Image Hosted by ImageShack.us

Bringing you the dark genius of Dostoyevsky
combined with the divine, intelligent humor of Pynchon
since spring 2002


What Cool Scientists Are Wearing



  • Click Here To Get Your Own Cool Science Guy Stuff!
Sites Cool Scientists Are Reading
  • Science & Supermodels
  • Scientific Blogging
  • Build Cool Stuff!
  • We Are Scientists
  • Sex And The Beach
  • The Grunt
  • The Mighty Dyckerson
  • Blog Portland
  • Mo Comedy
  • RevRee
  • Chatoyance
  • Crystal Village
  • Misogynous Portuguese
  • M-Visions
  • Forever Geek
  • Geek Logik
  • Michelle's Spell
  • Issy
Top 10 Reasons My Faster-Than-Light Car Rules:

10) Stephen Hawking always wants to carpool.

9) Breaking the laws of physics is only a misdemeanor in most states.

8) Traffic enforcement is pretty much limited to cops with Ph.D.'s in Quantum Physics.

7) Bugs - they never see you comin'.

6) I can get to the good hookers before Charlie Sheen.

5) I made a fortune selling pizza with the slogan "It's there before you order or it's free!"

4) I sleep until noon and still get to work by 8:00am!

3) I'm never in the car long enough to hear an entire Madonna song.

2) My cigar butts don't land in the back seat, they land in last week!

... and the number one cool thing about my faster-than-light car is ...

1) I get a license plate that reads "ME = MC^2"

Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
  • Subscribe

  • Making the world safe
    for technology,
    one comedic punch
    to the throat at a time.


  • Add to Technorati Favorites!
  • Subscribe in NewsGator Online
  • Subscribe with Bloglines

Previous Scientific Goodness

  • Practical Science Part I - Bugs Bunny and Beer

  • An Equation About Easter Miracles - Should Captain...

  • Happy Easter

  • Girls Gone Green

  • Who Funds The Chocolate Consensus?

  • Heidi Klum Is Not Grabbing My Butt This Valentine'...

  • Would Female Orgasms Kill Men?

  • The Scientific Guide To Dating

  • A Population Crisis The Left And Right Can Agree On

  • Yes,Vagina, There Is A Santa Claus

Blah, Blah, Blah

  • Subscribe in NewsGator Online
  • unique IPs to-date
  • Top Technology Blogs
  • Site Feed
  • iPing-it!
  • Listed on BlogShares

  • Other Places
    To Find Me

    Powered by Blogger

Queer As Fish: Estrogen in Pittsburgh rivers





There's a lot of "Can X make you gay?" articles being written these days. This fellow says soy is making you gay and even the New York Times wonders if you have a gay car.

Now a study from the University of Pittsburgh says that fish from Pittsburgh rivers contain substances that act like estrogen.

Estrogen. The female hormone. So you'll have to forgive me for the topical television reference, but when a show called Queer As Folk is set in Pittsburgh, 'fish' is going to jump in there rather naturally.


We're supposed to make girls go fishing.
Fishing is not supposed to make us into girls.



Since fish are sentinels of the environment, say researchers at Pitt's Center for Environmental Oncology, and retain chemicals from their habitat within their bodies, their experiments show that feminizing chemicals are making their way into the region's waterways.

Their study also says these chemicals caused increased growth of estrogen-sensitive breast cancer cells. Wow, you can become a woman and get breast cancer. Fishing in the 'Burgh sounds better and better.





"We decided to look at pisciverous fish, those that eat other fish, for this project because we know that they bioaccumulate contaminants from water and their prey, which may include toxic metals, farm and industrial runoff and wastes from aging municipal sewer systems," said Conrad D. Volz, Dr.P.H., M.P.H., principal investigator, department of environmental and occupational health, University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.

