Science bits: Pressures on adolescents; Increasing male sex drive! 😮; Making mosquitos deaf

A social science research paper, The Perils of Not Being Attractive or Athletic: Pathways to Adolescent Adjustment Difficulties Through Escalating Unpopularity, considers factors that appear to lead some children into unpleasant feelings and situations:

Adolescents who lack traits valued by peers are at risk for adjustment difficulties but the mechanisms responsible for deteriorating well-being have yet to be identified. The present study examines processes whereby low athleticism and low attractiveness give rise to adolescent adjustment difficulties. .... The results indicated that the possession of stigmatized traits predicted escalating unpopularity, which, in turn, predicted increasing adjustment difficulties. Similar indirect associations did not emerge with rejection as a mediator, underscoring the unique role of power and prominence (and the lack thereof) in socioemotional development. The findings underscore the adjustment risks and interpersonal challenges that confront children and adolescents who lack traits valued by peers.

I suppose this is not a surprise. What is surprising is that, if this paper is a good indicator, this line of research is a lot less advanced than I imagined. This is puzzling.

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Researchers have found two clusters of neurons in the brain of mice that mediate male sex drive. The Messenger writes: 

A Discovery in Mice Brains Could Solve Sexual Disorders in Men

The study found that stimulating a neural circuit makes mice try to mate with whatever is nearby—including inanimate objects

A neural connection in mice may hold the key to helping men struggling with sexual disorders like libidos that are too high—or too low.

While different parts of the brain have long been known to play a role in sexual behavior, Stanford Medicine scientists have found a single circuit involving two different neural clusters that they say plays an integral role in the mating behavior of male mice.

“The circuit seems to be the central component of male sexual behavior that also elicits desire and also leads to reward or pleasure-type behavior,” said Professor Nirao Shah, the study’s lead author.

The two clusters are POATacr1, a region in the preoptic hypothalamus (a portion of the brain known to be involved in sexual behavior, as well as bodily functions like temperature regulation) and BNSTprTac1, which is in the amygdala (the part of the brain that regulates emotions and plays a role in recognizing potential mates).

By stimulating the connection between POATacr1 cells and BNSTprTac1 cells, the researchers found that the mice would try to mate with whatever was nearby—including other male mice or even inanimate objects. They found this was the case even if the mice had just ejaculated; normally, male mice have a refractory period that lasts five days after mating, but in the experiment, that period was shortened to a single second.  

“We think this circuit does underlie male sexual behavior. I think there are going to be other components to the circuit naturally,” he said. “For example, we don't know which specific sensory neurons sense the external cues in the world. But what we've identified seems to be a central essential set of components.”

I always suspected that POATacr1 and BNSTprTac1 were the culprits. I need to buy some stock in male escort companies. Their stock is going to shoot through the roof, so to speak.

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Malaria researchers have found that if male mosquitos cannot hear females in flight, they cannot locate mating partners and the population collapses. The authors write:

The acoustic detection of mating partners in swarms by malaria mosquitoes constitutes a superb example of the adaptation of a sensory organ -the mosquito ear- to a transient change in the sensory ecology. Malaria mosquito swarms are brief and transitory aggregations of up to a thousand mosquitoes that take place every sunset. Within the swarm, mosquitoes are exposed to an acoustically challenging, noisy environment. It is against this noisy acoustic backdrop that male mosquitoes identify and locate the flight tones of their female mating partners. 

Using transcriptomics, we identify a complex network of candidate neuromodulators regulating mosquito hearing in the species Anopheles gambiae. Among them, octopamine stands out as an auditory modulator during swarm time. In-depth analysis of octopamine auditory function shows that it affects the mosquito ear on multiple levels: it modulates the tuning and stiffness of the flagellar sound receiver and controls the erection of antennal fibrillae. We show that two α- and β-adrenergic-like octopamine receptors drive octopamine’s auditory roles and demonstrate that the octopaminergic auditory control system can be targeted by insecticides. Our findings highlight octopamine as key for mosquito hearing and mating partner detection and as a potential novel target for mosquito control. 

In other words, researchers are now looking for insecticides that targets mosquito hearing. Instead of the typical poisons that are often or usually environmental toxins, it is possible that new insecticides might be less toxic, or maybe even non-toxic to most other animals.