Slanted Science

Archive for the ‘They’re Just Like Us’ Category

Scientific breakthroughs have traditionally been announced to the world at serious, prestigious conferences to an audience of bookish old men dressed in tweed.

So kudos to Douglas Hines, who last week made his big proclamation at the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, presumably to an audience of sweaty perverts wearing heavily-stained underpants.

And his revolutionary scientific advance? Why, only a life-sized robotic girlfriend with artificial intelligence and the ability to speak.

What? It was hardly going to be a cure for cancer, now was it? Read the rest of this entry »

We won the war. The other great apes – gorillas, orangutans and chimpanzees – put up a good fight in the evolutionary battles, but in the end we were victorious. It’s why we now have iPhones, whereas they are left with whoop-, holler- and buttock-based communication systems.

Well, we have to report that there are humans out there – traitors to our species, one might wish to call them – who are actively teaching apes how to use cigarette lighters. And not in the good, smoky, cancery way either. No, they are teaching these evolutionary losers how to use the lighter to make, and control, their own fires.

May God have mercy on our souls. Read the rest of this entry »

Story Update!

We missed this previously, but feel compelled to bring you the video which accompanies our recent story about female bats giving their mates oral sex during intercourse, in order to keep his genes within her reach, rather than other females’. Read the rest of this entry »

It is a widely-held belief that testosterone turns men into wild, aggressive beasts. But a research paper just published shows that the ‘male hormone’ does no such thing. In fact, scientists show, a quick dose of testosterone actually makes women behave more fairly in a laboratory-controlled game.

We foresee some heated discussions tonight at dinner tables everywhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Hot on the heels of the news that bacteria in human guts make us fat comes this: scientists have shown that leafcutter ants also use the single-celled critters to give them some otherwise inacessible nutrients. They apparently use the bacteria’s ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen into a biologically usable form. Clever little fellas, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

The wonderful artwork above is used courtesy of Eric Spitler. You should check him out at EricSpitler.com

Scientists have used that most faithful of laboratory animals – the fruit fly – to identify a number of genes involved in behaviors associated with drinking.

With all sincerity, we would like to offer ourselves up as volunteers to take this work into humans. We’re selfless like that.

Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: NOW WITH VIDEO!!! CLICK THIS LINK FOR HOT BAT-ON-BAT ACTION!

Wow. Now this is what research is all about!

A group of (creepy?) scientists have used infra-red cameras to watch bats having sex. And their discovery? The horrible little critters love nothing more than to introduce a bit of mouthplay into the act. We’re just really hoping this doesnt’t extend to vampire bats…

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, it’s been a busy week for scientists looking into how like humans macaque monkeys are. Just a few days after we were told that monkey mothers ‘baby’ their children in the same way human moms do, scientists have just described research showing that they are also vaguely disturbed by computer-generated depictions of other monkeys. Read the rest of this entry »

New research out of Italy suggests that female rhesus macaque monkeys treat their babies just like humans do: kissing, intense eye contact, raised voice pitch and more. As well as being fascinating and more than a bit cute, will this bring anything to the ethical debate concerning how we treat primates in both captivity and research?

Read the rest of this entry »