study – The Daily Opinion

Animals Do Have Personalities

Chimpanzees apparently do have personalities, according to a new study. Although, what first struck me was: “How does one define a personality?” I’ve always viewed it as something quite subjective. When I consider someone to be the type of person who lacks a personality, I tend to have people who disagree with me. They’re wrong, of course, but they still disagree with me.

Anyway, the research team at the University Of Edinburgh apparently found that Chimpanzees do have personalities. What is an animal personality, though? Well an animal personality is defined as the differences between different animals. To make it a little clearer, if there’s a fish and he can see some bait in the water. A fish with personality A may think to himself that he doesn’t want to take the risk and isn’t interested anymore. A fish with personality B may decide he will take the risk to get the juicy piece of bait on the end of the hook. And this can be applied to a variety of different scenarios.

The study also specified that chimpanzees and animals like Orang-utans, which are sometimes referred to as ‘People of the Jungle’, need and require friends just like most humans. But surely we knew this in the beginning due to the herd mentality of many species of ape? If you watch any nature show then you will see it. In fact, some species of ape will even get their protein from killing and cannibalising other apes.

What does all this mean, though?

In short, it will have very little impact on our scientific advancement, nor will it influence tomorrow or anything like that. What it will show, with a little more research, is that we did evolve from a common ancestor; the common ancestor being the ancestor chimpanzees evolved from too. And this will have a profound impact on a variety of religious sects as they still don’t believe that evolution even exists.

Furthermore, a question I’ve always wondered about, is who exactly is this common ancestor? If we can gradually trace ourselves back then it will yield the various incarnations of ourselves all the way throughout history. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it is a point of interest at least.

On a side note, the only thing we have to be surprised about is why didn’t we know all this before? Why do humans still find it hard to grasp that we are just really intelligent apes? Why do so many humans still think we came from somewhere special, as if we are not like anything else on our planet? If we did then surely we could have predicted this to start with. Surely we are just slightly more intelligent monkeys?

Genes Not Linked to Disease?

Those who enjoy speculating on the future of science were once predicting that DNA sequencing will become so cheap and so easy to carry out that everyone would have their own little genome card which could tell their doctors everything they needed to know. This sounds pretty cool and very useful. But a new study has revealed that this probably won’t be of any use at all due to the considerable low genetic risk, even if it does sound incredibly cool.

Genetics were originally expected to play a role by acting as markers for serious diseases like cancer and diabetes, but, sadly, the risks associated with these diseases as being caused by genetics is very low. And this is because most of these diseases are caused by external factors under our control. However, scientists have still maintained that if they find all the markers then the benefits will warrant the creation of inspecting the genome.

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It’s Chocolate Time…Yay!

That’s right, now nobody should feel guilty when throwing a kilogram of chocolate down their necks because scientists have supposedly discovered that those who eat the most chocolate are actually the thinnest people in our society. Chocolate makes you thin? Huzzah!

This is something I was sceptical about at first because my first thought was that those who are thinnest will eat the most chocolate because they know it won’t make them fat. However, a fat person wouldn’t touch the stuff through fear of giving themselves a third butt cheek.

The study was published in the journal of the Archives of Internal Medicine and outlined a study carried out by the University of California, in San Diego, and came to the conclusion that chocolate makes you thin.

As for the exact results, it showed that of a study involving just under 1,000 Americans, those who ate chocolate a few times a week were thinner, on average, than those who only ate chocolate on occasion. The study looked at a number of factors when putting together these results, including diet, Body Mass Index (BMI), and calorie intake.

Scientists are putting these results down to the fact chocolate doesn’t encourage the creation of fat, despite the fact that it has a lot of calories. Even though these results only prove that there might be a link, it could lead to a complete change in the way we view weight gain and weight loss when it comes to food.

Chocolate has also been demonstrated by scientists to have some other benefits for the body, other than the urge to eat more. One of these benefits comes from dark chocolate, which contains many antioxidants that can help fight disease and get rid of the harmful free radicals in our body that harm our cells.

But this shouldn’t be new for those who have looked into the subject at all because this was discovered long before this study came to light. The Raw Food Movement were the ones who first came up with this when a book called The China Study was released. They demonstrated that mass amounts of sugar in things like chocolate and fruit doesn’t have a negative effect on one’s weight at all.

This means that chocolate doesn’t contribute to weight gain – otherwise how could it be possible for people to live entirely off of sugary fruits and vegetables? Even though this is only just coming to light in mainstream science now, what we have to remember is that this has already been touched upon in the basement of global science many times before. Yes, chocolate makes you thin, but it will be a long time before it’s made official in the mainstream world.

Hey, Fatty, Are You Going to Be Having Kids?

Scientists have discovered that it’s not just the excessive rolls of fat that mean fat people are less likely to find a woman to have kids with. Rather, it’s the saturated fat in food which is leading to lower sperm counts amongst men.

The Harvard Medical School in Boston carried out the experiment under the stewardship of Professor Jill Attaman. The study asked 99 men questions about their diet and analysed their sperm samples over four years.The results of the study showed that of the 99 men in the study, those with the highest fat intake had 43% less sperm than normal at the end of the study. And even more bad news showed that at the end of the study the concentration of the sperm, measured via number of sperm per unit volume of semen, was down by 38%.

The study, reported in the scientific journal Human Reproduction, revealed these results, but everyone involved in the study is saying that more research needs to be done before any conclusions can be made.The men who ate the most omega-3-rich foods had a conventional structure when it came to the shape of the sperm, but the important thing to take into account was that 71% of the 99 men were already overweight or obese anyway. So this could have had an impact on the sperm even before the study had begun.But like with many of these studies which seem to be appearing at the moment, they all seem to have used very small research groups. Is it because they couldn’t find more people to masturbate into a jar every so often for the next four years? If this is the case then they should either be promoting their cause more or paying their volunteers because 99 men where 71% are already obese is not a study that can be taken very seriously.If the study was designed to discover whether high levels of saturated fat caused a reduction of sperm in men or not then surely they should have used people who lived on relatively healthy diets. This would show comprehensively whether it reduced the number of sperm or not. But if they also wanted to know how much it was reduced by then they should have used an equal number of healthy and unhealthy people when it came to the study.

As for this writer’s own personal study on whether people who eat more saturated fat (by implication, fat people) will have a lower chance of conceiving a child or not then a conclusion has been found. To conceive a child you need a woman, and everybody knows that fat guys generally do finish last in this category.All I need is the warm, fatty embrace of these sausagey buns.

So science may not have discovered whether high levels of saturated fat actually do cause a reduction in the amount of sperm yet, but this writer’s study has definitely brought up some comprehensive results.