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Male Scent Molecules May Be Compromising Biomedical Research
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out. The effect appears to be due to scent molecules that male mammals (including humans, dogs, and cats) have been emitting for eons. The finding could help explain why some labs have trouble replicating the results of others, and it could cause a reevaluation of decades of animal experiments: everything from the effectiveness of experimental drugs to the ability of monkeys to do math. Male odor could even influence human clinical trials."
No more need to wear deodorant. My naturally musky smell will make everyone feel more at ease.
Shower more, filthy nerds :D
Maybe the male scientists need to shower more often...
Women are intimidating and cause stress. Film at 11.
What does a percent of lessened pain feel like? I can't even tell whether my throat hurts half as bad as it did yesterday or a fourth as bad, and that's from a first person perspective, the only perspective from which you actually have access to pain sensations.
I should also note that I'm not a mouse.
Well that stinks!
Does this suggest that female presence in a work place could reduce overall productivity and increase stress based on purely biological factors?
How do those little rodents feel when Richard Gere walks into the room?
Remember what the brown gerbil said to the white gerbil?
"You're new around here, aren't you."
No brain, no pain.
They controlled against no person present which had the same effect as female which means that it was the male odor that was the cause.
They also tested with scents from various male and female animals and the male scents still had the same effect.
Now we just have to figure out how to stop imposing our gender norms on dog's pain receptors.
I knew there was a reason I was always resistant to bathing.
Maybe the males are all neutral and the women are just nagging the animals to perform and causing too much stress!?
Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for they are subtle, and quick to anger.
Did you bother to actually read the article?
The results were quite simple. No odor, or just female odor = 1 result. Male odor = another result.
Simple logic would then equate female odor = no effect (simply because the female odor had the same effect as no odor at all).
So therefore, the male odor was causing a change in the results of the experiment.
Same thing happens in the school yard - "No I ain' t crying, I just got some dust in my eye".
This is a psychological trick to avoid showing pain, not a biochemical trick to reduce pain.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The summary writes:
The rodents are also less stressed out.
The article writes:
The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt.
Was this the daily "Find the inconsistency" test on slashdot? Did I win something?
Is this where "malodorous" came from?
Can't find the article available for online reading, beyond http://www.nature.com/nmeth/jo...
But one wonders about the sample size and the statistical significance of the experiments.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
Does this mean that it is ok to require that all lab assistants be female?
This means that men treat the mice better than the women and they can feel that.
Apparently (as stated in TFA), UNACCOMPANIED male odor caused the mice to not be willing to show pain, but a strange male in company with a strange female didn't cause the mice to go all macho all of a sudden.
So, I wonder if male mice with female mice will show different effects than male mice alone?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I could easily believe that male hormones cause nearby animals to be more prepared to defend themselves and thus pain relief follows as an aid to flight or fight enhancements in the animal. This also demonstrates why variables should never exist in any scientific experiment and just how subtle a variable may be. The financial losses from decades of spoiled research could be considerable.
"These creatures you call mice, you see, they are not quite as they appear. They are merely the protrusion into our dimension of vastly hyperintelligent pandimensional beings."
Do YOU feel manipulated?
Signed: A male (smelly) scientist
"The Rat Grimace Scale: A partially automated method for quantifying pain in the laboratory rat via facial expressions" http://www.molecularpain.com/c...
Here is another paper where the researches used a patch clamp to interface the spinal cord. (A patch clamp is a very low noise/high gain amplifier that can measure single cell ion channels, etc -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
I wonder what methods are typically used? Do researchers videorecord grimacing rats? That seems rather tedious and subjective.
This may be affecting experiments, but if you're designing your experiments correctly, it won't change your results. The "male in the room" effect should affect all animals the same.
You have a control set and a variable set of mice. The animal handlers should be the same for both, and they shouldn't know if at all possible which is which. Males on the staff will stress out the mice, okay, but they'll stress out both control and variable mice the same. Having a female undergrad handle the control cages and a male undergrad handle the variable mice you're using to try to prove your drug makes them hurt less is going to skew your results independent of gender scents.
