Word: genee
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...oops" theory. Among insects, same-sex sexual behavior is usually a case of mistaken identity. Male fruit flies, for instance, may romance other males because they lack a gene that enables them to distinguish between sexes. Even more surprising, male toads can't tell the difference between girl toads and boy toads, so males will routinely embrace other males, although the subordinate ones are equipped with a call that quickly results in the dominant male releasing. In other species, the "straight" males get tricked by other wily straight males who dress in animal drag: male goodeid fish, for instance, sometimes...
...Ramis and co-writer Gene Stupnitsky clearly think the best thing about setting a movie in Sodom is the opportunity for jokes about sodomy. They trot out bananas being eaten seductively by prostitutes, a horny high priest (played to the hilt by Oliver Platt, in more eye makeup than Liza Minnelli) who has his eye on Oh and even a sheep joke. Vulgarity can be a dazzlingly pleasurable thing in comedy. But there's something very sad about Year One's vulgarity. It's desperate. The movie is one long snigger. Cera is the only aspect of it that doesn...
...JAMA study, which reviewed 14 studies involving 14,250 participants on the interaction between the serotonin-transporter gene and stressful life events, found no such association with depression risk. The study goes on to caution that any potential use of 5-HTTLPR as a screening tool for depression risk would be invalid. Currently, no such test exists, although several genetic-testing companies, including 23andME and Navigenics, do use genetic markers to tell customers which antidepressant drugs they are more likely to respond...
...Meta-analyses can be a steamroller," says Alexandre Todorov, a genetic epidemiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., whose 2007 peer-reviewed study was included in the JAMA piece. (While Todorov's study found an association between the gene and depression, it was based on a different variant - the long allele as opposed to the short one.) "If you have three studies and two find nothing and the third finds something significant, that does not mean that the third study is not real...
Where most genetics researchers do agree, however, is on the fact that uncovering the genetic roots of depression - and most diseases, for that matter - is a complex task. "We have about 30,000 genes, and it is hard to pick just one and analyze it," says Dr. Hans Joergen Grabe of Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University of Greifswald in Stralsund, Germany. Although his 2005 study also found a correlation between the 5-HTTLPR gene and depression among the unemployed, "the magnitude of the effect is very small - if the effect does really exist, it will only produce depression in very rare...