaculate, the longer the fertile sperm survived. "They forgo reproduction to help their brothers."
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I am neither markedly masculine nor notably effeminate. Nor am
I typically perceived as androgynous, not in my uniform of
Diesels and boots, not even when I was younger and favored
dangling earrings and bright Jack Purcells. But most people
immediately read me (correctly) as gay. It takes only a glance
to make my truth obvious. I know this from strangers who find
gay people offensive enough to elicit a remark—catcalls from
cab windows, to use a recent example—as well as from
countless casual social engagements in which people easily
assume my orientation, no sensitive gaydar necessary. I’m not
so much out-of-the-closet as "self-evident."
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Researchers have identified a key family of genes and proteins that help bring C. elegans chromosomes together during meiosis. This specialized cell division produces gametes, or sex cells, each of which has only one copy of each chromosome instead of the two copies most cells carry. During meiosis a cell replicates and then divides twice, resulting in sperm or eggs with just one set of chromosomes each. For meiosis to work properly, corresponding chromosomes must first identify each other, then line up accurately and stay together during the recombination process. Different organisms use different methods for these critical steps; in C. elegans, the job is initiated by regions called Pairing Centers, which are found near one end of each of the worm's six chromosome. Dernburg's lab has been studying the role of these special regions.
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