There already is body of research about various hormonal reactions in mice that are sex specific. So, likely, yes.
Is this why females are more irritating in general?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Either way, we make mice feel nice.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The labs have to stop using gay rats.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Bzzt. Oh, so sorry. The correct response was "Wow, I was a total dumbass for not reading the article. My idiotic knee-jerk rejection of this study based on the first stupid thought to cross my mind was completely wrong. I apologize for being a know-nothing smart-ass and promise not to do it again." Better luck next time!
Rats react to women the same as if their was no observer?
Maybe we should she if women can observe things without changing states!
This would explain a lot of male confusion when women say two diametrically opposed things in the same sentence... They can just observe more quantum states than we can and can't understand why we cannot. :)
What's the baseline stress level? It would answer the question: do men cause 33% more stress or do women aleviate 33% stress? And I call bullshit on it anyway because I can tell you who stresses me out the most in order: my mom, my grandma, my sisters and my wife.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
...like why women don't enter scientific fields...
It's the drill instructor or coach attitude that they pick up.
"Come on, mouse! Play through the pain! Gimme twenty more pushups!"
Have gnu, will travel.
I've never felt pain while dreaming. that sounds like a weird experience!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
...mice are sexist.
Not in the cases where you measure LEVELS of sensitivity to pain in some way.
Which basically includes every endurance or stress test.
They are "zeroed out" to a higher level.
Now your mice endure longer or don't start reacting as soon as they should have. So all your results are off by a third.
On top of that, someone tries to repeat your experiment - and their mice react differently.
There goes the peer review.
And that's just the pain. What else is influenced by inducing more stress?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"The rodents are also less stressed out"
And so are the male scientists, depending on what time of the month it is.
"everything from the effectiveness of experimental drugs to the ability of monkeys to do math"
Aha, so next time you're doing poorly on a math exam, tell the teacher that you need all the males to leave.
This looks like junk science, all you had to read is "says M. Catherine Bushnell, a neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Division of Intramural Research at the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM"
As in not real medicine and not real science, just junk masquerading as science. They developed their own pain scale based on anthropomorphism of mice "grimaces", then threw some smelly t-shirts in and watched the mouse face after smelling the body odor. nice.
I'm concerned that our tax money may somehow be going to this place.
mice that are sex specific
Who can tell in this crazy day and age.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I take umbrage at that accusation, sir. I can sense the slightest of suffering from animals or humans alike. The fact that that suffering gives me great pleasure is beside the point.
I think frequency would be slightly more important here...you would want to maintain a suitable blood-alcohal level constantly, but then you could always spike it higher for those pesky 'dealing with the public' occasions. ;-)
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I can only assume this was a clever experiment to make your lab assistants remove their shirts, for science.
Govt isn't funded by taxes, in the same way that banks aren't funded by deposits. Banks' loans (created out of nothing) are their assets. So the Fed expands its balance sheet by creating an asset, which funds the government, and keeps the asset on its books forever. Zero-cost govt funding. Taxes aren't necessary, a relic of a feudal era.
I gots my stank on. C'mere and I'll let ya take a snootful of ma stank. Like that?
Seriously, now I need to take a hot shower for a few hours. Scrub!
While it's true that it's difficult to ask a mouse about its gender, sexing them isn't that hard.
After you cleanse with alcohol (or leave the shower) simply rub a half teaspoon or so of table salt into the dampened armpits to prevent the growth of body odor causing bacteria throughout the day. One may also use a salt solution to inhibit foot odor. There appears to be a link between Alzheimer's disease and the concentration of aluminum found in the brain which may have been absorbed via deodorants containing aluminum and/or food prepared in cookware containing aluminum. Thus, I also recommend against the use of aluminum foil -- Instead, use authentic vintage tinfoil for one's hattery.
My studies indicate that males who eliminate odor in this fashion tend not to need worry over contamination of their surroundings by any female odor as well. The mechanism of repulsion has yet to be discerned, but preliminary research indicates it may be due to such preliminary research itself.
I know that when I have tests performed on me, the hotter the woman the more I'm affected. Now excuse me while I hunch forward while the hot nurse takes my blood.
