Gingers More Susceptible to Cancer, Say Scientists

It shouldn't be funny. But it sort of is. First they have to be ginger, and now this.

David Fisher and his team at Massachusetts General Hospital did an experiment on mice with either red or black hair to see how they responded to the introduction of a gene linked with melanoma. They wanted to know more about melanoma after exposure to UV light; focussing on how much it damaged the fair skin of people - or creatures - with red hair.

But before they could observe anything relevant to their hypothesis - all the ginger mice got cancer.

This was completely unexpected, so they did some new experiments on ginger mice to find out what had actually happened. They bred some hybrid mice that were half-ginger and half-albino and tested them to see if it was the ginger gene or ginger pigment that was the issue. The specially bred mice had the ginger gene, but white hair, and they also tested on mice with both the ginger pigment and the ginger hair.

They tested again to see how they were affected by melanoma-inducing UV. All the white-haired mice were fine, despite carrying the MC1R (ginger) gene.

The mice with ginger hair all got cancer.

Ouch.

It's a shame really. Turns out Voldemort isn't the only thing this lot have to worry about...

The Creepy Sex-Death of the Male Anglerfish

The term 'anglerfish' can be applied to over 300 different kinds of animal, spanning almost twenty species, named for their method of hunting prey with a fleshy lure dangling off its head which can be wriggled in such a way that prey believe it is food. This development of the anglerfish is an ingenious twist of nature; it is not only practical, but has made it somewhat famous in the animal kingdom, not only for its scarily accurate portrayal in Finding Nemo.

The first thing you notice about the anglerfish is that it is fuck ugly. In every species. It is hideous. It has protruding teeth and bulging eyes and some species are covered in spiny hairs and others look like they are already decaying so that they fit in with the scum on the ocean floor. Most of them live at the bottom of the sea where it is so dark that everything is ugly, but the ones that glow have no excuse. The bioluminescence has evolved to attract prey, but it would seem only sensible to avoid something with a face like this...

And that's the female.

Actually, all of the big, scary ones are female. The males are rather more puny and not half as repulsive. They aren't as worried about feeding, so they don't have to be as predatory as the females. They don't need the big teeth, distending jaw, expanding stomach or light-proof gut lining (so they don't get caught having eaten something luminescent). They are a hell of a lot smaller than the females and their eyes and teeth aren't half as daunting. The male Photocorynus spiniceps is only a quarter of an inch long, one of the smallest vertebrate in the animal kingdom; it is near enough half a million times smaller than its female counterpart.

Some of them are even quite cute.

Sort of.

All that matters with the males is their testicles and their primary concern is mating.

They have very sensitive eyes to seek out their mates in the gloom of the ocean. They also have an amazing sense of smell with which they can sniff out the pheromones of females through the water. Once they have sought out a mate, they latch onto her with their sharp little teeth. He bites into her skin and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her side so that they fuse together. Over the next couple of weeks, his whole body is absorbed into her until all that remains of him is a pair of testicles attached to her side.

In response to the to hormones in the female's bloodstream, the testicles release sperm into her system so that she has an available mate whenever she is ready to breed. Many males can latch onto any given female. A female was once discovered with eight pairs of testicles hanging off her.

In most species, if the male does not find a female with which to mate, he dies. In some species, however, the males are able to swim away into a dark and private part of the ocean where they grow massively and turn into a female in place of their missing mate.

It really puts it into perspective how great it is to be a creature that doesn't die just because it can't get laid...

A Failing of Human Evolution; One of Many

Animals generally have cool things that a lot of people wish had stuck around a bit longer in the evolutionary path. Take, for instance, Batman and Spiderman, who may have taken their desire for animal abilities a bit too far. But I would bet that most people would gladly take wings if they were offered them, or gills, or the ability to leap between trees like squirrels and other cool stuff that just feels like it would be nice. We put far too much importance on things like sporting events for it not to be an obvious remnant of the physical prowess necessary for summoning mates in the animal kingdom.

Generally, we can live without these things. We have the intelligence to design transport so we don't need to be as proficient and travelling long distances, for example, and we've invented shoes so we don't need to have the protection animals get from paws. In fact, we have the intelligence to design machines to deal with pretty much everything that our increasingly lazy species can't be bothered to do with our own bodies, so these advantages that animals have over us aren't all that important.

And then this spider comes along and says, "Fuck you, mankind, bet you wish you had THIS..."

This is a giant wood spider called Nephila pilipes and in this species many tiny males compete for the attention of huge females, which can grow to between seven and ten times the size of the males. During copulation, males are known to sever their own genitals in order to plug the female stop other males breeding with their chosen mate. This is common, particularly among insects, and biologists with far too much time on their hands have documented it extensively.

This is a crafty technique - and the girls have caught on.

A team of researchers found that, when many males were converging on one female, the female can produce an amorphous plug to fill her genitals for the period during which she is laying eggs to prevent being impregnated again. The researchers came to the conclusion that this mechanism is a way of preventing "unwanted or excessive copulation".

Essentially, these spiders have developed a way to avoid being raped when they're busy doing other things.

Now, people may not always be busy doing other things, but no one wants to get raped. Even people who fantasise about getting raped, don't really want to be raped. By definition, rape is sex without consent.

Of all the things that evolution has kept in the human body - take, say, the appendix, which has lost all of its function in the evolutionary process aside from one day exploding and killing you from within - why not this one? This seems pretty damn useful, especially considering the closest we, as a species, have come to preventing "unwanted copulation" is this nasty-looking bastard: