Weird Science does most of its breeding after death

This little guy never knew his dad.

UCLA

If not life after death, at least a little bit of sex. What's not to love about a paper entitled "the posthumous reproductive dynamics of male Trinidadian guppies"? Or the finding that, "A significant proportion of the reproductive population consisted of dead males, who could conceive up to 10 months after death (the maximum allowed by the length of the dataset), which is more than twice the estimated generation time." Before you get images of zombie guppies swimming slowly and groaning "booty!" instead of "brains!" there's a small fact that can make sense of this result: female guppies store sperm that they later use to fertilize their eggs. It's common among insects (which is why just a single roach can be bad news) but this is the first I've heard of it being a major factor in fish reproduction.

Gamers see more, but don't remember any of it. A variety of studies have shown that people who play fast-paced video games seem to get more out of complex scenes than non-gamers do. This could simply be a matter of a visual system that was more locked-in, or it could involve something more significant, like better tracking of objects in memory or better decision-making based on visual input. Gaming might actually do your brain all sorts of good. Unfortunately, It's not something that's significant. A more detailed study shows that the gamers' visual systems were better at picking information up, but the brain didn't retain it any better.

Cancer free, but hairy, impotent, and uninterested in alcohol. Finasteride seems to be a wonder drug, in the sense that we here at Weird Science are beginning to wonder if there's anything it doesn't do. The drug inhibits an enzyme involved in testosterone metabolism, and is primarily used for treating enlarged prostates. One potentially useful side effect of its testosterone inhibition is that it combats male pattern baldness. On the downside, however, it also tends to have some bad effects on male sexual function. All of that mostly makes sense (testosterone, after all), but there's at least one effect that's a head scratcher: people on finasteride drink less. The typical number of drinks consumed by people taking the drug went from over five to two.