A good reason to leave your mother’s womb

This picture was taken for Lisa, a Montreal blogger expat who now lives in the U.K. and who misses poutine. Lisa is in the hospital as I write these words, waiting for her baby to finally decide to come out.

Just show him the picture of this new Quebec delicacy, Lisa, and your baby will hurry up and learn to walk as soon as possible so he can run to the closest d�panneur.

Balls and brain = same stuff

While perusing their data, I used a statistical method, called a Principal Components Analysis, to position each tissue type in a 3 dimensional graph based on the similarity between their respective gene expression profiles (left panel). I was surprised to observe in this extensive dataset evidence that testes are the tissue type that is the most similar to the brain.

From the very scientific Andr� in Digital Apoptosis.

The new Bridget

I was doing some quick research for a story I’m working on, which is based in London, and I found some interesting facts about british singles on the BBC Web site.

More than half of single British women are happy to stay unattached, according to a survey.

The poll, for market research group Mintel, found 56% of single women were « very happy » with their lives as they were and had no desire to be married.

It found 46% of single men felt the same, but one in four said they missed the « comfort and closeness of a hug ».

Almost half of single men questioned said the biggest downside of living alone was « not having enough sex ».

For women, the biggest gripe was that people always assumed they wanted to be in a relationship.

Researchers at Edinburgh University also found that:

There are now more single men in their thirties than women. Figures from the Office for National Statistics show the number of men choosing to remain single and live alone has reached record levels.

Between the ages of 25 and 44, men have been found to be twice as likely as women to live by themselves.

The lifestyle of the reluctant female singleton was shown in Helen Fielding’s best-seller Bridget Jones’s Diary and its sequel Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason.

But in the real world there are more than 1.65 million men aged between 30 and 39 who are single in the UK – up more by than 50,000 from last year. Compared to 1.27 million women in the same age range, making « Brad Jones » the new Bridget.