Single women worldwide can breathe a sigh of relief — it turns out men aren’t dying out after all.
Previous research suggested that men would become extinct within the next five million years.
But a new study of rhesus macaque monkeys — one of man’s most distant cousins — found that although the Y chromosome is shrinking, the rate of decay is not as steep as once thought.
Scientists had previously discovered that the male Y chromosome had shrunk from 1,400 genes 300 million years ago, to just 45 genes now.
Based on this rate of decay, they predicted the male chromosome, and thus all human men, would die out within the next five million years.
But the latest study has found that the ‘male extinction’ claims have been greatly exaggerated.
Researchers concede there was a rapid decrease in Y genes at first, but that this has now slowed dramatically.
The rhesus species has not lost any Y genes in the past 25 million years, while humans have lost just one. Furthermore, the human Y has been completely stable for the past six million years.
“The Y was in free fall early on and genes were lost at an incredibly rapid rate,” study leader Professor David Page from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“But then it levelled off — and it’s been doing just fine since.”
Who knew Justin Theroux had a hidden talent for breakdancing?
He recently appeared on Ellen to show off his moves which he says his girlfriend Jennifer Aniston is “obsessed with”.
He said Aniston’s obsession with his breakdancing started when he showed her a Zoolander performance.
“I breakdanced at a friend’s wedding, so [Jennifer has] been saying, ‘When are you going to breakdance?’ If I don’t have my ‘breaking shoes’ then I don’t breakdance,” he said.
Luckily, Aniston had planned ahead by sending the shoes over to Ellen before the show.
Watch Justin show off his breakdancing moves in the video player above.
For most, marriage is about love but a new US survey has found that many singles don’t necessarily marry for love.
A Match.com survey, which surveyed 5000 people, found that men are more likely than women to marry someone who they don’t love.
The survey found that 31 percent of men admitted they would marry someone who has everything they are looking for in a partner, but who they weren’t in love with compared to 23 percent of women.
The data collected also showed that although men weren’t necessarily interested in finding love, they were interested in settling down, even if the situation was not ideal.
Sex and relationship therapist Doctor Laura Berman who blogs for Match.com said men are likely to commit to a woman they don’t feel romantically linked to so that they don’t feel like they are being left behind.
“Well, even though we often think of men as die-hard commitment-phobes, the truth is that they are just as susceptible to peer pressure as women are,” she said about the survey.
“If they see all of their buddies getting hitched and having kids, they will feel a desire to follow suit, especially if their partner is pressuring them down the aisle.”
The survey also found that 21 percent of men confessed that they would tie the knot with someone that they weren’t sexually attracted to.
Men in their twenties had a stronger urge to marry than those in their thirties, but the desire rose again for men in their forties.
Although Dr Berman says the decision to marry someone who you don’t feel a romantic connection with may seem easy for some men, it isn’t necessarily the right choice and can often end in failed relationships.
“Ultimately, a man will only get to that place of deep commitment and love when he is ready to and you can’t ever force such feelings,” she said.
French Children Don’t Throw Food by Pamela Druckerman, Random House, $29.95.
The idea of Paris is enough to make those of us who don’t live there go weak at the knees — the Renaissance lofty garrets filled with starving artists, the oh-so-chic slender women who seem to get sexier as they age, the sophisticated bars and lifestyles…
And it is with these stereotypes swimming around her headthat New Yorker Pamela Druckerman and her British husband moved to the city and started to drink in the culture.
Pamela was far from an instant convert. She found Parisian women distant and aloof, the city a tad shallow and much of daily life to be very different from the picture postcard ideal.
Yet when she fell pregnant and started raising her kids there, Pamela’s sense of wonderment really kicked in.
While she and husband Simon struggled to control their toddler, Bean, in a local restaurant, French families sat calmly, the kids using cutlery, eating vegetables and staying in their seats while their parents sipped wine and indulged in adult conversations. What sort of witchcraft was at play here?
This is the premise for Druckerman’s investigation into French parenting secrets and while her methods are far from scientific — a hefty dose of anecdotes from friends, some patchy research into the history of France’s parenting experts and a few interviews with paediatricians and psychologists — her findings are both intriguing and highly amusing.
As much an autobiography about love and kids in a foreign clime as a parenting guide, French Children Don’t Throw Food has a deliciously self-deprecating tone which coupled with feisty New Yorker wit makes Druckerman’s observations come alive.
