The benefits of paternity leave

The Economist

Despite decades of social progress in the workplace, women still have to contend with the lion’s share of child-care. While most countries allow up to three months of maternity leave, only around half a dozen countries offer fathers more than two weeks paternity leave. In Denmark, 90% of dads take more than a fortnight’s leave.

Research suggests that enabling fathers to look after their newborn children has positive knock-on effects.

What are the benefits of paternity leave?

First, fathers who take paternity leave are more likely to take an active role in child-care tasks. According to a study of four rich countries – America, Australia, Britain and Denmark – fathers who had taken paternity leave were more likely to feed, dress, bathe and play with their child long after the period of leave had ended. Danish men were the most diligent. Seventy-seven per cent of them play with their children. And, in Britain, dads who took time off at birth were almost a third more likely to read books with their toddlers than those who hadn’t.

Second, this early interaction has longer-term benefits for a child’s learning abilities. A study by the University of Oslo found that paternity leave improved children’s performance at secondary school; daughters, especially, seem to flourish if their dads had taken time off. But this tends to benefit children whose dads come from more advantaged backgrounds. Most paternity leave tends to be short and poorly paid so richer dads are more likely to take the time off.
Third, paternity leave is good for women's careers. When childcare responsibilities fall exclusively on the mother, the effect is to depress women’s wages. Time out of the labour force deprives them of experience and promotions. When men shoulder more of the childcare burden, the effect is lessened.

For years the priority for women’s’ rights campaigners has been to increase the provision of maternity leave. These days, more governments are starting to believe that the best way to improve women’s career prospects is instead to turn to the dads.

First person to live to 1,000 already alive today?

Google Ventures' Bill Maris Investing in Idea of Living to 500

Bloomberg Business

Bill Maris has $425 million to invest this year, and the freedom to invest it however he wants. He's looking for companies that will slow aging, reverse disease, and extend life. 

Maris' interview:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-09/google-ventures-bill-maris-investing-in-idea-of-living-to-500

• Google Ventures' Bill Maris said he thinks humans can live to 500 years old
• This will be due to medical breakthroughs and a rise in biomechanics
• Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil previously said we'd be uploading our brains to machines by 2045
• Google Ventures has invested in genetics firms and cancer startups
• Tech giant also set up Calico - anti-ageing research and development labs
• Mr Maris said: 'We have the tools to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision. I just hope to live long enough not to die'
• But professor Sir Colin Blakemore believes there's a limit on human life
• Neurobiologist believes 120 years ‘might be an absolute to human lifespan’
• This is because living for longer is ‘so rarely exceeded’ that even with medical advances, it is unlikely this threshold will be raised 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2986493/Google-says-s-possible-humans-live-500-YEARS-investing-firms-hoping-extend-lives-five-fold.html#ixzz3UOtnXVOp
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Los Angeles Cannibal Club Where Human Meat Is Served

Mary Greeley

Also:

http://www.cannibalclub.org/staff.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cannibal_Club 

54 Australian Men 'Gave Birth' Last Year

Read >>

Testimonios de prostitutos cubanos

masculinidades en cuba

lagartoverde.com/2012/08/21/

Por Marta María Ramírez

La Habana, 15 de febrero de 2014- La investigación Pingueros en La  Habana, testimonios de prostitutos cubanos de 16 a 24 años de edad, fue presentado la víspera en una amena charla con su autor, el historiador cubano y líder de la Red Iberoamericana y Africana de Masculinidades RIAM, Julio César González Pagés, en el Pabellón Cuba.

El libro está disponible para llevar en memorias flash y de manera gratuita en la sala de navegación de la AHS, en el Pabellón, desde hoy.

Julio aseguró que al menos 40 hombres fueron asesinados en La Habana en 2013 (incluyendo al director teatral Toni Díaz, en 2014) y sus muertes están relacionadas con este fenómeno. Además, aclaró que no es un libro para los mecanismos represivos, para la PNR, sino para enfrentar las vulnerabilidades que enfrentan.

Sex with Neandertals Introduced Helpful and Harmful DNA into the Modern Human Genome

Scientific American Blog Network

By Kate Wong 

www.sci-news.com

Over the past few years a number of studies of ancient and contemporary genomes have reached the same stunning conclusion: early human species interbred, and people today carry DNA from archaic humans, including the Neandertals, as a result of those interspecies trysts. Now two new analyses of modern human genomes are providing insights into how the acquisition of Neandertal DNA affected anatomically modern Homo sapiens tens of thousands of years ago and how it continues to affect people today.

