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THE emergence of the H1N1 swine flu has added urgency to what has become an annual ritual for millions of Americans: getting a flu shot. The good news is that scientists have developed a vaccine against the H1N1 virus. But it is taking much longer than expected to produce the hundreds of millions of doses the government had planned to distribute. And it is still too soon to know how effective the vaccine will be in preventing swine flu. In all likelihood, we’d have a better H1N1 vaccine — and more of it — if in our preparations we had...

New twist in Semenya gender saga By Gordon Farquhar BBC sports news correspondent Tests have revealed Caster Semenya's testosterone level to be three times higher than those normally expected in a female sample, BBC Sport understands. Analysis prior to the World Athletics Championships and the 18-year-old's big improvement prompted calls for a gender test from the sport's governing body. It was made public only hours before the South African, who has been backed by her nation, won the 800m in Berlin. A high level of the hormone does not always equate to a failed drugs test. But the news will...

Expert: Tests Extra-Complicated and Could Well Prove Inconclusive; South African Champ's Backers Call Probe Racist, SexistSouth Africans planned to rally in support of track champion Caster Semenya - celebrating her win in the 800 meters at the world championship, and denouncing questions about whether she should be allowed to compete as a woman as racist and sexist. The International Amateur Athletic Federation (IAAF) has initiated gender tests on Semenya. The tests are expected to take weeks to complete. They are extremely complex, involving a physical medical evaluation and including reports from a gynecologist, endocrinologist, psychologist, internal medicine specialist and gender...

The controversy over South African athlete Caster Semenya's gender has given the public a view into the complexities of gender. At first blush, the issue should be fairly straightforward: a person is either a male (with an X and a Y chromosome) or a female (with two X chromosomes). But the reality is that a number of conditions can blur the gender line. After her 800-meter final on August 19 at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, the International Association of Athletics Federations announced that they had asked Semenya to undergo tests to verify that she was female, with IAAF...

The family and friends of the teenager who struck gold in the women's 800 metres at the World Athletics Championships but now faces sex tests hit out yesterday at claims she could be a man. And South African Caster Semenya was also backed by her government, who called her the country's 'golden girl' and a role model for young athletes. Caster, whose rapid improvement over the last year raised eyebrows, won the women's title with a crushing performance in Berlin on Wednesday. The governing body of world athletics, the IAAF, has asked South Africa to test their star 18-year-old's gender...

Environmentalism cannot explain all behavior It is obvious and true that one’s environment influences one’s behavior. A Chinese will tend to act differently than a Russian; for example, they will tend to celebrate different holidays and show variation in respect to their elders, purely because of socialization. No one disputes this. It is also true and obvious that one’s physiology and biology, one’s neurochemical makeup, influences one’s behavior. A 250-pound, muscle-bound man is more likely to play for the NFL than is a short, 150-pound, desk-bound man. Goldberg is fond of repeating, “an adult male’s ability to grow a moustache...

Men and women really are different. The findings of hard science – in endocrinology, brain structure and function and genetics, for instance – have forced rational feminists to admit that, statistically speaking, men and women have different aptitudes, interests and responses, little though this is yet understood. Such generalisations never apply to an individual, of course, and although – for instance – women are underrepresented at the extremes of intelligence and statistically are less good at higher maths, chess, musical composition and physics, any one woman might be brilliant. Similarly, while women tend in general to be less aggressive and...

Neuroscientists found woman's partner status relevant for her interest in the opposite sex A study by neuroscientist Heather Rupp and her team found that a woman's partner status influenced her interest in the opposite sex. In the study¹, published in the March issue of Human Nature, women both with and without sexual partners showed little difference in their subjective ratings of photos of men when considering such measures as masculinity and attractiveness. However, the women who did not have sexual partners spent more time evaluating photos of men, demonstrating a greater interest in the photos. No such difference was found...

As the nation embarks on high school graduation season, The Choice was reminded of a study published last summer that sought to compare male and female high school valedictorians. The goal of the study, by an economics professor at Meredith College in North Carolina, was to examine the college choices, intended majors and career aspirations of high-achieving boys and girls, and see if there were any differences. Specifically, the study examined 150 valedictorians from high schools from the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, and surrounding counties. Its main conclusion? That when stacked up against the boys, the female valedictorians tended...

