IFLScience: Study Finds Yet Another Possible Benefit Of Moderate Alcohol Consumption: Sperm Quality

A new study published in the journal Andrology revealed that men who consumed 4 to 7 units (1 unit = 12.5 g of ethanol, which corresponds to 125 mL wine, 330 mL beer, or 30 mL spirits) per week had greater semen volume and total sperm count compared with those who drank between less than one unit and three units per week.

Similar to examinations on heart health and overall mortality, the team found a U-shaped association between alcohol and sperm concentration, meaning that men who drank very little and those who regularly binged tended to have no-to-low benefit whereas those in the middle showed a notable benefit. [...]

“On the other hand, different studies experimentally proved that alcohol has a detrimental effect at all levels of the male reproductive system: it interferes with the function of the hypothalamic-pituitary-testicular axis, impairing gonadotropin secretion with consequent decreasing of testosterone levels.”

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Spiegel: Germany's Anti-Trump Strategy Begins to Take Shape

But the guest from Germany brought more with him in his suitcase than just friendly words. In Tokyo, Maas presented the Japanese leader with his idea for a new alliance between states. It could fill the geopolitical vacuum created by Trump. In the coming months, a network of globally oriented states is to be created that closely coordinates its foreign, trade and climate policies. "We need an alliance of the multilateralists," says Maas -- which is to say, an alliance that stands for the global rules and structures of the postwar order that Trump rejects. "It's better to bend than break" would be the wrong maxim in these times," Maas argues. [...]

The strategy won't likely be fully formed until the end of the year, but the allies have already been determined. In addition to Japan, they are likely to also include South Korea, which Maas will also be visiting this week. Both countries would like to sign wide-ranging free trade agreements with the EU.

Maas is also considering South Africa, Australia and Argentina as strategic partners, as well as, of course, the U.S.'s two neighbors, Mexico and Canada. In late August, Canada's Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland is expected to be a guest at the German Foreign Ministry's Ambassadors Conference in Berlin. [...]

Maas plans to float the first trial balloon during the General Assembly of the United Nations in late September. Together with India, Brazil and Japan, the German foreign minister is planning a proposal for a reform of the Security Council. Germany will serve on the Security Council for two years starting in 2019. If Berlin is assigned to chair the council, that would be the point at which the new alliance would appear together for the first time. Maas wants to define the new seat as "European," in "radical alliance" with France.

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Slate: What Is the F--kboy? (AUG. 18 2015 8:29 AM)

A good insult requires no elaboration. We feel it before we understand it. That’s why some slurs resonate even when we’re not sure who or what they’re defaming. Consider the strange case of fuckboy, which plays a central role in Nancy Jo Sales’ controversial article, “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’ ” in this month’s Vanity Fair. Here are two true statements about the word: Everyone knows what fuckboy means. And no one knows what fuckboy means. [...]

This array of meanings is almost certainly a consequence of the complicated uptake and appropriation of fuckboy. Sales nods to the term’s history—“The word has been around for at least a decade with different meanings”—though she fails to explore that history at all. In our conversation, Massey claimed that fuckboy had entered her social world sometime in the past year, but acknowledged that it had a fuzzier past. “I was told that we stole it from gay men,” she told me. “I don’t actually know.” [...]

It’s not uncommon to locate the origins of fuckboy in prison slang, where, according to some accounts, it refers to “men who are ‘gay for pay.’ ” Other sources directly connect the term to prison rape, or suggest that it operates in the space where those two meanings overlap. The word has also been associated with gay male culture—though there too it takes on a variety of specific connotations. I’ve heard it used to refer to men who take a submissive role in sex. But one acquaintance told me that, “to gay men like me it means a rich and powerful man’s kept boy.” [...]

As the Huffington Post’s Sara Boboltz notes, fuckboy has appeared “in a growing number of rap and hip-hop songs” in the decade since Cam’ron first employed it. Unsurprisingly, listeners started noticing the word before journalists did. A 2009 thread in the Hypebeast forums finds users wondering over the word’s derivation while others mock them for arriving late to the party. Significantly, the commenters evince little agreement about fuckboy’s significance or etymology. They propose a variety of possible meanings, all ugly but widely divergent in the specific onus of their ugliness, except insofar as they tend toward a homophobic register.

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Vox: It’s much safer to back into parking spaces. Why don’t we do it?

Incidentally, the photograph shows cars parked closest to campus being more likely to have backed in. This is a consistent day-to-day trend and suggests that early arrivers are go-getters and more willing to do a little work at the outset so as to have a smooth and clear exit. The go-getter idea is consistent with the thesis of the only academic study of this topic that has ever been undertaken. [...]

“Needless to say, back-in parking takes more time and effort than head-in parking. Yet, it is easier, quicker, and safer when exiting. Thus we may conjecture that people take the trouble to back in demonstrate the ability to delay gratification; they want to invest more time and effort now so they can enjoy the fruits of their labor later. They demonstrate a culture of long-term orientation.” [...]

“Americans are not taught to back into stalls either during instruction or by observation of the habits of other drivers. This results in the average American not being comfortable backing into a parking stall.… Europeans are more often challenged to get cars into and out of tight spaces and learn to back cars into parking spaces at an early age.” [...]

Still, there is a difference between men and women — and more generally, within the overall population — on the skills that go into parking, especially parking while backing up. The most important such skill is what psychologists “mental rotation,” or the ability to imagine objects in other than their actual position. (You can test your own mental rotation skills here.) For reasons that are still widely debated, men are on the whole better mental rotators than women.

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The Atlantic: The Scientific Case for Two Spaces After a Period

“Increased spacing has been shown to help facilitate processing in a number of other reading studies,” Johnson explained to me by email, using two spaces after each period. “Removing the spaces between words altogether drastically hurts our ability to read fluently, and increasing the amount of space between words helps us process the text.”

In the Skidmore study, among people who write with two spaces after periods—“two-spacers”—there was an increase in reading speed of 3 percent when reading text with two spaces following periods, as compared to one. This is, Johnson points out, an average of nine additional words per minute above their performance “under the one-space conditions.” [...]

Others were less ecstatic. Robert VerBruggen, the deputy managing editor at National Review, shared the study with the comment: “New facts forced me to change my mind about drug legalization but I just don’t think I can do this.” [...]

Such an argument is extremely difficult to make when it comes to sentence spacing, because the evidence is not there for either case. The fact that the scientifically optimal number of spaces hasn’t been well studied was odd to Johnson, given the strength of people’s feelings on the subject. The new American Psychological Association style guidelines came out recently, and they had changed from one space to two spaces following periods because they claimed it “increased the readability of the text.” This galled Johnson: “Here we had a manual written to teach us how to write scientifically that was making claims that were not backed with empirical evidence!”

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