What the scientists are saying…
Women and erotic images
Women often report being less turned on by sexual imagery than men – and they certainly watch far less pornography. However, in terms of brain activity, the two sexes’ responses to sexual imagery are identical, a new study has found. The researchers analysed data from 61 earlier studies in which both women and men had their brains scanned while viewing explicit photos and videos – and found no functional differences in the two sexes’ neurological responses. These occurred in the exact same brain regions – ones chiefly concerned with emotions and “reward processing circuitry”. This raises the possibility that many women would enjoy sexual imagery more were they not inhibited from doing so by social factors, said the team from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. However, brain scanning only captures neural activity at the level of relatively large anatomical structures, and they admit that it is possible that there could be differences on a cellular level that didn’t register on the scans.
Insects: the new superfood?
We shouldn’t just eat insects for the sake of the planet: a study has shown that they are also rich in antioxidants, qualifying them as a so-called superfood, along with the likes of quinoa, kale and chia seeds. Antioxidants protect against the effects of free radicals – molecules produced by the body that can damage cells and DNA. Eating food with a high antioxidant content is thought to help protect against a variety of conditions, including cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s and arthritis. Now, for the first time, scientists have studied the antioxidant properties of insects, which are already regularly eaten by around a quarter of the world’s population. The Italian team ground a selection of the creatures – from ants and worm larvae to scorpions and tarantulas – into dust and, having separated out the fat, they tested the resulting extract for its antioxidant content. Grasshoppers, silkworms and crickets got the top scores, with an antioxidant content roughly five times that of orange juice, and twice that of olive oil. Insects that prey on other animals, such as tarantulas, were generally at the lower end of the chart. “There’s a clear trend: the vegetarians have markedly higher antioxidant levels,” said Dr Mauro Serafini of the University of Teramo, who led the research.
Making Mars habitable
The difficulty of growing food on Mars’s cold, arid surface has long been seen as a major obstacle to colonising the planet. But there may be a solution: lining its surface with silica aerogel, a rigid material with extraordinary insulating properties. According to a team from Harvard University, Nasa and the University of Edinburgh, it might be possible to make parts of Mars fit for farming if they were covered with 3cm-thick sheets of the material, to create a warming akin to that created by greenhouse gases on Earth. This, they claim, would simultaneously overcome all the major hurdles to Martian agriculture: the sheets would block out harmful UV rays, while letting in enough sunlight to allow photosynthesis to occur; at the same time, they would raise temperatures sufficiently to melt ice locked under the red planet’s surface. The sheets could either be laid directly on the ground to grow algae and aquatic plants, or suspended to provide room for land plants, the scientists write in Nature Astronomy.
Skull redraws human timeline
New analysis of a skull fragment found in a cave in Greece in the 1970s suggests that modern humans may have arrived in Europe 150,000 years earlier than previously thought. When first discovered, the fossil was assumed to be Neanderthal. But having re-examined it using computer modelling and uranium dating, researchers from the University of Tübingen, in Germany, have concluded that its morphology is Homo sapiens, and that it is around 210,000 years old. Scattered findings over the past decade or so have suggested that modern humans began to leave Africa well before the “big push” 70,000 years ago. Prof Katerina Harvati, author of the new study, thinks this skull could be from a modern human originally from Israel, where remains dating back some 200,000 years were discovered last year.