A Momentary Flow

This image, spreading over the Internet, suggests that frequent ejaculation lowers the risk of prostate cancer with one third.

But is it also true? We checked the original research paper to find out. The researchers studied men under 70 with (n=1079) and without (n=1259) prostate cancer.

The subjects were asked to report the average number of times that they had ejaculated per week in their most sexually active year in each of three decades of age: their 20’s, 30s and 40s.

The researchers found a significant negative relationship between risk on prostate cancer and number of ejaculations for men in their 20s (and not in their 30s and 40s). The results suggest that men who have on average five or more ejaculations per week in their 20s have a lower risk on developing prostate cancer than those who ejaculate less often in their 20s.

“Ejaculatory frequency, especially in early adult life, is negatively associated with the risk of prostate cancer, and thus the molecular biological consequences of suppressed or diminished ejaculation are worthy of further research,” the researchers conclude.

So gentleman, when you’re still in your 20s it seems beneficial to ejaculate at least 5 times a week. But if it reduces the risk of prostate cancer by a third is not confirmed by this research.

Source: Giles, G., Severi, G., English, D., McCredie, M., Borland, R., Boyle, P., & Hopper, J. (2003). Sexual factors and prostate cancer BJU International, 92 (3), 211-216 DOI: 10.1046/j.1464-410X.2003.04319.x

Researchers led by biomedical engineering Professor Shy Shoham of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are testing the power of holography to artificially stimulate cells in the eye, with hopes of developing a new strategy for bionic vision restoration.

Computer-generated holography, they say, could be used in conjunction with a technique called optogenetics, which uses gene therapy to deliver light-sensitive proteins to damaged retinal nerve cells. In conditions such as Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP) - a condition affecting about one in 4000 people in the United States - these light-sensing cells degenerate and lead to blindness.

“The basic idea of optogenetics is to take a light-sensitive protein from another organism, typically from algae or bacteria, and insert it into a target cell, and that photosensitizes the cell,” Shoham explained.

Intense pulses of light can activate nerve cells newly sensitized by this gene therapy approach. But Shoham said researchers around the world are still searching for the best way to deliver the light patterns so that the retina “sees” or responds in a nearly normal way.

The plan is to someday develop a prosthetic headset or eyepiece that a person could wear to translate visual scenes into patterns of light that stimulate the genetically altered cells.

In their paper in the February 26 issue of Nature Communications, the Technion researchers show how light from computer-generated holography could be used to stimulate these repaired cells in mouse retinas. The key, they say, is to use a light stimulus that is intense, precise, and can trigger activity across a variety of cells all at once.

“Holography, what we’re using, has the advantage of being relatively precise and intense,” Shoham said. “And you need those two things to see.”

The researchers turned to holography after exploring other options, including laser deflectors and digital displays used in many portable projectors to stimulate these cells. Both methods had their drawbacks, Shoham said.

In many ways the Internet is the ultimate virtual laboratory. Social media and news sites tell the casual observer much about our priorities and interests, whether it’s the grave prognosis of the U.S.’s ongoing “fiscal cliff” political negotiations or elation over England’s royal pregnancy. Social scientists believe that, beyond such superficial revelations, the Internet can also be a tool for conducting expansive, yet inexpensive research experiments at unprecedented speed. Duncan Watts has been studying the Internet’s impact on social behavior, and vice versa, for more than a decade. In 2001 Watts and fellow Columbia University sociologists published the results of their Small World Project, an e-mail version of sociologist Stanley Milgram’s famous 1967 “six degrees of separation” experiment that used snail mail to test the theory that every person on the planet is separated from everyone else by a chain of about six people. In 2006 Watts worked with a team of researchers on Music Lab, an online experiment that illustrated the difficulty of predicting a song’s popularity among a diverse group of listeners.

We hear a lot about energy research and development. Perhaps that’s because it’s the one sort of policy that Republicans and Democrats generally agree on. But there’s a different kind of research that I’d like to see get a lot more attention and funding. I’m talking about research into what various kinds of energy policies actually *do* to shape the technical possibilities open to humanity. In my time researching energy, most of the people who actually care about where we get our energy from have committed to an energy source, be it oil, gas, traditional nuclear, wind, solar, geothermal, or thorium. Then, they go looking for policies that would benefit their technology. I’ve also run into a lot of people who believe in inexorable laws of change in energy, whether that’s decarbonization or the inevitable rise of natural gas or nuclear power. And I’ve run into a lot of energy experts who believe in a fairly simple relationship between research money going in and technologies coming out. Unfortunately, none of these three groups of people is likely to produce very good energy policy. To put it in more mainstream terms, we’ve got a lot of energy pundits and very few energy Nate Silvers, who put reality (i.e. good data) ahead of ideology and intuition. Don’t get me wrong: everyone in energy loves them some data, but few people are interested in using it the way Silver does. Let me introduce you to a scholar who I think embodies the kind of research we need more of. His name is Gregory Nemet. He did his PhD at Berkeley and now teaches at the University of Madison, Wisconsin. I first discovered his work through a 2006 paper in Energy Policy, “Beyond the Learning Curve: factors influencing cost reductions in photovoltaics.” Now, you’re probably familiar with the neat story that learning curves tell. They say that as you do something, you get better at it, and because it’s a curve, the assumption is that this happens at a fairly consistent (and therefore predictable) rate. This is part of the rationale for supporting photovoltaics after all. They’ve gotten so much cheaper (orders of magnitude) over the last few decades that proponents suggest they’re inevitably going to get cheaper than grid electricity some time in the near future.

The beer-goggle effect is well-documented - the way that being drunk makes everyone look wonderfully attractive. A new study asks whether the goggles work backwards. Does being drunk affect how we judge our own appeal? Laurent Bègue and her team asked 19 patrons at a French bar to rate their own attractiveness and to puff into a breathalyser. The two measures correlated - the participants who were more drunk tended to rate themselves as more attractive. But maybe that was nothing to do with the effect of alcohol. Perhaps better-looking people like getting more drunk?