Culturegeeks

Wow, the perfect gift! Does it come in Serenity model?

(via Boing Boing)

India is continuing their attempt to conquer the world through outsourcing.  This time?  Outsource their wombs.

So Jess, you say fake babies are creepy, how about this? 

Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.

A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.

 

I do have to question whether their circumstances are quite so rosy.  But, at least they did give some consideration to the surrogate’s situation.  Still, creeps me out.

Or, rather, that’s what I thought that this article was going to suggest.  Actually, it ended up being more interesting than I thought.

Researchers studied a group of Masai who live on basically a diet of red meat and milk, a diet that’s 60% fat, half of which is saturated.  They have really low cholesterol.

They followed Masai who moved to more urban environments, and found that their cholesterol skyrocketed.

It turns out, the whole “Saturated Fat leads to heart attacks,” is a theory that was put forth in the 60’s because scientists noted that people with higher fat intakes have more heart attacks.  They would have had to delete the Masai data point if they had known about it.

“In the nutrition field, it’s very difficult to get something published that goes against  established dogma,” says Mozaffarian. “The dogma says that saturated fat is harmful, but that is not based, to me, on unequivocal evidence.” Mozaffarian says he believes it’s critical that scientists remain open minded. “Our finding was surprising to us. And when there’s a discovery that goes against what’s established, it shouldn’t be suppressed but rather disseminated and explored as much as possible.”

At any rate, the article made me happy in that it doesn’t do the, “if you want to avoid heart attacks, do this,” but it’s rather an analysis of research studies. 

Turning Homosexuality on and off

Within hours of the treatment, previously heterosexual male fruit flies would be courting other males, and treatment could also cause flies who had been engaging in homosexual behavior to become exclusively heterosexual…