French parenting, she says, seems to “vacillate between extremely strict and shockingly permissive”, but its bonuses are babies who sleep through the night, children who eat at appointed hours and don’t need to endlessly snack, their food a civilised combination of fruit, vegetables, cheese and dessert, and youngsters so secure they can spend a week away from their parents as young as six.
Add to this mothers who return to work after just three months — thanks to state-subsidised créches — and hang on to their independence, their sex life and even their figures, while still raising seemingly well-behaved, well-adjusted kids and, like Druckerman, we are compelled to find out how on earth they pull it off.
Her answers are maddeningly simple, but do seem to be fuelled by common sense and plenty of French “easy calm authority”. Are we convinced? Not entirely, but it’s a fascinating journey.
About the author
American author Pamela Druckerman worked for five years as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal based in Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo and New York.
She went on to work as a freelance journalist writing for titles including The New York Times, The Guardian and Marie Claire magazine before writing her first book Lust in Translation: The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee in 2007.
She lives in Paris with her husband, English football writer Simon Kuper, their daughter, Bean, and twin sons Leo and Joey.
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Kathy Lette with her son Julius, 21, who has Asperger's.
Kathy Lette talks for the first time about the painful day she was told her son, Julius, had Asperger’s and how she’s coped with his eccentric view of life and his dark days.
Kathy Lette sat in stunned silence in a London doctor’s office as he told her that her son, Julius Robertson, then just three, suffered from a developmental disorder.
“I remember the paediatrician’s voice being all light and falsely cheery, which was how I knew something was seriously wrong,” recalls Kathy, London-based author, mother of two and wife of human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson.
“The word ‘autism’ slid into me like the cold, sharp edge of a knife. This is a diagnosis that pulls you into the riptide and drags you down into the dark. The doctor had reduced him to a black and white term — autism. But, to me, Jules was full of the most vibrant colours.”
Kathy Lette, 53-year-old veteran of a thousand interviews, is a bundle of jangled nerves. Normally, the effervescent princess of pun, co-author of the iconic ’70s novel Puberty Blues, takes questioning in her stilettoed stride, all part of the business of being an internationally successful writer published in 120 countries.
Yet today is different. Today, Kathy is doing something she has never done before. Today, she is talking about her relationship with her son, Julius, now 21, who has lived his life with Asperger’s syndrome, a developmental disorder closely associated with high-functioning autism.
She is also talking about her new book, The Boy Who Fell To Earth, on sale March 1, the sometimes funny, sometimes moving story of Merlin, a boy with Asperger’s, and his mother, Lucy, who struggles to cope after her husband runs out.
The book is, as Kathy points out, a work of fiction, not a memoir. Yet there is a lot of Julius in Merlin and a lot of humour, love and emotional truth in Kathy’s writing.
Talking about her family is something Kathy has avoided over the years. Articles about her are littered with one-liners about feminism and double entendre, but her private life has remained off limits — until now.
The link between her latest work and her own life is inescapable. It is, after all, the reason she wrote the book.
“This is not the book that I intended to write,” says Kathy. “It just came pouring out of my pen. And sometimes that happens. They say writing is the cheapest form of therapy.
“My son has Asperger’s. I have never spoken about or mentioned that before in a public context. In the past, that was because he was still a child, but now he’s 21 and he has read the book and he loves it, and he agrees with me that it could help people understand young people like him, which can only be a good thing.
“He says he loves being Aspergic because it makes him quirky and funny. It’s an amazing condition and there are a lot of strengths that go with it. He has an incredible vocabulary and amazing numeracy skills, and a very idiosyncratic, eccentric view of life, which can be disarming and charming in its own way, but it also has its difficulties.”
Asperger’s syndrome is a developmental disorder that falls within the autism spectrum of disorders and is often characterised by good language skills but poor communication, a difficulty in forming friendships, repetitive behaviours and a childhood preference for playing alone or with older children or adults.
Many Aspergics talk in extensive detail about a narrow topic — subatomic particles or Brazilian stamps — yet often can’t recount what happened during their day or understand subtlety, jokes or sarcasm.
“It’s a little bit like raising a Martian who speaks Swahili at times because they don’t read emotions very well,” says Kathy.
“People with Asperger’s have no filter and tend to say what they are thinking. Like the time my son asked his intimidating headmaster what he wrote on his driver’s licence for hair colour, being completely bald? Or enquired of a leather-clad bikie if he’d ever noticed that his chin looked like upside-down testicles?”
