New Hampshire Health News Digest

Scientists Agree: It's in His Kiss | Wired Science from Wired.com And according to experts in this field (yes, there are at least three of them), the 60's pop song got it right: It really is in his kiss. "Kissing is a mechanism for mate choice and mate assessment," Helen Fisher, a Biological Anthropologist from Rutgers University here at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said to a press conference crowded with science journalists hoping for a story or, perhaps, some advice. Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit. But because it is so pervasive, scientists think there must be a good reason for it, some kind of evolutionary advantage. And humans aren't alone in this ritual. Chimpanzees kiss, foxes and dogs lick each other's faces, some birds tap their bills together, and elephants put their trunks in each other's mouth...

Cooking Has Been Both Boon and Bane for Humans | Wired Science from Wired.com CHICAGO — Raw-food devotees take note: Your diet is not in any way natural. Humans are as adapted to cooking our food as cows are to eating grass, or ticks are to sucking blood. "Cooking is a human universal," said Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting here Friday. While cooking kills parasites and other pathogens, Wrangham believes this health benefit is not its primary contribution. "The fundamental importance of cooking is that it provides increased sources of energy," he said. And that boost may be what facilitated the leap in size between Homo erectus and modern Homo sapiens. But, cooking may also have helped some modern humans into an obesity epidemic. Wrangham cited data showing that cooking increases the body's ability to digest starches (as found, for example, in bread, potatoes and bananas). Only about 50 per...

Looking for Love In All the Right Alleles | Wired Science from Wired.com People may naturally be attracted to mates with HLA profiles different from their own, ostensibly guaranteeing the hybrid vigor of their offspring's immune systems -- and also providing a spark that will last through good times and bad. "Proper age, similar life goals and ideas, education levels -- all of these things have to fit. And on top of that, you need to be biologically compatible," said Tamara Brown, managing director of GenePartner. But not everyone is convinced that scientists can read the genome of love. "These kinds of ideas are not as crazy as they often sound, but before you start trying to sell this kind of thing, we'd like to have solid evidence," said Dustin Penn, a behavioral biologist at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Ethology. "There's some supporting evidence, but it's mixed." The science of HLA love started with Swiss biologist Claus Wedekind, w...

Science News / All In The Family Could there be genetic benefits to marrying distant cousins for animals and humans? Kissing cousins It's no secret that humans interbreed too. Charles Darwin married his first cousin, Emma Wedgewood. More recently, a 1997 study of Pakistani hospitals found that three out of five marriages were between first cousins, while a study of one South Indian city found that one-fifth of marriages occurred between uncles and nieces and a third between first cousins. But close inbreeding comes with a high cost for humans. "First cousins, when they have babies—it's like a textbook example—tend to have higher mortality," Zamudio says. In contrast, scientists know little about the effects of inbreeding between more distantly related couples—third cousins and beyond. But recent work on Icelanders suggests that some family loving might be a good thing. A team of researchers at the Icelandic firm deCODE genetics sifted through 165 years of genealogy da...