New Science on Marriage: Stress, Wealth, Infidelity, Heart Disease, Testosterone and Fertility. Plus Robo-Bugs and Life-Size Transformers!

Beware Robo-Bugs
Researchers at several universities have designed and built ultra-small flying pseudo-insects.

The military clearly has developed drones that work well for reconnaissance and are being developed for offensive action. One of them has a length of about 27 feet and a wingspan of nearly 49 feet. Hobbyists, of course, can make far smaller drones and even equip them with video cameras.

As with many electronic devices, the trend is to go smaller and smaller.

Now researchers at the California Institute of Technology have made a “microbat ornitopter” that flies freely and fits in the palm of one’s hand, reports The Washington Post.

A Vanderbilt University team has made a similar device. “With their sail-like wings, neither of those would be mistaken for insects. In July, however, a Harvard University team got a truly fly-like robot airborne, its synthetic wings buzzing at 120 beats per second,” The Washington Post adds:

The fly’s vanishingly thin materials were machined with lasers, then folded into three-dimensional form ‘like a micro-origami,’ said team leader Robert Wood. Alternating electric fields make the wings flap. The thing weighs just 65 milligrams, or a little more than the plastic head of a push pin.

This device, though, currently requires a tether. Yet “radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths” were made in some Japanese facilities.

The robo-bugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

(Thanks, Fred.)

Life-Size Transformer
As we pointed out during the summer, engineers at Himeji Soft Works offer one example of a real-world “Transformer,” the WR-07 bot. The fully functional wheeled vehicle is able to convert into a humanoid battle bot and vice-versa.

But it’s small.

Now two fellas from Nanjing, China, have built a Transformer robot that is 15 feet tall — using parts from a Citroen C2 car.

According to NewLaunches.com (via Fark):

Weighing in at 600 kgs, it cost $8,000 and took them 3 months to complete. Unfortunately, it can’t move or transform, but nonetheless it is super cool and the closest thing to Bumblebee. It uses original Citreon C2 lights and tires; the rest is hand-sculpted synthetic resin, glass and metal. The creators are planning to make a larger Optimus Prime in the future.

So perhaps the trend isn’t always to go smaller. (See previous blog item.)

Credit (both images): NewLaunches.com

Banking on Infidelity
Almost half of America’s rich say they’re unhappy in marriage, according to a study from Prince and Associates, a Connecticut firm that tracks the habits of the rich.

What’s worse: More than that say they’ve been unfaithful in the last three years.

Of those confessing to an affair, more were women (61 percent) than men (43 percent), Forbes recently noted. The reason cited most frequently by both sexes: variety.

Prince and Associates asked 433 breadwinners — 56 percent male and 44 percent female — with a net worth more than $1 million about their relationships. Thirty-eight percent of the participants had a net worth of $10 million or more.

It should come as little surprise, then, that 30 percent of the survey group said they were considering a divorce.

Broken, Bitter, Diseased Hearts
Of course, the rich aren’t the only ones with marriage problems that lead to divorce and bitterness, which can take massive tolls on families, personal well-being and much more.

Included in that “much more”: heart-health risks. And we’re not talking about broken hearts.

Adverse close relationships — marital strife and other bad personal relationships — may increase the risk of heart disease, researchers reported on Monday. The scientists say the primary cause is stress, already a commonly considered contributor to health problems.

The Associated Press reports of the study:

In a study of 9,011 British civil servants, most of them married, those with the worst close relationships were 34 percent more likely to have heart attacks or other heart trouble during 12 years of follow-up than those with good relationships. That included partners, close relatives and friends.

The study, which follows previous research that has linked health problems with being single and having few close relationships, appeared Monday in Archives of Internal Medicine. In the new study, researchers focused more on the quality of marriage and other important relationships.

Marriage Lowers Testosterone
Two new studies published this fall claim that marital status and paternal responsibility may have a significant effect on levels of testosterone and other hormones in men.

The studies, conducted by an anthropology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, are among the first of their kind conducted outside North America to show that “hormone levels differ significantly not only between fathers and non-fathers, but also between single men and men involved in long-term marital relationships,” ScienceDaily points out this week.

Speaking of Testosterone and Marital Strife…
Researchers have found that lap dancers earn more when they are in the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, suggesting that a woman signals subliminal cues to when she is most fertile.

Although, just how they do it is not clear.

According to ScienceNOW Daily News:

Women, unlike many mammals, don’t come into heat or estrus, a state of obvious fertility that attracts potential mates. Common wisdom has it that estrus was lost as humans evolved. The notion is that women evolved “concealed ovulation’ along with around-the-month sexual receptivity the better to manipulate males by keeping them in the dark, says Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Over a 60-day period, researchers collected data from 18 lap dancers’ 5,300 lap dances. They divided logged data — work hours, tips and when she was menstruating — according to whether the dancers were in the menstrual phase, the high-fertility estrous phase or the luteal phase.

The result, as reported last week in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior:

Of the 11 women with normal menstrual cycles, those in the estrous phase pulled in about $70 an hour — compared with $50 for those in the luteal phase, and only $35 an hour for those who were menstruating. The other seven women were on birth control pills. They earned less across the board, and there was no peaking at the estrous phase.

The numbers suggest that men can tell when a woman is most fertile, although the message seems to be conveyed by “subtle behavioral signals” that evade conscious detection, the authors say.

So now you know.

Boost that Testosterone
Here’s a 1,000-frame-per-second internal video footage of a running engine:

Cheers.