South Asia Daily

National pride vanishes around ribosomes

 

It makes perfect sense to me that someone dealing in ribosomes inside human cells would have gone beyond national pride engendered by randomly drawn geographical boundaries which define nations.

When asked by Sanjay Suri of CNN-IBN  on whether he felt “particular pride” as an Indian after winning the Nobel Prize in chemistry Dr. Venkatraman Ramakrishnan said, “I am not particularly big on nationalism. I like people rather than nations but I am deeply aware of my Indian roots and I am deeply grateful to my teachers.”

I thought it was a terrific response, precisely the kind I would have offered had I won any prize in anything.  I am still trying to square how someone who operates at such profoundly complex levels in a laboratory unraveling the fundamentals of human life would still feel excited over a prize, even a Nobel Prize.

The size (of your wallet) matters

 

 

It seems the size does matter; size of the wallet that is. British scientists say that the richer the male partner the greater (more frequent) the female orgasms.

In case you do not understand the connection here is what one of the scientists says. “Women's orgasm frequency increases with the income of their partner,” said Thomas Pollet, a psychologist at Newcastle University, who conducted the research.

He gives a fancy scientific name such as “evolutionary adaptation” for what simpler folks uncharitably call gold diggers. I bring this nugget of information without any personal take on it other than saying that as a mere journalist my wallet is necessarily small.

Logically, one can argue that the frequency of female orgasms must have reduced dramatically in recent months considering the wallet sizes across economies have shrunk so much. I shudder to think about the sex lives of billionaires whose fortunes were halved overnight because of stock market crashes. Think of a billionaire who was worth say 15 billion dollars in the morning and when he returned home at night it had dropped to 5 billion dollars. One can only imagine what awaited him in the bedroom.

Pollet and his co-author Daniel Nettle reached their conclusion after studying data from what is described as one of the world's biggest lifestyle studies, namely the Chinese Health and Family Life Survey. Under this some 5,000 Chinese people were surveyed. “Increasing partner income had a highly positive effect on women's self-reported frequency of orgasm. More desirable mates cause women to experience more orgasms,” Pollet has been quoted as saying by Britain’s The Sunday Times newspaper.

I wonder about the quality of the Chinese sample considering that incomes never really go up that much in China for most people.