Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
"Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in. The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt. “It’s really astounding that such a robust effect could have been missed for so many years,” Mogil says."
RTFA.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in.
The article then continues to support your reason for less pain response. That the potential presence of a lone male predator is a threat and it is not safe spending excess time responding to minor injuries.
Also, the line right after the above quote indicates that the summary has it backward (as surprise to no one) about the part of test-rats getting stressed.
The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt.
This also indicates that lions figured out how to cheat the system.
Male: "Every one of those tasty herbivores gets so flighty when I get close."
Female: "Well, you're also scaring off the hyenas and other critters we don't want near the cubs. You stay here and act scary, I'll go get some dinner."
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
"Further testing showed that the rodents exposed to male odors were actually feeling less pain, rather than simply hiding the pain they were in. The male aroma ramped up their stress levels, which deadened the hurt. “It’s really astounding that such a robust effect could have been missed for so many years,” Mogil says."
RTFA.
Clearly, it's natural selection via sexism. Science is mostly a male dominated field and, after a century or more of being used for experiments, these carefully managed strains of rodents now have genetically coded instincts that detect the scent of (male) human scientists as they do the scent of other predators.
(Laugh, it's funny.)
That's not directly contradicting what he said though: unless researchers are directly patch-clamping the pain nerves in the mouse feet while doing this and showing there are fewer pain signals from the same injury, one can't say for sure they're feeling less pain as opposed to simply hiding it. The stress might be working at the paw, or it might be working in the brain.
"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.
Because there aren't female predators?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, no, it suggests that a male one might well. (The summary is incorrect.)
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."
Actually, I am laughing.
(Biomed, by the way, is one of the fields with great gender parity, but since previous generations - at least of mice - are in question, your point holds.)
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..."
lioness hunt almost exclusively. Their are plenty of other examples besides that, but it was the first one to come to mind.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
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!
You didn't know my last boss.
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. :)
Lionesses?
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.
About as much as requiring that all veterinarians and their staff are male - cause we are basically walking painkiller for mammals.
Which includes humans, so just on the off chance that it does work...
But don't worry... From TFA:
"Placing a womanâ(TM)s T-shirt next to a manâ(TM)s T-shirt negated the impact."
Aaaand it just occurred to me that the negating effect of female smells is NOT the argument against "all male" animal or human clinics and hiring policies.
Damn. Hope that does not become a trend.
Is foregoing feeling 36% less pain really that big of price to pay to have sexy nurses and doctors?
And by sexy I mean women.
Not being sexist. Just being human male, hetero and honest.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I've never felt pain while dreaming. that sounds like a weird experience!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
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 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
Sarcasm.. fail.
I was being sarcastic to the original poster who said:
"Animals know that if they show weakness in front of a predator"
Looking at the data from these tests and the study, the poster is implying that predators are male.
Which is false in many species. i.e. anything that eats mice.
I keep rereading my post and really don't see how that could be read as anything but sarcastic in the context.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
While it's true that it's difficult to ask a mouse about its gender, sexing them isn't that hard.
So, that sounds impressive, but at most you patch clamps neurons, not nerves, and the relationship between activity nociceptive neurons and perceived pain is complex. Even were you able to record the activity of all nociceptive sensory neurons responding to the stimulus, you could not from that predict how the pain would be experienced in the brain, where the experiencing part is actually happening. (Heck, right now I'm working with sea slugs, that don't have brains, but instead just a number of ganglia, and even in that system of vastly fewer parts we can't make that kind of prediction.)
The canonical use of the term patch clamp refers to pulled patches - where you remove a small piece of membrane from a neuron to examine the activity of one or a small number of ion channels in that patch. I suspect what you're thinking of is whole cell patch clamping* where you use similar electrodes to create a similar seal, but rather than pulling a patch away from the cell, you blow the patch and instead clamp the whole cell, measuring the change in voltage or current in the whole cell (the "clamp" bit refers to holding one steady while measuring the changes in the other).
* Which, to be fair, is a ton of fun. And whole cell patch clampers - which is what I learned first - often use the term patch clamp without modifiers, just to confuse things.
The more likely explanation (at least I think so anyway) is that exclusively male hormones with no female hormones present, coupled with the fact that nearly all mammals conserve these olfactory signals, means that the same olfactory signals in a "Strongly competitive" mouse colony (reproductively competitive that is) are being expressed by the preponderantly male research scientists, which increases stress hormone levels in the mice, which chemically inhibits pain receptivity.
This makes sense, as a strongly competitive colonial environment is likely to cause injury to both male and female mice under the circumstances in question. Females get bullied for sex, males get attacked/killed to weed out competition.
as the two types of hormones approach equilibrium, there is less competition for sexual partners, and the risks of physical injury by other mice decreases.
Human males are just releasing the chemical cocktails that trigger the stress response in the mice.
This just means another layer of experimental control is needed when using mice in experiments where pain tolerance or mitigation is being researched, and the human researchers are male. For example, spraying female olfactory hormones to counteract the effect, or ensuring that male to female ratios in research teams directly handling the animals is always 1:1, or favors female handlers.
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.
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.
..except that there are a lot of feminist politicians and 'scientists' running around who would actually agree.
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.
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!
Technically the link was with antiperspirants and not deodorants and was debunked years ago.
Jesus, using Snopes on Slashdot. What's the world coming to?
http://www.snopes.com/medical/...
http://www.webmd.com/skin-prob...
[John]
Shit better not happen!
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.
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."
While my original post was merely on the effectiveness of rubbing alcohol to eliminate body odor, I do use snopes and agree that its points are valid (for now).
However, we already have a hundredish chemicals (including rocket fuel) in our bodies from polluted ground water and the skin is a semi permeable organ and it seems logical that if you rub aluminum salts on the surface and dampen it with sweat in your underarm that some aluminum salt is going to be carried into the body.
If it's not all that effective, and it's not really well studied yet (studies are still underway as of 2013) then why take the risk?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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.
proves my point.