Word: papered
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to the paper, "Payment for Sex in a Macaque Mating Market," published in the December issue of Animal Behavior, males in a group of about 50 long-tailed macaques in Kalimantan Tengah, Indonesia, traded grooming services for sex with females; researchers, who studied the monkeys for some 20 months, found that males offered their payment up-front, as a kind of pre-sex ritual. It worked. After the females were groomed by male partners, female sexual activity more than doubled, from an average of 1.5 times an hour to 3.5 times. The study also showed that the number...
...easy to draw parallels between the monkeys' mating dance and our own, but Gumert warns against reading too much into primate studies like this one. The paper draws no conclusions about what these observations in monkeys mean for the human world. In fact, whether and how scientists should extrapolate from primate behavior is a fairly "big debate," says Gumert. Certainly, our biology underpins much of what we do, but so does our culture and environment. Gumert asks, "Where do we draw the line...
...less than optimum farmland? That's exactly the thinking behind the push to develop cellulosic ethanol from the waste plant switchgrass, which grows throughout the Midwestern prairies, with little input from farmers. Instead of fuel from food, switchgrass cellulosic ethanol promises fuel from virtually nothing - and a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) argues that it's worth making the switch...
...hope those breakthroughs come soon. Another new paper in PNAS underscores just how vital it is to make the transition to low-carbon transport fuels. Scientists at the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo quantified the full impact of all our driving, shipping and flying on the climate, and found that transport accounts for around 16% of all man-made carbon emissions - with auto fuel taking the largest chunk. That percentage will only increase over the coming decades - unless we can switch to something cleaner...
...this year, which means votes cast in those states will almost certainly be irrelevant. These voters are effectively disenfranchised, and are unlikely to receive attention from the candidates before the party conventions. This inequality is unfair and undemocratic. According to a November National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, earlier voters can have up to 20 times the influence of later voters in the primaries. This distorts the issues that candidates focus on and shuts certain states out of the selection process. There is no reason we should allow Iowa or New Hampshire to hold a privileged position in primary...