The votes for January have been tallied, and the latest edition to the ranks of the Molly award winners is…
Feralboy12
Leave your suggestions for the next inductee for the month of February right here in the comments.
All right, is there nothing so disgusting that someone somewhere won’t eat it in the belief that it will make their penis hard? Nepal is suffering from goldrush-style violence over the harvesting of yarsagumba, a purported ‘natural viagra’. This is yarsagumba:
Yarsagumba is the result of a bizarre parasitic relationship between fungus and insect. Spores of the Cordyceps mushroom invade and consume the larvae of the Himalayan bat moth, which live underground at altitudes of 10,000 to 16,000 feet for as long as five years, feeding on roots before they commence their metamorphosis into moths.
After the fungal spores have killed and mummified the larvae, they send up a spindly brown stem, a tiny knob-headed mushroom – and then they are very likely to be picked.
Sound familiar? It’s Cordyceps, the parasitic fungus that alters the behavior of its insect hosts. The Nepalese are carefully gleaning high-altitude fields, looking for shriveled dead insects with fungal stalks sprouting from them, and selling them at high prices on the global market.
What was the first person to pick up one of these and chew on it thinking? “I’m desperately starving and about to die”?
Anyway, the article claims that it’s actually effective.
The fungus’s reputation is powered by the anecdotal reports of consumers as much as by ancient tradition: In other words, it appears to work. And medical research has backed up claims for its efficacy. A study at Stanford University’s medical school found an increase of 17-ketosteroids in the urine of men taking daily doses of yarsagumba, which indicates an increased production of androgen and other sex hormones in the adrenal gland and testicles.
Controlled animal tests offer credible evidence that regular yarsagumba use decreases recovery time between orgasms and increases the volume of semen production. In another blind trial on human subjects, 65 percent of Cordyceps eaters reported an enhanced sex drive.
I don’t know if I quite believe it. I looked for some of these articles, and not much turns up on PubMed. There are a few articles in places like The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (not very credible), and a few studies in tissue culture that show an effect on steroid synthesis in tumor cells. Nothing incredibly definitive, although I suppose it’s possible it has some effect…but nothing that justifies going all gangster over it.
Well, other than that gullible people will go crazy over imaginary magical herbs.
Now some of our troops are committing murder. Unsanctioned murder, that is, unlike the usual stuff.
A U.S. servicemember left his base in southern Afghanistan on Sunday and allegedly went on a shooting spree that killed 16 civilians, plunging U.S-Afghan relations into a fresh crisis.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai called the act an "assassination" and demanded an explanation from the United States. U.S. officials, who have not confirmed details of the incident, issued immediate apologies.
Can we just shut the whole mess down now?
Yes, I still get affectionate, loving email from devout Catholics.
The gore and tenacity to take the consecrated Host and desecrate it by piercing a nail through it and discarding the Blessed Sacrament.
Your soul will plead in mercy at the final Hour of your Death.
When you are in grave pain, cry out in Mercy by saying Jesus, I Trust in You…at the final Hour of your death.
Foolish Man…What good is it for you to gain all the wisdom in the world with your professorship yet lose your soul…
I was robbed. I was supposed to get all the wisdom in the world when I became a professor? Who do I complain to about getting my due?
Good news! The gorilla genome sequence was published in Nature last week, and adds to our body of knowledge about primate evolution. Here’s the abstract:
Gorillas are humans’ closest living relatives after chimpanzees, and are of comparable importance for the study of human origins and evolution. Here we present the assembly and analysis of a genome sequence for the western lowland gorilla, and compare the whole genomes of all extant great ape genera. We propose a synthesis of genetic and fossil evidence consistent with placing the human–chimpanzee and human–chimpanzee–gorilla speciation events at approximately 6 and 10 million years ago. In 30% of the genome, gorilla is closer to human or chimpanzee than the latter are to each other; this is rarer around coding genes, indicating pervasive selection throughout great ape evolution, and has functional consequences in gene expression. A comparison of protein coding genes reveals approximately 500 genes showing accelerated evolution on each of the gorilla, human and chimpanzee lineages, and evidence for parallel acceleration, particularly of genes involved in hearing. We also compare the western and eastern gorilla species, estimating an average sequence divergence time 1.75 million years ago, but with evidence for more recent genetic exchange and a population bottleneck in the eastern species. The use of the genome sequence in these and future analyses will promote a deeper understanding of great ape biology and evolution.
I’ve highlighted one phrase in that abstract because, surprise surprise, creationists read the paper and that was the only thing they saw, and in either dumb incomprehension or malicious distortion, took an article titled “Insights into hominid evolution from the gorilla genome sequence” and twisted it into a bumbling mess of lies titled “Gorilla Genome Is Bad News for Evolution”. They treat a phenomenon called Incomplete Lineage Sorting (ILS) as an obstacle to evolution rather than an expected outcome.
To put it simply, the idea of a god or gods is preposterous; if there were any higher being which had sway over this world, we would see some measurable signs of it, which are markedly absent. Furthermore, had any such thing happened throughout history, there would be some form of consensus throughout historical record of this being or beings, but what we have from history instead is a large number of contradicting accounts. As a final note, the motivations of religious figures are transparent: They have everything to gain from perpetuating these stories, and we have seen their capability to control people through these religious teachings.
