The Great Beyond has headed off into the great beyond today, taking a well-earned long weekend break. Still, we couldn’t resist sharing a few news items with you.
A start-up date has been announced for the Large Hadron Collider. The big day is 10 September, when the first attempts to circulate a particle beam will start. So, we have a little over a month left before the planet is annihilated (or, more accurately, isn’t). The first tests of synchronisation between the LHC and the Super Proton Synchrotron take place this weekend.
Nature recently reported on the regulatory difficulties of using unmanned aerial vehicles for research in the UK, and today there are reports of the kind of applications we could be missing out on. Defence company QinetiQ, and Aberystwyth University in Wales, collaborated on a project to map crop density in fields using a 2.5m wingspan UAV, so that farmers can target their fertilizer better. Alan Gay of the University of Aberystwyth told the BBC that sheep farms are the next port of call for the aircraft, adding, “We can see quite a sea-change in farming, to it being based on real measurements rather than being based on some guesswork.” Time for popular farming-themed musical combo The Wurzels to update their lyrics? “I’ve got a brand new unmanned aerial vehicle” – it almost works.
A paper in Science this week looks at the unusual reproductive system in melons – the fruit exhibit andromonoecy, possessing both male and hermaphrodite flowers. The French-US research identified the gene responsible that encodes a protein important in the synthesis of the hormone ethylene that appears to play a key role in flower sex determination.
“If we can understand how different sexual systems in plants have evolved, we can then begin to understand how sex in general evolves,” explains one of the authors, Michael Purugganan of New York University. Quite how one report got from there to “Melon evolution reveals the future of human sex” is unclear. This sounds like a perfect silly-season story but only The Daily Telegraph tackled the fruity fruit . Perhaps the papers are tired of melons following the important recent news of a new variety of melon that tastes like a lemon.
And finally, a breakthrough for bobbies-on-bicycles’ battered bits and bobs. A new paper, with the eye-watering title “Cutting Off the Nose to Save the Penis”, appearing in the latest issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine. It reports the advantages for mens’ sexual health of using alternative “noseless” bicycle saddles over traditional designs. For those of you who never made the link between parts of the face and parts of a saddle, the nose is the long, pointy part at the front . Cycling has previously been linked with erectile problems for some cyclists.
Ninety cycle cops from five US cities took part in the six month study of using alternative noseless designs. Before-and-after tests reported reduced experience of genital numbness while cycling, increased penile tactile sensation and improved erectile function. Presumably unaware of the looming double entendre, the journal’s editor-in-chief Irwin Goldstein says in a press release, “For the first time, we have a prospective study of healthy policemen riding bikes on the job…”