Category: Mother Nature

…testosterone levels increased among fans of winning teams and decreased among fans of losing teams. The effect among winning fans was strong enough to reverse the normal pattern of decline in testosterone levels across the day. Because the outcome of each game was not determined until the last few seconds, this effect was likely sudden, rather than building up gradually during the game.

Source https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031938498001474#:~:text=Discussion,testosterone%20levels%20across%20the%20day.

Comment:

I wonder whether games in which one team crushes the other early on have a depressing effect because both sets of fans know the result is unlikely to change by the end of play?

Both men and women have testosterone, so are the same effects (in teams and fans) also observable in women?

Are testosterone levels affected by films or even books where the protagonist goes from early success, to failure, to rising from failure, to ending in final success?

Do testosterone levels rise in fans who are asked to think back to a game where their team won, and to picture it in their minds?

Only deer have antlers. Chinese water deer and the Musk deer don’t grow antlers at all, and both sexes of reindeer or caribou grow them. In all other deer it is the males that have big racks of antlers, while females may have small points.

Antlers grow from permanent outgrowths called pedicles of the frontal bone on the skull. When antlers start to grow they are covered by a layer of velvety skin. Triggered by increased testosterone levels, the velvet falls off and hangs in tatters, and the deer rub the velvet off against trees, and the tannin the wood turns the white of the bone brown.

Amazing – who ever thought that the colour of the antlers is from staining?

There was fields of tulips in the fields on the road to the north of Holland, Then at the place where I met up with everyone, there were these tulips growing in the hedge. Beautiful, aren’t they.