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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Women’s choice of men goes in cycles

Women are attracted to more masculine-looking men at the most fertile time of their menstrual cycle, psychologists have shown.

During the less fertile times, they choose men with more feminine-looking faces. These are seen as kinder and more co-operative, but less strong and healthy genetically.

A controversial implication of the new research is that, in evolutionary terms, it is natural for a woman to be unfaithful in order to secure both the best genes and the best carer for her children.

beetles with the biggest horns have the smallest testes, showing that in evolutionary terms you cannot have it all. [ABC Online]

Apparently according to earlier research by the scientists, the smaller horned (and sometimes hornless) males have much more powerful sperm and are much sneakier!

Instead, small, hornless males seem to invest their limited resources in longer sperm and disproportionately larger testes, compensating for their inability to guard a female by ejaculating more seminal fluid per copulation. In this way, small males may increase the odds of fertilizing an egg each time they manage to sneak past their larger competitors who mate more often but possibly with less efficiency. When unable to scuttle past their larger opponents, sneaker males may even dig side tunnels into a female’s chamber, where they are often detected by the resident guard and booted out. In the midst of all this rivalry, the female seems equally willing to mate with any male who manages to reach her, and it is likely that the competition continues within her, between the sperm of rival males. Thus the tradeoffs associated with horns may explain why males have evolved the two alternate mating strategies of guarding and sneaking. [Innovation - Princeton Journal of Science and Technology]

For plenty more information on weird beetle facts, check out Professor Douglas Emlen’s homepage.

Piers then figured out how many shots I’d need to be 99% certain of getting a good one. He found that photographing thirty people in bad light would need about thirty shots. Once there’s around fifty people, even in good light, you can kiss your hopes of an unspoilt photo goodbye.Piers also came up with a rule of thumb for calculating the number of photos to take for groups of less than 20: divide the number of people by three if there’s good light and two if the light’s bad.”

Here’s a graph to that illustrates the number of photos required to be 99% confident of getting a good one:

When a person intruded into a line, this resulted in an objection 54% of the time. However, when 2 people intruded at once, there were objections 91.3%. The figure shows that 73.3% of objections came from people behind the intruder, and the person directly behind the point of intrusion objected most frequently.

I’m presuming that these were only vocal objections as I thought there would be more if it included unvoiced ones, but you’d have to read the actual study…

Women in their 40s who went to single-sex schools subsequently had higher incomes than those in mixed classes, a long-term study shows. Researchers at London University’s Institute of Education are tracking almost 13,000 people born in 1958. They said boys and girls in single-sex schools were less likely to have studied “gender stereotyped” subjects.

Phew, lucky I changed schools in the second year of high school to an all girls’ school. But isn’t it nice to know that the reason they earn more is because they were less likely to take up “female” occupations, which are paid less than technical or “male” jobs…