Men with deep voices father more babies

Now this one’s interesting…According to a recent study, men with deep toned voices tend to father more children than their high-pitched counterparts.

Coren Apicella, a Harvard University anthropology student, spent six months studying the Hadza, a nomadic hunter-gatherer population from Tanzania. For her, they were ideal because they “provide a window to our past.”

Hadza still sleep under the stars. Women gather berries and tubers while men hunt using the bow and the arrow. The Hadza are monogamous (but divorce rate are high) and they choose their own partners. They don’t use birth control methods either, so they are what we can call a natural fertility population.

The study was pretty simple. It involved collecting voice recordings of 49 men and 52 women between ages 18 to 55 from nine different camps. They were made to say “Hujambo”, meaning “hello” into a microphone.

Some analysis here, analysis there, and the conclusion (or maybe speculation?) was this. The reason why men with deep voices fathered more children is probably because they attract more women with their voice than their tenor counterpart.

Hmmm…

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Here’s the full article by BBC News.

Energy Saving: Rice Cooker vs. Microwave Oven

May I digress…

Our highschool batch yahoogroups discuss interesting topics in our threads. We have topics ranging from tuna chorizo to the effects of laptops on men’s fertility.

The “hot” topic today was cooking rice using the microwave.

Apparently, some of my friends have been nuking their rice and it struck me as amazing. Naturally, I “googled” around and saw some tips on how to do it. For my friends “technique” involves “microwaving” the rice at 5 minute intervals and stirring until done. Generally, they said, it takes them 14 to 15 minutes to cook their rice.

Now, I cook rice using the rice cooker. I prefer leaving it there while doing other stuff while I wait for it to be done. Now here comes my question:

Which of the two methods would be more energy efficient?

So, again, I “googled” around. I am lucky. Believe or not, four Indian scientists did a study comparing the energy consumption of cooking rice using the microwave, electric rice cooker, and the pressure cooker.

The title of the paper is “Energy consumption in microwave cooking of rice and its comparison with other domestic appliances“ and was authored by S. Lakshmi, A. Chakkaravarthi, R. Subramanian, , and Vasudeva Singh.

I didn’t have access to the full paper ( I’d have to buy it), but the abstract gave me what I needed to know.

Among the cooking appliances, the electric rice cooker was the most energy-efficient while the microwave had the least cooking time (15 – 22 min). Now, this one’s useful, right?

And oh, here’s the bit that interested me the most. Presoaking the rice will save us energy between 5 to 11%.

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Related to this here’s a blog by The Ethicurean.