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A student at Yale University that had told the university´s newspaper that she had inseminated herself several times and took drugs to get an abortion for an art project told school officials that the project was faked. According to the Washington Post, the initial information created an “outcry” on the Internet and protests and debates on the Yale campus.

The student, Aliza Shvarts,had said that she had inseminated herself “as often as possible” and then took herbal substances to induce an abortion. She had said that she would videotape her miscarriages and include a spoken section to explain what she had done.

Helaine Klasky, Yale´s spokeperson, stated that Shvarts admitted that she hadn´t impregnated herself and did not induce any miscarriages. Klasky added that the “entire project is an art piece, a creative ficion designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman´s body”.

Via | Ap/Google

Fertility professionals at Yale School of Medicine that studied human eggs for in vitro fertilization have found genetic markers which indicate the egg´s maturity. Pasquale Patrizio, MD, professor of obstetrics and gynecology and director of the Yale Fertility Center and Dagan Wells, from the University of Oxford, UK, have found significant differences in genes at different stages of the eggs´ development.

Via | Yale School of Medicine

X-Rays and anaesthetic gases used without appropriate protection can increase risk of miscarriage in female veterinarians, according to West Australian researchers.

The study was done by scientists at the Western Australian Institute for Medical Research (WAIMR) and The University of Western Australia’s School Of Population Health.

The research included more than 1200 women, graduates from an Australian veterinary schools over a 40-year period, and showed the occupational dangers of x-rays, anaesthetic gases and pesticides: they can have serious influence on pregnancy and fertility.

Professor Lin Fritschi, a WAIMR Associate, said that findings “showed that female veterinarians exposed to an hour or more of anaesthetic gases or exposed to pesticides during the course of their duties were twice as likely to miscarry during pregnancy”.

Also, they found out that two thirds of the female veterinarians surveyed spent five or more hours a week in an operating suite or recovery room area, and many of them (close to a quarter) did not wear any protection and were completely exposed to the gases.

Professor Fritschi stated that women should be aware that protection is necessary and that can be achieved by wearing the right aprons, ventilating the workplace and minimizing the amount of exposure by using appropriate masks, shoes and gloves.

She concluded that “vets most at risk of dangerous exposures include graduates, vets under 30 years of age, those working in a mixed animal practice and vets working more than 45 hours a week.”

Do warriors get the girl? According to researchers from three universities in California, who studied why evolution has not developed men into super-aggressive types, there is more to the mating process than just destroying the others in competition. This study was published in the open journal PLoS ONE.

Studying fruit flies, the scientists from University of Southern California, Cal State University in Sacramento and the University of California, Davis, USA, found that even though females choose males who are victorious in fights, they also go for others that do not find and choose them with no apparent reason. This can help understand aggressive behavior in human and other species.

The lead author of the project, Brad Foley (PD fellow at USC) says that “females didn’t necessarily prefer aggressive males – some males mated less when they lost fights, but some mated more if they didn’t fight. Moreover, different males preferred different males”

The investigation showed some genetic variation in aggression in males fruit flies, and say that it also applies to humans. They suggest that a possible reason for this is the fact that no fighting strategy is effective every time, so there is not a clear pattern of aggression.

“We showed in fruit flies that even the most genetically aggressive flies can have an Achilles heel, and lose against males who are (for the most part) wimps,” noted Foley.

The authors actually conclude that “unexpected interactions” between individuals are the ones that define who wins and who loses, so there is not a definitive strategy that would divide winners and losers categorically.

Source | PLoS ONE