"The goals of this project are to use fish as environmental sensors of chemicals in the water and the aquatic food chain, and to determine the origins of these chemical contaminants," said Dr. Volz. The study examined white bass and channel catfish caught in the Allegheny, Monongahela and Ohio Rivers. These fish are among those commonly caught as a food source by local anglers.

The laboratory of Patricia K. Eagon, Ph.D., co-principal investigator of the study, found that extracts from the fish acted like estrogen, a female hormone, by binding to estrogen receptors – the proteins within cells that render the cells sensitive to estrogen.*

"We know that there are hundreds, even thousands, of chemicals in the environment that can have estrogenic activity," said Dr. Eagon. "These chemicals usually come from industrial pollution, farm animals, farm chemicals and municipal water treatment plants. What surprised us most in this study was that these estrogenic materials are present in such easily detected levels in local fish."


Mmmmmmm ... fish. Someone get that girl out of there.



According to Volz, the next step in their research is to identify the sources of the estrogenic chemicals. "These findings have significant public health implications, since we drink water from the rivers where the fish were caught. Additionally, the consumption of river-caught fish, especially by semi-subsistence anglers, may increase the risk for endocrine-mediated health endpoints like some cancers and developmental problems."

They drink from the river in Pittsburgh??

If they are doing that, they have a lot more to worry about than growing breasts.





Source: University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences.

posted by your friendly neighborhood Moderator at 12:36 PM
Email This Cutting-Edge Humor
Direct Link This Post
or Add to del.icio.us or even Digg me.
5 attempts to be as funny as a scientist


Comments on "Queer As Fish: Estrogen in Pittsburgh rivers"

 

Blogger Danielle in Iowa in Ireland said ... (2:35 PM) : 

I'm gonna go all "environmental engineer" on you and point out that typical drinking water treatment plants can make dirty river water drinkable, but they can't remove estrogens. So those Pittsburghians won't get sick from drinking that water, but soon it will be a town full of women and girlymen :-)

 

Blogger Chief Scientist said ... (8:34 PM) : 

This is why I moved to California from the 'Burgh. California was already littered with women and girlymen.

Do you think they do water reclamation from the rivers in Pittsburgh? Those things are for transport.

 

Blogger The Grunt said ... (1:11 AM) : 

Not about water, but I did see a guy with a handlebar mustache driving a Miata today.

Of course, gay and girly do not always go hand in hand. The growing crop of effeminate straight men really has me shaking my head. It's getting to be so bad that men are losing their spatial reasoning and asking for directions and shit while worrying about their hair product.

It's just less competition for us normal manly men.

I have to laugh about all this going down in Pittsburgh. Isn't that where George Romero shot all his "Living Dead" epics? So, has there been a movie about gay zombies yet...with tits?

One last thing: When I was 17 I was about to get a loan from my father to buy a 1967 candy-apple red Ford Bronco, all cherried out and lifted. While I was looking for the nearest calculator, abacus, Asian person to tally up how much pelt I would trap, my sister decided to buy a brand new car. This was a car she could not pay for and had daddy bail her out. Here is an interesting note: I would've had to pay my dad's loan off with interest; my sister got this car gratis, courtesy of pops. What did I get after all of this? My sister's powder blue P.O.S. 1969 Beetle.

There went the "MUFDVR" license plate that I'd been dreaming of. I guess my dad did not care if I was driving a gay car or not.

 

Blogger Danielle in Iowa in Ireland said ... (9:49 AM) : 

I was thinking that perhaps Pittsburgh used groundwater, but I looked it up and apparently the Allegheny River is their drinking water source, so yeah they do drink that river water :-) I guess there is no hope for them!

 

Blogger Chief Scientist said ... (2:34 PM) : 

Mr. Grunt,

Your comment makes me sad - because it's way funnier than anything I wrote in the article and probably funnier than anything else I will read today. That's not an easy thing for a funny scientist to admit.

Miss Danielle,

Your comment makes me happy - because I love the name Danielle in general and I learned something new.

 

post a comment