Women are less tolerant of each other than men are, according to a new study which may explain why some women prefer to have a male boss.The research, published in the US journal Psychological Science, found that women formed a negative view of their peers much quicker than men did. The team from Emmanuel College in Boston asked male and female college students to rate their room-mates under different scenarios. When asked to judge how they would rate their room-mates if they carried out a single fictional act of negative behaviour, after they had been otherwise completely trustworthy, women were...

Little girls may be made of sugar and spice and all things nice, but their armpits smell of onions. And while free of slug or snail odours, men's armpits pack a powerful cheesy whiff. That's the conclusion of research in Switzerland that involved taking armpit sweat samples from 24 men and 25 women after they had spent time in a sauna or ridden an exercise bike for 15 minutes. The researchers found marked differences in the sweat from men and women. "Men smell of cheese, and women of grapefruit or onion," says Christian Starkenmann of Firmenich, a company in Geneva...

LONDON: It is often suggested that there's natural smell in females that arouse males, but a team of testers have now found that women smell of onions while men smell of cheese. A Swiss team of researchers, who studied the armpit sweat samples from 24 males and 25 females, found marked differences in the sweat from men and women after they had spent time in a sauna or 15 minutes on an exercise bike. "Men smell of cheese, and women of grapefruit or onion," said Christian Starkenmann of Firmenich, a company in Geneva that researches flavours and perfumes for food...

ScienceDaily (Dec. 28, 2008) — To whom would you rather give money: a needy person in your neighborhood or a needy person in a foreign country? According to new research by Texas A&M University marketing professor Karen Winterich and colleagues, if you’re a man, you’re more likely to give to the person closest to you  that is, the one in your neighborhood  if you give at all. If you’re a woman, you’re more likely to give  and to give equal amounts to both groups. Winterich, who teaches marketing at Texas A&M’s Mays Business School, says she can...

Men tend to perform better than women at tasks that require rotating an object mentally, studies have indicated. Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old. While women tend to be stronger verbally than men, many studies have shown that adult men have an advantage in the ability to imagine complex objects visually and to mentally rotate them. Does this advantage go back to infancy? "We found the answer is yes," said Scott P. Johnson, a...

Male superiority on mental rotation tasks may develop within a few months after birth The gender gap in spatial abilities — charted for more than 30 years — emerges within the first few months of life, years earlier than previously thought, psychologists report. Males typically outperform females on spatial-ability tests by age 4, especially on tasks that require mental rotation of objects perceived as three-dimensional. Yet, two studies of 3- to 5-month-olds, both published in the November Psychological Science, conclude that a substantially greater proportion of boys than girls distinguish a block arrangement from its mirror image, after having first...

There is an enormous and growing body of research, encompassing the fields of biochemistry, neurobiology, physiology and psychology, which all point to a clear conclusion: that there are profound differences between men and women. These go well beyond the obvious physical appearances and reproductive differences; men and women differ at many levels, and also approach relationships differently. As such, this document rests upon, and makes the case for, these four foundational principles: 1. Gender differences exist; they are a fundamental reality of our biology and impact our psychology. Our maleness and femaleness is a key aspect to our personhood. 2....

WASHINGTON: Americans may like to make fun of girls who are good at math, but this attitude is robbing the country of some of its best talent, resear chers reported on Friday. They found that while girls can be just as talented as boys at mathematics, some are driven from the field because they are teased, ostracized or simply neglected. "The US culture that is discouraging girls is also discouraging boys," Janet Mertz, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who led the study said in a statement. "The situation is becoming urgent. The data show that a majority of the top...

Women are slower than men in running, in swimming, in cycling. Whether it is a 100-meter race on the track or a marathon, a 200-meter butterfly swim or a 10-kilometer marathon swim, the pattern holds. And even though some scientists once predicted that women would eventually close the gender gap in elite performances — it was proposed that all they needed was more experience, better training and stronger coaching — that idea is now largely discredited, at least for Olympic events. Researchers say there is no one physiological reason for the gap, although there is a common biological thread. “To...

Women have puzzled over it for years—why the heck do men do the things they do? Why do they profess their love for you one minute, then ignore you the next (say, when an Attila the Hun special turns up on TV)? Why can they not remember our birthdays? Let science explain some of these conundrums—and help you rev up your relationships! Be patient with his memory The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a smaller percent of the male brain than the female brain. If on your first date he can't remember where you work, even though you...