In the first study, Sriram Sankararaman and David Reich of Harvard University and their colleagues compared a complete Neandertal genome sequence with 1,004 modern human sequences to see which regions of the modern genome contain Neandertal DNA. Like other researchers before them, they observed that Asians and Europeans have DNA from Neandertals, whereas Africans have little or no Neandertal DNA. The pattern is consistent with a scenario in which early modern humans mated with Neandertals they encountered when they migrated out of Africa and into Eurasia, where Neandertals had lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

Moreover, the team determined that Neandertal DNA is not distributed evenly across the genome. Some genes have a high proportion of Neandertal ancestry (which is to say, many people today carry the Neandertal versions of these genes). Those genes with the highest Neandertal ancestry are associated with keratin, a protein found in skin and hair. The Neandertal variants of these genes may well have helped early modern humans adapt to the new environments they found themselves in as they spread into Eurasia. But the researchers also found that people today carry Neandertal genes that are associated with diseases including Crohn’s, type 2 diabetes and lupus.

Intriguingly, other regions of the modern human genome have no or very low Neandertal contribution, notably the X chromosome and genes related to the functioning of the testes. According to Sankararaman, Reich and their collaborators, the absence of Neandertal genetic material in these regions suggests that male hybrids who inherited a Neandertal X chromosome were infertile, and thus unable to pass their genes along to the next generation. The researchers detail their findings in a paper published in the December 30 Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.)

In the second study, published by Science, Benjamin Vernot and Joshua M. Akey of the University of Washington screened whole genome sequences from 665 living Europeans and Asians for telltale signs of Neandertal contributions. Their results show that although non-Africans individually inherited between 1 and 3 percent of their genomes from Neandertals, different people carry different bits of Neandertal genetic material. Together these sequences represent around 20 percent of the Neandertal genome.

Like the other team, Vernot and Akey found evidence that Neandertals passed along beneficial skin genes to modern humans, including some linked to pigmentation. And they, too, observed genome regions devoid of Neandertal contributions. One such region contains the gene FOXP2, which plays an important role in speech.

Vernot and Akey’s work is additionally interesting in that they were able to use statistical and computational methods to identify the Neandertal contributions in the genomes of modern-day people without using a Neandertal genome to guide their search. This work raises the possibility that simply by analyzing the genomes of people alive today, scientists will be able to discover and describe extinct human species that mated with early H. sapiens but that, unlike Neandertals, are unknown from the fossil record. Previous studies of genomes of living people have hinted at dalliances between early H. sapiens and unknown archaic humans in Africa. Perhaps this approach will shine a light on these mysterious skeletons in our closet.

How Climate Change and Plate Tectonics Shaped Human Evolution

By Mark Maslin and The Conversation

It should not be a surprise that East Africa was a hotbed of evolution, because over the last five million years everything about the landscape has changed.

The extraordinary forces of plate tectonics and a changing climate have transformed East Africa from a relatively flat, forested region to a mountainous fragmented landscape dominated by the rapid appearance and disappearance of huge, deep-water lakes. And from this highly variable landscape emerged an ape smart enough to question its own existence.

A cradle rocked by tectonics
Twenty million years ago the Indian and Asian continental plates clashed and pushed up the massive Tibetan plateau. In summer this plateau acts as a huge heat engine, absorbing solar energy which it transfers to the atmosphere, causing immense convection currents. With all this hot air rising, air is sucked in from all round, including moist air from the Indian Ocean that produces intense South East Asian monsoons.

This has a knock on affect of drawing moisture away from the African continent, and it was this that began the progressive drying out of East Africa. In terms of human evolution, this distinct split between the climate of Asia and Africa coincides with the split between Asian and African apes, the latter eventually evolving into us.

At the same time as the peaks of Tibet were thrusting upwards, the rifting process began in Ethiopia and gradually moved south finishing in Mozambique about one million years ago. This rifting was caused by a hotspot of magma under northern East Africa heating the crust causing it to split down the middle like an overdone apple pie.

The rifting process produced a deep, wide, hanging valley half a mile above sea level with uplifted shoulders or mountain ranges on either side rising up to two miles high. The affects of the Rift Valley formation on the local climate was dramatic.

Keep reading on scientificamerican >>

Testosterone therapy may boost serious risks in men with heart troubles

vigilantemma.com

Brian Alexander, NBC News

Watch any football game or a news program, and you’re almost sure to see one of those commercials about how a-little-dab’ll-do-ya of testosterone can banish the “low-T” blues and put spark back into your life.

The ads work. Almost 3 percent of American men aged 40 and older have been prescribed testosterone replacement therapy. According to figures compiled by BloombergBusinessweek, sales of testosterone drugs could reach $5 billion by 2017.

