A reader emailed me about Grosjean et al (2007), an article released Sunday in Nature Neuroscience about the mating choices of fruit flies. They found that homosexual activity could be "turned on and off" in experimentally mutated drosophila melanogaster males. The mutation is in a gene that the team has named GB, or "genderblind." The GB gene ( Read more... )

Teaching computers to distinguish between male and female faces is a ticklish problem. Chellappa et al's 1995 review discusses the facial recognition methods used until the mid 1990's, which had limited success. Moghaddam et al (2000) got better results on low resolution thumbnails with their Support Vector machines (SVM) than human test subjects ( Read more... )