If you believe that girls fare significantly worse on math than boys in high-school tests, you would have been right — twenty years ago. Thanks to a concerted effort by parents and schools to get more girls in advanced math classes, the test-score disparity has completely disappeared, according to the National Science Foundation:

Zip. Zilch. Nada. There's no real difference between the scores of U.S. boys and girls on common math tests, according to a massive new study. Educators hope the finding will finally dispel lingering perceptions that girls don't measure up to boys when it comes to crunching numbers. "This shows there's no issue of intellectual ability--and that's a message we still need to get out to some of our parents and teachers," says Henry "Hank" Kepner, president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in Reston, Virginia. It won't be a new message. Nearly 20 years ago, a large-scale study...

Today’s headlines mostly got it wrong: * The New York Sun said "Study Shatters Myth That Boys Are Better At Math." * The New York Post said "Girls = boys in math skills." * The New York Daily News said "Math gender differences erased." * The New York Times said "Math Scores Show No Gap for Girls, Study Finds." Only the Wall Street Journal got it right: * "Boys' Math Score Hit Highs and Lows." This is, of course, a political topic. This is evidenced by the Times beginning their take on the story by recalling the fate of Larry...

Oops ! He forgot your birthday again. Well do not blame his memory for this innocent forgetfulness as the the reason behind it is down in the genes. While men may fail to match a woman's ability to remember the date of an anniversary, they are better at storing a seemingly endless cache of facts and figures and all this is because of genetic differences. Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, have found that males use different genes from females when making the new connections in the brain that are needed to create long-term memories. They believe...

When It Comes to Brains, Size MattersIn a study of 200 university students, the researchers found that women and men performed similarly on tests of language and reading skills. Differences in brain organization between men and women may be driven by sex differences in brain size, they said. “People have said women have relatively larger language areas of the brain,” said Christine Chiarello, UCR professor of psychology. “In none of our language tasks were women better than men. When you account for differences in brain size between men and women there are few differences in the relative size of areas....

LONDON (Reuters) - Gay men and straight women share some characteristics in the area of the brain responsible for emotion, mood and anxiety, researchers said on Monday in a study highlighting the potential biological underpinning of sexuality. ADVERTISEMENT Brain scans also showed the same symmetry among lesbians and straight men, the researchers wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The observations cannot be easily attributed to perception or behavior," the researchers from Sweden's Karolinska Institute wrote. "Whether they may relate to processes laid down during the fetal or postnatal development is an open question." A number of...

Melanie McGrath reviews The Sexual Paradox: Troubled Boys, Gifted Girls and the Real Difference Between the Sexes by Susan Pinker Why is it that some boys who fail at school or university - Albert Einstein and Bill Gates come to mind - go on to forge spectacular careers while many talented girls never reach the top of the career ladder? Here, in a nutshell, is the paradox explored in the developmental psychologist Susan Pinker's new book. It is time, says Pinker, to stop thinking of men as the 'default' setting and women as variants of the norm, when advances in...

Women earn most of America’s advanced degrees but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the "problem." Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man...

Boys and their toys? It's biological, not social By Nic Fleming, Science Correspondent Last Updated: 4:01pm BST 07/04/2008 Boys prefer playing with cars to dolls because of basic biological differences rather than social pressures, scientists say. The males monkeys played with the 'boys' toys while the females played with 'boys' and 'girls' toys Researchers observed young male monkeys spent more time playing with vehicles than with cuddly toys. They believe this suggests that in most cases boys have an innate predisposition for masculine toys, which is then reinforced by what they learn from their parents, friends and wider society. Dr...

Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s but lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem.’ Math 55 is advertised in the Harvard catalog as “prob­ably the most difficult undergraduate math class in the country.” It is leg­endary among high school math prodigies, who hear terrifying stories about it in their computer camps and at the Math Olympiads. Some go to Harvard just to have the opportunity to enroll in it. Its formal title is “Honors Advanced Calculus and Linear Algebra,” but it is also known as “math boot camp” and “a cult.” The two-semester fresh­man course...

Boys And Girls Brains Are Different: Gender Differences In Language Appear BiologicalNew research shows that areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks, and that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks. (Credit: iStockphoto/Rich Legg) ScienceDaily (Mar. 5, 2008) — Although researchers have long agreed that girls have superior language abilities than boys, until now no one has clearly provided a biological basis that may account for their differences. For the first time -- and in unambiguous findings -- researchers from Northwestern University and...