But a study released Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association is sure to raise questions about the wisdom behind the testosterone rush. It finds that among men with previous heart troubles and low testosterone levels, the use of 'low-T' therapy boosted the risk of serious problems including heart attack, stroke — and death.

Researchers at the University of Texas at Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas reviewed records from more than 8,700 men with low-T levels who underwent coronary angiography — a procedure that uses dye and X-rays to peer into heart arteries — in the Veterans Affairs system between 2005 and 2011.

Of nearly 7,500 guys who did not get extra T, about 1 in 5 had bad cardiovascular outcomes, including stroke, heart attack or death. In the more than 1,200 men who got testosterone, nearly 1 in 4 percent had those terrible problems, an increased risk of nearly 30 percent.

The researchers concluded that taking testosterone came with an increased risk of an adverse outcome.

That’s not the whole story, though. Dr. Anne Cappola of the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania wrote in an accompanying editorial: “The most important question is the generalizability of the results of this study to the broader population of men taking testosterone ….”

That’s a very big caveat: By definition, all the men in the study were older than 60 and all had heart problems. It's still not clear whether those same risks apply to younger, healthier guys.

“These were sick, older veterans,” Dr. Michael Ho, a cardiologist with the VA Eastern Colorado Health Care System who helped direct the study, said in an interview. Many were obese, had diabetes, and other ailments, he said.

Dr. Bradley Anawalt, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Washington, agreed — but only to a point.

“This is a modestly cautionary study about giving testosterone to men over 60 with multiple” health problems, he said in an interview.

Some men might do just fine with a little extra T, experts say.

Keep reading on NBC >>

Scientist a step closer to treating baldness

Toronto Sun

www.bellezapura.com

Scientists have moved a step closer to finding a treatment for baldness in men and women with the discovery that it is possible to grow new hair follicles from human skin cells. The new test results are the first breakthrough in 40 years of research into finding a way to regenerate the structures in the skin that cause hair to grow and could lead to radically different therapies for hair loss. Scientists have struggled for decades to to replicate human hair follicles in the laboratory, but the new techniques prove they can be stimulated to grow in skin tissue and made to produce hair shafts.The researchers claim that instead of the current method of transplanting hair from another part of the body, patients' own skin could be used to produce an essentially never-ending supply of hair follicles for transplant operations. One of the study's lead authors, Professor Angela Christiano of Columbia University said, "This approach has the potential to transform the medical treatment of hair loss. Current hair-loss medications tend to slow the loss of hair follicles or potentially stimulate the growth of existing hairs, but they do not create new hair follicles. Neither do conventional hair transplants...Our method, in contrast, has the potential to actually grow new follicles using patient's own cells."

Living Relatives of Iceman Mummy Found

Discovery News

By Rossella Lorenzi 

Ötzi the Iceman has at least 19 living male relatives in the Austrian Tirol, according to a genetic study into the origins of the people who now inhabit the region.

Scientists from the Institute of Legal Medicine at Innsbruck Medical University analyzed DNA samples taken from 3,700 blood donors in the Tyrol region of Austria.

During their study, they discovered that 19 individuals share a particular genetic mutation with the 5,300-year-old mummy, whose full genome was published last year.

PHOTOS: Iceman Mummy 20 Yrs On: Mysteries Remain

“These men and the Iceman had the same ancestors,” Walther Parson, the forensic scientist who carried out the study, told the Austrian Press Agency.

The researchers focused on parts of the human DNA which are generally inherited unchanged.

“In men it is the Y chromosomes and in females the mitochondria. Eventual changes arise due to mutations, which are then inherited further,” Parson explained.

People with the same mutations are categorized in haplogroups. Designed with letters, haplogroups allow researchers to trace early migratory routes since they are often associated with defined populations and geographical regions.

Indeed, Ötzi’s haplogroup is very rare in Europe.

“The Iceman had the halogroup G, sub category G-L91. In our research we found another 19 people with this genetic group and subgroup,” Parson said.

ANALYSIS: The Ice Mummy: Little-Known Facts

Having carried Y chromosome haplogroup analysis, Parson was able to trace only the male descendants of the Neolithic man.

So far the 19 individuals have not been informed of their genetic relationship to Ötzi.

Found in 1991 in a melting glacier in the Ötztal Alps (hence the name), the mummy is one of the most heavily investigated human corpses of all time.

Scientists discovered that Ötzi had brown eyes and very bad teeth, was lactose intolerant, had a genetic predisposition for an increased risk for coronary heart disease and probably had Lyme disease.

It’s certain he died a violent death: In 2007, CT scans showed that an arrowhead had lacerated his left subclavian artery, leading to fast bleeding.