... all gender differences are just social constructs! All the cool people say so!
I'm sure if the mice had been give female monkeys and legos to play with when they were younger, then ... aw, forget it.
Your comprehension of this article seems to be very different from mine.
The smell of males seems to make other mammals feel endangered, and in this state, they feel less pain. This is similar to how people under great stress (for other reasons than being in the presence of He-man) will ignore the pain from even serious injuries.
Now, if your goal is to make sure people around you are less bothered by pain, sure, share your smell with everyone. But if you would like to keep stress levels around you down, you should suppress your smell. It all depends on what your goal is.
As for those who 'cannot handle that information', you'd be surprised how often people confused those who cannot handle something, with those who are actually thinking over what they just learned, and considering the implications. There are times where inaction is worse than the the worst action. In the modern world, such situations are few and far between.
No good deed goes unpunished...
sounds like gay rat talk. your place or his?
The real problem is that feminists and their supporting politicians have turned sex into a loaded subject, so when science associates it with some study, the water gets churned up to a point where no one can really tell who's telling the truth and who's pushing propaganda.
As opposed to then group of histrionic drama queens who now make up the bulk of the ruling class, who think that feelings (specifically theirs) should be center stage in everyone else's decision making process?
Actually the summary has it wrong. It's the male pheromone that inhibits pain but also increases stress.. If anything, this is 'feminist' science trying to find a reason to diss men...or perhaps it is correct science speaking the truth.
Perhaps if you head read the article you would have noticed that the female presence suppressed the stress response in the mice when the male was present. So I can only conclude you didn't. Anonymous cowards don't need to I suppose.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The original article says that the rats felt less pain because they were - more- stressed. Not less. The stress was too high for them to feel pain.
Can you please correct this?
So those would be the rats of NIH?
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... )
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Except human trials have found women feel more relaxed around sweaty, smelly men who don't wear deodorant (or just their dirty shirts). Pheremones are important.
I imagine female mice don't have the same reaction to male pheremones.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
The mice are experimenting on us! Someone get to Alpha Centauri quick and get the triplicate forms filled out to prevent the demolition of Earth!
Here is a contradicting article.
Do men stress mice out or not? Why is there polarizing conclusions from the same sources!?!?!?!?
http://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/men-stress-out-mice-researchers-find-n91521
What's wrong with this: measuring "% pain" in an animal that cannot give meaningful feedback (mouse grimace? don't even want to think how they correlated that to pain as I'm sure they tried to) and the defacto assumption that all the experiment's subjects feel pain to the same degree (hint: humans don't all feel pain to the same degree and it is very hard to measure in us even though we can provide very clear feedback to people inflicting pain on us)
Bah! Biology and related fields are not science any more than astrology is.
There are no "first principles' in biology from which to theorize, it's practioners almost uniformly have a poor grasp of basic math and statistics, and their typically, poorly designed 'experiments', usually involve the discomfort, torture, mutilation, or murder of another creature.
Make it so biologists and their ilk are only allowed to experiment on each other. That way the results will be more relevant to humans and the experiments will be fewer and much more carefully designed. Well maybe. Biologists seem to be a sadistic bunch.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.
Mark Twain
Or, far more likely, you are a misogynist.
Now, if your goal is to make sure people around you are less bothered by pain, sure, share your smell with everyone. But if you would like to keep stress levels around you down, you should suppress your smell.
Uh, from the summary at the top of this very page: "Scientists have found that mice feel 36% less pain when a male researcher is in the room, versus a female researcher. The rodents are also less stressed out."
You sound nice and I bet you're pretty like a pony. Wanna play crabs sometime?
The guy who wrote the summary failed to read the fucking article, or lacked comprehension. Par for the course.
No good deed goes unpunished...
below the line, you posted
The United States of America are a country
We lost that war in 1865.
--
I appear to be a voice of reason. I'll let you know what the other voices in my head say.
You mean to tell me the observer has an EFFECT? What? My God! This changes everything!
proves my point.
Thanks for killing our jokes