Robert A. Fink, MD March, 2008 Editors Note:Right Side News welcomes Dr. Robert A. Fink and his writing on critical issues of our day, in the culture wars we are engaged in. Please review his bio at the end of his article today. Boys - Casualties of the Gender Wars addresses the rise of gender feminism, and the wide use of prescription medicines in our children, especially boys. Robert A. Fink, M. D. -- Recently, educational researchers have begun to review the changes within our educational system brought about by such diverse factors as standardized testing in the schools, the...

On an unseasonably cold day last November in Foley, Ala., Colby Royster and Michael Peterson, two students in William Bender’s fourth-grade public-school class, informed me that the class corn snake could eat a rat faster than the class boa constrictor. Bender teaches 26 fourth graders, all boys. Down the hall and around the corner, Michelle Gay teaches 26 fourth-grade girls. The boys like being on their own, they say, because girls don’t appreciate their jokes and think boys are too messy, and are also scared of snakes. The walls of the boys’ classroom are painted blue, the light bulbs emit...

[selected gems -- read the article for even more crap!] But the books also serve as a reminder that we still haven't figured out what gender equality means or how to prepare kids to live it in the world they will assume. "Dangerous" limits boys to tasks, ideas and ways of being associated with boyhood, neglecting knowledge about girlhood that would serve them well as men working and raising children alongside women. "Daring," on the other hand, urges girls to learn both female and male skills and lore -- a good thing for advancement into what is still a man's...

Ever wondered why you catch your man when he lies to you? Well, that’s because you have superior sensory equipment. According to self-help authors and body language experts Allan and Barbara Pease, men and women think differently and have different behaviours. The body language research of humans reveals, that in face-to-face communications, non-verbal signals account for around 60 per cent of the impact of the message, while vocal sounds make up around 30 per cent. The other ten per cent or so is words, said the authors. While communicating, a woman's superior sensory equipment picks the information and analyses it,...

It's Wednesday night, just after 7, and the betting has already begun in Greg Avedesian's kitchen. He and six friends have bellied up to a white folding card table, wedged between stove and sink, and begun a four-hour game of Texas Hold 'Em. They pass the time slugging beer and exchanging good-natured insults at one another's expense. This particular group has been gathering for poker night once or twice a month for the past three years. The rules are always the same: There's a different host each week, buy-in is $20 and there are no girls allowed. No wives, no...

Baseball players and other athletes use steroids for one reason -- they work. Former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who launched an independent probe into the use of performance-enhancing drugs in March 2006, was expected to name on Thursday at least 50 Major League Baseball players who used banned drugs, despite rules and health warnings. They can cause acne, enlarged breasts and shrunken testicles in men. They cause women to grow facial hair and can lead to infertility in both sexes. Yet some players still use them. Why? Because they can help build muscle and endurance more quickly, mostly by speeding...

< >It is one crazy world when the man who rules Iran with an iron hand, denies the Holocaust, and vows to destroy Israel can speak at Columbia University, but the former president of Harvard and former Secretary of the Treasury can’t speak at U.C. Davis.< >I always thought we liberals were supposed to be in favor of free speech, open discussion, the marketplace of ideas, the notion that good ideas can defeat bad ones.< >It does us no good to forcibly silence those who say out loud what others believe in private.< >

WASHINGTON -- The latest smack-down of former Harvard President Lawrence Summers should extinguish any remaining doubt that political correctness is the new McCarthyism. Summers, you'll recall, was driven out of his university post in 2005 after he suggested at a conference that gender differences might account for an underrepresentation by women in science, math and engineering. Never mind that scientific evidence suggests as much. One simply doesn't say -- ever -- that men and women aren't equal in every way. Summers' remarks were seized upon, taken out of context and misinterpreted by many, including one female biologist from MIT, who...

Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn't much anybody can do about it, researchers said on Monday in one of the first studies to show scientifically that there are gender-based color preferences. Researchers said these differences may have a basis in evolution in which females developed a preference for reddish colors associated with riper fruit and healthier faces. ... "We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specialization in the evolutionary division of labor," she wrote in Current Biology. "There are biological reasons for liking reddish things." ... "Women have a very clear pattern. It's low...

All Things Considered, January 19, 2005 · Last Friday, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers suggested that innate differences between men and women might be one reason there are fewer women in the fields of science and engineering. More than 50 Harvard professors signed a letter protesting his statement, and alumnae have threatened to withhold donations. Summers has apologized, but commentator and psychological researcher Drew Westen says that apology might be unwarranted. (Audio at link.)

