Word: maleness
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...days as a cozy, boozy gentlemen's club may have long passed, but the City, as London's financial quarter is known, remains a male bastion. As it turns out, that could have more to do with biology than misogyny. In a study by scientists from the University of Cambridge, male City traders who had been exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb were on average six times more profitable than those exposed to low levels of the hormone...
...research, to be published Jan. 13 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a U.S. journal, scientists measured 44 male traders' second-to-fourth-digit-length ratio, which is otherwise known as 2D:4D and is an indicator of the effects of prenatal testosterone. The longer a trader's fourth finger relative to his index finger, and therefore the lower the 2D:4D ratio, the greater his prenatal exposure to the hormone. All of those taking part in the study carried out the same type of trading over the 20-month period studied and had the same access...
...make better traders than women? Not exactly. Though it helped determine the male subjects' returns, the 2D:4D ratio accounts for only 20% of the difference in profit levels observed in the study, according to John Coates, a Wall Street trader turned Cambridge scientist and the study's lead author. "Which means there's 80% left unexplained. It's like height in tennis. It appears to give you some sort of advantage, but there's probably a dozen other things giving you an advantage, and if you were to focus just on [height], you'd be missing all sorts...
...fuss over this particular mosquito's mating call? First off, the findings, published in the Jan. 9 issue of the journal Science, dispel a few former assumptions about A. aegypti's behavior: that the female is deaf and a passive participant in the mating ritual and that the male cannot hear frequencies above 1,000 Hz. In fact, the Cornell researchers have established that both the male and female of this subtropical species can detect frequencies as high as 2,000 Hz and that they are equal participants in the courtship process...
While some mosquito species mate at dusk, A. aegypti engages in daytime rendezvouses. A male flies into a swarm to scope out potential mates, chasing a few specimens (see one such chase here) and checking them out at a range of 1 to 2 cm. If the female has recently mated, she'll rebuff the male's advances, but once a love connection is made, the two will adjust their wing speeds: females typically beat their wings at about 400 Hz, or beats per second, and males flap at a frequency of about 600 Hz; however, when two potential mates...