Weird Science keeps its testosterone steady after fighting with quails

It's a testosterone laced fight club!

K. Hirschenhauser

It's not how you do, it's who sees you doing it. We tend to associate testosterone with facial hair and deep voices, but it also controls behavior in both sexes across the animal kingdom. One bit of behavior it seems to control is a response to conflict: winners experience a testosterone surge, while losers see their levels drop. Now, some researchers have looked into that response in more detail, and uncovered a rather important feature of it: it seems to be tied to the public embarrassment of losing a fight in front of an audience.

The authors were using the Japanese quail to track the testosterone response. (Because when you think of testosterone-laced conflicts, you immediately think "Japanese Quail," right?) When a fight went on in private, a testosterone surge actually appeared in both the winners and losers. But when an audience of other quail were present, the losers saw their testosterone levels drop. Obviously, we'll want to check this in other species to determine if quail are especially sensitive to public humiliation. Of course, I'm not sure how you'd conduct the test with humans, who would always know that the researchers were watching.

We're not giving you this liver unless we're convinced you're going to keep using it. Since organ donation remains relatively uncommon, transplant centers need to prioritize who gets in line first for one of the limited number of body parts available. Now, someone's gone through and surveyed hospital administrators about how they establish who gets a new liver. And, in the obvious result of the week, they found that if you're over 80, obese, and in jail, the liver's going to someone else. Less obvious was the fact that there was little agreement over what made someone a good candidate for getting an organ, or even which criteria the public might consider controversial.