ANALYSIS: The Iceman Suffered Brain Damage Before Death

CAT scan of the mummy’s brain and a paleoproteomic study have recently pointed to a cerebral trauma — a violent blow to the head — as the cause of death.

As investigation into the mummy continues, new relatives, alive and well, could be added to the list of the 19 descendants.

According to Parson, the genetic mutation might be also found in the nearby Swiss region of Engadine and in Italy’s South Tyrol region.

“We have already found Swiss and Italian partners so that we can continue our research,” he said.

Image: Facial reconstruction of Ötzi the Iceman. Credit: Heike Engel-21Lux/SÜdtiroler Archäologiemuseum

The Mysterious Difference Between Those Who Make It Rich And Those Who Don't

Business Insider

tripwow.tripadvisor.com

James Altucher 

Rob told me JB was dead. JB was my best friend growing up. We sat next to each other on the bus. After school we’d play ping pong or pinball or monopoly or ride bikes.

Every single day we did this for eight years. Then we drifted apart.

Rob said, The last time I spoke to him he sounded like a ghost.

It was like there was nothing there, Rob said.

I hadn’t seen JB in 20 years.

He dropped out of college, Rob said, and never really had a job. His parents gave him money to live. He didn’t want to do anything.

He changed his phone number every few weeks, Rob said. So he was hard to keep in touch with.

I didn’t understand. Why did he change his number every few weeks?

He’d meet a girl, and then a few weeks later he’d get tired of her but not want to deal with it. He’d change his number so the girl couldn’t reach him, Rob said. And he moved a lot.

He had no Facebook page, no internet presence, it was hard to track him down, Rob said.

And it’s true. I had never found him on the Internet.

JB hurt his leg a few years ago, Rob said, and had no insurance because he never had a job. So got addicted to painkillers.

He was into the drug scene, Rob said.

So no job, drifting phone numbers, a hazy identity, drug, nerve damage, pain killers.

One day he never woke up, Rob said.

He was 39.

I don’t feel sad about this. People die. I haven’t seen him since we were 18 and on graduation day.

But I wonder about one thing Rob said.

“He was like a ghost the last time I spoke with him.”

We know when the body and mind are giving up. We know when spirit is exhausted. When the emotions don’t care.

He never had anything he wanted to do, Rob said.

Is that all it is? Do we just need something to do? Something that we want to scratch just a tiny bit so we continue one more day?

We don’t have to save the world. Or invent warm ice. Or time travel. Or even have a passion or a purpose.

When I was dead broke and crying I wanted to die just so my kids could have my life insurance policy. What got me to get up and go again?

And then later, when it happened again. And then again.

Why didn’t JB do that?

I call it “the push”.

You’re riding the bicycle up the hill all the time in life. Everything in life wants you to decay. To be subjugated. To be violated. To be tired. To become a ghost.

To roll back down the hill just when you thought you were close to the top.

It’s fucking tiring to live.

What can give us THE PUSH?

I don’t know.

For me, today, it’s just this post. Some days, it’s to see my 11 year old smile. Sometimes, I just want to take a walk. Or help Claudia. Or do something fun and creative.

What’s your PUSH today?

A little bit, every day, compounds.

A little push today turns into a big life tomorrow.

My one requirement: I have to give something. I have to enjoy it.

Else, it’s too draining. It’s a shit stain. I slip back on the hill.

A deep breath. You can do it, I tell myself. One more turn of the pedals. THE PUSH! Get over the hill!

I want to live.

Read more: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2013/04/how-to-be-rich-the-push/#ixzz2RnGGphWZ

Pulitzer Prize-winner Junot Diaz on the Power of Love

ForaTv

Man's oldest ancestor identified as rat-sized mammal

itnnews

Hobbit Humans Come to Life With New Fossils

A reconstruction of a Hobbit face.

Susan Hayes, University of Wollongong

discovery

By Jennifer Viegas 

New bones attributed to Homo floresiensis -- aka the "Hobbit Human" -- along with other recent findings, are helping to reveal what members of this species looked like, how they behaved, and their origins.

The latest findings, described in a Journal of Human Evolution paper, are wrist bones unearthed on the Indonesian island of Flores. Since they are nearly identical to other such bones for the Hobbit found at the site, they refute claims that H. floresiensis never existed.

"The tiny people from Flores were not simply diseased modern humans," Caley Orr, lead author of the paper, told Discovery News.

"The new species of human stood approximately 3' 6" tall, giving it its nickname 'The Hobbit,'" continued Orr, who is an assistant professor in the Department of Anatomy at Midwestern University.

