Unforeseen Advantages of Gay Intercourse in Beetles

Why homosexuality have persisted is, from an evolutionary stand point, not really completely understood. It has been suggested that it may provide a way for males to exert dominance over each other, a way for males to “practice” for straight sex or that it may just be an epiphenomenon of other evolutionary traits. Well, a new study showed that male flour beetles (Tribolium castaneum) actually transfer sperm when having gay intercourse, and that this sperm, occasionally, could be transferred to the female when the receiving male beetle later reproduces. This did not happen often though (only in about 1% of the cases), but it could still provide an evolutionary advantage for beetles participating in gay intercourse. Really kind of fascinating…. (In all fairness, the researchers also suggested that male-on-male intercourse could be a way of dumping old sperm, but that would be the boring explanation, wouldn’t it?) For those interested, here is a video of the beetles getting it on.

Saudi Supercomputer

The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, or KAUST, recently announced that they were to purchase/develop a 222 teraflop supercomputer to attract top level researchers and scientists. (And btw, a “flop” is a measure of a computers performance, and stands for Floating Point Operations per second.) This is not the fastest supercomputer in the world (the IBM Roadrunner achieved 1 petaflop in May, but 222 teraflops would still make the Saudi supercomputer, nicknamed Shaheen, the 6th fastest supercomputer), but having access to this kind of computing power would still be of huge benefits for researchers. In total, King Abdullah has donated 10 billion dollars to the university, and has demanded that women and men are to be treated equal when attending, which goes against the country’s strict religious parameters. So, go Saudi Arabia on this one. 

The petaflop IBM Roadrunner