New evidence on sex differences in people’s brains and behaviors emerges with the publication of results from the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) Sex ID Internet Survey. Survey questions and tests focused on participants’ sex-linked cognitive abilities, personality traits, interests, sexual attitudes and behavior, as well as physical traits. The Archives of Sexual Behavior¹ has devoted a special section in its April 2007 issue to research papers based on the BBC data. BBC Science, in collaboration with researchers in the United Kingdom and North America, designed their research project on psychological sex differences in conjunction with their TV documentary, Secrets of...

Chemical castration is the common treatment for advanced prostate cancer, and more than 250,000 American men are taking these drugs. My initial response to the therapy was typical. My mood plummeted along with my testosterone level....My memory suffered. Not only was I now more likely to lose my car keys, I occasionally couldn’t remember where I left the car. When I was stoked up on testosterone in the old days,...I would obsess about exacting revenge on those who offended me. Now I see the foolishness in such macho fury. Rather than trying to undo others, I can now willfully exercise...

A long time ago I read a short online piece about how women could get their men to put the toilet seat down. Inherent in it was the idea that this was an example of men's lack of consideration and that the task at hand was one of disciplining these bad boys. I don't know, my attitude is that if women can leave a toilet seat down, men can leave it up. Of course, this is just a silly, pebble-in-the-shoe issue, but I see it as a metaphor for a modern phenomenon: The casting of women's characteristic behaviors as the...

Men may have developed a psychology that makes them particularly able to engage in wars, a scientist said on Friday. New research has shown that men bond together and cooperate well in the face of adversity to protect their interests more than women, which could explain why war is almost exclusively a male business, according to Professor Mark van Vugt of the University of Kent in southern England. "Men respond more strongly to outward threats, we've labeled that the 'man warrior effect'," he told the British Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. "Men are more likely to support a...

According to a poll released by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University men are still chivalrous and protective of their womenfolk. Women like to shop and are fastidious. While such findings merely point out the obvious to most, some see them as evidence that the transformation of America into a gender-neutral society is not proceeding as rapidly as desired. Amanda Holden of the National Organization of Women is depressed over the “glacial pace of change” revealed by the survey. “The whole concept of chivalry is demeaning to women,” said Holden. “It implies that men are voluntarily doing women...

Fact and feminism keep tripping over each other. For decades, radical feminists have prostrated themselves upon the altar of androgeny, flatly declaring that all differences between the sexes are socially constructed. So when men earn more money than women, they say that’s proof of sex discrimination. But men have the Y chromosome, while women don’t. And it turns out that one chromosome contains 78 very important genes. Those genes contain programming instructions that control a man’s brain structure, sex hormones, and a host of other functions. These critical genetic differences play out in thousands of ways that influence risk-taking, sex...

SAN FRANCISCO -- As an Ivy League-trained neurobiologist who oversees a research lab at Stanford, Ben Barres feels qualified to comment on whether nature or nurture explains the persistent gender gap in the scientific community. But it wasn't just his medical degree from Dartmouth, his Ph.D from Harvard and his studies on brain development and regeneration that inspired him to write an article blaming the shortage of female scientists on institutional bias. Rather, it was that for most of his academic life, the 51-year-old professor who now wears a beard was once known as Dr. Barbara Barres, a woman who...

Genetic differences between men and women hardly end at the X and Y chromosomes. A new study by researchers at UCLA has determined that thousands of human genes behave differently in the corresponding organs of males and females -- even in fat and muscle tissue. The findings help explain why the same disease often affects men and women differently, and why the effects of some drugs may vary drastically between the sexes. "This research holds important implications for understanding disorders such as diabetes, heart disease and obesity, and identifies targets for gender-specific therapies," said Jake Lusis, a professor of human...

[snip] We saw striking and measurable differences in more than half of the genes' expression patterns between males and females," said Dr. Thomas Drake, a professor of pathology. "We didn't expect that. No one has previously demonstrated this genetic gender gap at such high levels."

There is clear evidence that men perform better at spatial tasks and women outpace men on tests of verbal usage and perceptual speed, according to research conducted by Wendy Johnson, postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Minnesota, and Thomas Bouchard, director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research. The findings, which will be published in the journal Intelligence, indicate that there is little difference in how the genders fare as far as general intelligence, however. But since engineering positions are overwhelmingly filled by men, this further supports the theory that spatial abilities are key to success in...