He said that they were "similar to modern humans in many respects." For example, he explained that they walked on two legs, had small canine teeth, and lived what appears to have been an iconic "cave man'" lifestyle.

"Stone tools and evidence of fire use were found in the cave, along with the remains of butchered animals, such as Stegodon (an extinct elephant relative), indicating that meat was a part of diet," Orr said.

He and his colleagues, however, also point out the differences between the Hobbit individuals and modern humans.

The Hobbits had arms that were longer than their legs, giving them a slightly more ape-like structure. Their skulls had no bony chins, so their faces had more of an oval shape. Their forehead was sloping. The inferred brain size was tiny, putting them in the IQ range of chimpanzees.

"Remarkably, the feet were also long relative to the legs, as fantasy fans might expect of a Hobbit," he added.

The Hobbit's wrist looked like that of early human relatives, such as Australopithecus, but the key ancestral candidate now is Homo erectus, "Upright Man."

It is possible that a population of H. erectus became stranded on the Indonesian island and dwarfed there over time. Orr said that "sometimes happens to larger animals that adapt to small island environments."

A problem, however, is that H. erectus is somewhat more modern looking than the Hobbit, so researchers are still seeking more clues.

Another question concerns whether or not the Hobbits ever mated with modern humans. There is evidence that happened to Neanderthals, which have left traces of their genome in modern human DNA. So far, however, conditions have not been right to extract DNA from H. floresiensis bones.

Nonetheless, the Hobbit -- which went extinct relatively recently during the Pleistocene -- is now better known due to the new discoveries.

"These fossils provide further, clear evidence that H. floresiensis is in no way a pathological modern human, or that its primitive morphology is related simply to its small body size," said Tracy Kivell, a paleoanthropologist from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "Instead, it is clearly its own, unique and very intriguing species."

Kivell added, "What is particularly interesting is that H. floresiensis is associated with such a long, well-documented history of stone tools. (Its primitive hand and wrist were) still apparently capable of making and using stone tools, suggesting that H. floresiensis solved the morphological and manipulative demands of tool-making and tool-use in a different way than Neanderthals and ourselves."

Orr and his team continue to study the Hobbit humans, with at least one other paper about the interesting species in the works.

La vida diaria de la Tribu Zoe

masDocumentales

French men not producing as much sperm

thelocal.fr

By Andrew M. Seaman
Reuters

When it comes to sperm counts, French men aren't what they used to be, according to a new study. 

Researchers found that between 1989 and 2005, the number of sperm in one milliliter of the average 35-year-old Frenchman's semen fell from about 74 million to about 50 million - a decrease of roughly 32 percent.

"That's certainly within the normal range, but if you think about it, if there continues to be a decrease, we would expect that we'll get into that infertile range," said Grace Centola, president of the Society for Male Reproduction and Urology in Birmingham, Alabama.

"A decline in male reproduction endpoints has been suspected for several decades and is still debated all around the world. Geographical differences have been observed between countries, and between areas inside countries," said Dr. Joëlle Le Moal, the study's lead author from the Institut de Veille Sanitaire in France. 

Le Moal and her colleagues write in the journal Human Reproduction that global analyses have found decreases in sperm counts, as did recent studies in Israel, India, New Zealand and Tunisia.

Centola, who wasn't involved with the new research, told Reuters Health that she's found similar results in a group of young sperm donors from Boston, too.

For the new study, Le Moal and her colleagues used a database of France's 126 fertility clinics that recorded men's semen samples from 1989 through 2005.

The researchers narrowed their study to 26,600 samples provided by men whose female partners were later found to be infertile. That, they say, minimizes the risk that the men had a fertility problem.

Over the 16-year period, the researchers found there was about a 2 percent annual decrease in the number of sperm in one milliliter of the average man's semen. More >>

Who Didn't Have Sex with Neanderthals?

Discovery news

Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor

spiegel.de

The only modern humans whose ancestors did not interbreed with Neanderthals are apparently sub-Saharan Africans, researchers say.

New findings suggest modern North Africans carry genetic traces from Neanderthals, modern humanity's closest known extinct relatives.

Although modern humans are the only surviving members of the human lineage, others once roamed the Earth, including the Neanderthals. Genetic analysis of these extinct lineages' fossils has revealed they once interbred with our ancestors, with recent estimates suggesting that Neanderthal DNA made up 1 percent to 4 percent of modern Eurasian genomes. Although this sex apparently only rarely produced offspring, this mixing was enough to endow some people with the robust immune systems they enjoy today.  More >>

New DNA project shows us living beyond our genes

nbcnews.com/

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Read >>

No arms, no legs, no problems!: LOOK AT YOURSELF AFTER WATCHING THIS (spanish subtitles)