Male-Male Courtship Gene Identified in Fruit Flies May 27, 2008
Posted by Colloquy in Science, news.Tags: news, Science
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This is some pretty interesting news! When researchers suppressed the “Sphinx Gene” in fruit flies, they noticed increased male-male courtship . Males were more interested in other males.
Unless I’m reading this article wrong (I’m no scientist) – Hongzheng Dai and Ying Chen from the University of Chicago, noted that:
Males without sphinx pursued each other more than 10 times longer than did males with a working copy of the gene. They performed all stages of normal male-female courtship–orienting, tapping, singing, licking, attempting–except for copulating.- …. Female flies without sphinx, on the other hand, did not show any changes in reproductive behavior compared to females with sphinx.
You can read the full story here.
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Thank you for your Memorial Day Tribute post yesterday, it was cute. Sorry I didn’t get around to leaving a comment.
Tell me about your editing problem. The easiest place to do it from is the “edit” tab right there with the page displayed. If you then highlight some text to delete, next press ‘delete’ on the keyboard. You aren’t clicking the ‘delete’ tab on the page are you? That will delete the whole comment.
8-)
Another thing you can edit is, from the editing page, on the upper right, you can edit the time stamp. This would be useful if you accidentally deleted a comment. You could recreate the comment and edit the time stamp, if necessary, to get that comment back in the right spot in the comment queue. So your personal avatar does not display with that comment, log out first, submit the comment, then do any necessary editing after logging back in. Every once in a while this trick comes in handy.
I’m not sure what is going on here, but something a little odd. Normally the default link color is blue. When it is clicked on, it is normal for it to afterwards display in another color, as a cue that I have already been there. Your links are initially displaying (for me, anyway) in orange, and after clicked on, in gray. The ‘problem’ with that gray is that it is nearly indistinguishable from the rest of the text (unless hovered upon). So, if I have visited that link and then am reading through the post a second time, I don’t readily notice those now gray links. Have you done something to change your default color for links? I’m not sure where you do that, but it is an option.
Sorry for not replying earlier – science project due tomorrow … Aauurrgghh!
Teenagers – harumph!
Oh that’s just terrific news!!! The gay bashers are going to have a field day with this. And you know, speaking as a fruit fly, our sex lives were just fine before you scientists had to butt in. DO YOU MIND!?
Re 7:04 comment, upon further observation, those undesirable color changes only occur when the comment part of the page is ‘buttoned up’. When it’s opened, the color change does not occur. It’s best you forget about it. I’ll get to the bottom of this mystery and let you know what I learn. Get that homework done!
A useful tool when some oddballs blather and run amok all over your comment section, is this: Create a page or post but either do not publish it or mark it as private. Then if there is any blather that you wish to store in the back room, copy & paste it to there, then delete or edit the original comment. It’s easier to save it as comments on said page/post rather than as the entry. Or you could make a password protected PAGE (is easier to find than post) for me.