Chris Kwolek
United States
Chris Clarke should just suck it up and make up the shortfall with volume.
And it isn’t pretty. Finally, someone notices the similarities between violent, angry misogynists and violent, angry racists, and calls the MRA’s out on their lies about women.
The men’s movement also includes mail-order-bride shoppers, unregenerate batterers, and wannabe pickup artists who are eager to learn the secrets of “game”—the psychological tricks that supposedly make it easy to seduce women. George Sodini, who confided his seething rage at women to his blog before shooting 12 women, three of them fatally, was one of the latter. Before his 2009 murder spree at a Pittsburgh-area gym, he was a student — though clearly not a very apt one — of R. Don Steele, the author of How to Date Young Women: For Men Over 35. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me over an 18 or 25-year period,” Sodini wrote with the kind of pathos presumably typical of Steele’s readers.
They also conveniently label the pariah sites of the men’s movement — if you want to know what sites to avoid, or what urls to preemptively put in your blog filters, that’s very handy.
(via Man Boobz)
As a man with a history of heart concerns, I know what to be aware of in me, and know what symptoms would send me off to the hospital (or to the phone — don’t exert yourself if experiencing heart attack symptoms!) But there are women I care about too, so it’s useful to know that women often experience different symptoms.
The study also found that women often fail to realize that they are having a heart attack – and so do doctors. This is because heart attack symptoms in women can be different than they are in men. The symptoms we most commonly associate with a heart attack, like pain in the left arm and tightness in the chest, don’t always occur in women. The study found that 42% of women who have heart attacks never experience the “classic heart attack symptom” of tightness or pain in the chest. Instead, they may develop pain in the back or jaw, light-headedness, nausea, vomiting and shortness of breath.
Heart attacks kill people of both sexes, but they affect female bodies differently than they affect male ones. The problem with having “male” as the default in medical research, and even in public health awareness campaigns, is that it fails to account for these differences, often with serious or even fatal consequences. The common heart attack symptoms for female bodies are ones we often associate with panic attacks or anxiety, especially when they appear in women.
Take care of yourselves!
(Also on Sb)
Hereby my reply, as requested, for why I am an atheist. My name is Maarten-Jan and I’m from the Netherlands.
Since I was a child, I was always interested in learning new things. I loved reading. Fiction was a big part in it, but I also had several science for kids books, about astronomy, insects, history and more. My upbringing was more or less catholic light, I went through all the steps of becoming a catholic, but me and my parents rarely attended church. I believed in god back then.
My first ‘rebellion’ against the church was when I was 11. I had to go through the process of confirmation: I hated every step of the way. From what I remember, this was not because of a crisis of faith or something, but mostly because the whole process was freaking boring. I never liked going to church, and in this confirmation period, I had to attend church-like meetings every week.
I remember fighting with my parents about it, and I believe in one of those fights I proclaimed disbelief in god. My parents only pressed the matter of my confirmation because of their view that if you start something, you have to finish it. They did not put my little sister later on through this terribly boring process. I can’t remember if my claimed disbelief was real, or just to upset my parents. I do remember it was not the big issue.
When I went to high school, religion faded into the background. I attended church once a year, with christmas, and that was mostly it. I never really thought about it, I just hated going to church because it was boring. Because I went to the Gymnasium, I got in contact with the old Greek and Latin language and mythology. I loved these old stories of gods and heroes.
In the second part of high school, literature became a huge part of the curriculum, with regards to the Dutch, English and German classes. I remember that my Dutch teacher discussed the relation of literature to the views of the people of the time, and the use of old themes in mythology is prevalent in literature. He labeled the Christian faith, with the side note that not everyone agreed with him on this, as a mythology as well. I immediately recognized this to be true. From this point onward, I consciously rejected christianity as a whole and the belief in a god.
Because I went to a secular school and my very mildly religious parents, I believed for a long time that the whole world believed more or less like I did. When I finished high school, I went on to the university. I educated myself on evolution (I dropped biology in the second year of high school, evolution was in it, but not a big part of it), and I got to read the God Delusion of Dawkins.
Through youtube, I got into contact with Thunderf00t (and the WDPLAC) and AronRa videos and eventually the atheist experience. I realized there were a whole lot of people that disagreed with me (and held really idiotic beliefs). Furthermore, I got the words to define my belief as a secular humanist, atheist, antitheist, rationalist and free thinker.
Ironically, I only learned of the dogmas of catholicism when I was already an atheist. I was surprised and frankly horrified that so many people actually believed that stuff, and that no-one ever told me about this when I was in the church (although that may not be too surprising, considering their goal of keeping people in the church). The only thing I got back then was the happy story about Jesus, forgiveness, et cetera.
From that point forward, I became an active atheist, I argued a lot with my parents and online, I read several books on the subject, watch hundreds of youtube videos, and got to read Pharyngula. I am continuing to argue, test my beliefs, and learn new things until this day. My search for the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth will hopefully continue throughout my life.
Best regards,
Maarten-Jan
Netherlands