Read more of this story in the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly.
“They called wrap on set and I went back to my apartment and took a long look in the mirror,” Rebecca tells the March issue of The Australian Woman’s Weekly.
“I said, ‘Wow, I’m fat.’ Well, not fat, but pretty chunky. And I had to be back on set for Packed to the Rafters in two weeks. I went on a diet and started trying to lose the weight.”
Rebecca, 47, started an aggressive diet, cutting out bread, pasta, and alcohol but the onset of menopause meant that the weight wasn’t coming off as quickly as it used to.
After weeks of feeling angry and anxious, Rebecca decided enough was enough — and decided to quit dieting forever.
“I was starting to stress out about the weight and not being able to lose it,” she says. “But then I thought, ‘Well, I can be grumpy, sad and hungry, but that wouldn’t be good, not for me, not for my family, not for anyone’.
“I’d be terrible to live with if I was all those things at once, so I thought, I’ll just be grumpy. I won’t be hungry anymore.”
“I am not an all or nothing kind of girl. I’m not going to give up everything. I’m just not. Life is too short, so I am going to have chocolate and I am going to have a glass of wine. And on my cheat day, I am going to have ice-cream. “
Rebecca is now down to a healthy size 10, and says she doesn’t care if she never gets back to her old body.
“Luckily, the great thing about being older is that I don’t feel the pressure to be a size 6 or 8 again,” she says. “I am a size 10. I’m healthy and I’m fit. I’m 65kg, which is smack bang in the middle of the healthy weight range for my height and age.
“I’m not at my pre-baby weight, but I refuse to beat myself up over it. There are plenty of more important things to worry about. It’s so sad that we put so much pressure on ourselves and emphasise the way that we look rather than, for example, our mental health.”
“We feel very blessed with our four healthy, happy and lovely children,” Mary tells the March issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. “First a boy, then a girl and now the twins. It was… ‘Wow, we’re having twins!’
“I realise we had the best of help, but being a mother and breastfeeding a couple of twins with two children already — it was a bit of a strain.
Despite the difficulties of having four children under five, Mary says she loves every second of her chaotic life.
“It is the most enjoyable time in your life because you are so absorbed in your own little bubble with your small, innocent children,” she says. “They are just like God delivered them.”
Mary returned to royal duties just five months after the birth of Vincent and Josephine.
“I reckoned I could say yes to a few things and then it suddenly gained a life of its own,” Mary says. “Nobody ever said, ‘Where is she?’ I never felt any expectations about me returning to the public eye.
“But there were events I had said yes to two years previously and they were in my engagement book. And, suddenly, there were a lot of meetings in the nursery — even if I have children, I cannot just resign from the public.”
Mary, who turned 40 on February 5, carries out an extensive list of royal duties every month. She supports several charities and foundations and spends a lot of time travelling.
This leaves very little times for relaxing, but no matter how hectic her life gets, Mary says her children make her feel “rich” beyond belief.
“First and last, we are a family that needs to thrive,” Mary says. “And experience this family of brothers and sisters together. You just sit still and observe in amazement.
“The love floating between them. You feel rich. When you have four children, the concept of sleep gains an entirely new meaning. You have four possibilities of being disturbed.”
Tania Herman, the woman serving at least nine years in jail for trying to kill Maria Korp, her lover Joe’s wife, has spoken for the first time from prison.
In an interview published exclusively in The Australian Women’s Weekly, Herman — who shares a unit with Herman Rockefeller killer Bernadette Denny — says she was “a bloody idiot” who was “brainwashed” by Joe.
“I am still amazed myself and think how the hell could I ever have gotten in so deep?” she says. “My biggest regret is taking a mother away from her children because I would hate that to happen to me.”
Herman says she knew what she was doing was wrong when she waited in Maria’s garage that fateful morning, but Joe Korp’s words — “don’t let the bitch get out of the garage alive” — were ringing in her ears.
She says she was in “a set frame of mind, but as soon as I saw the blood, something snapped. I panicked. I put her in the boot of her car and just drove. As I was driving, I couldn’t stop crying. I kept thinking, ‘This is wrong, this is wrong’.”
Herman is counting down the days until her release, and says she longs for privacy and “normal conversation”. Reports she punched Judy Moran were “totally inaccurate”. She has sporadic contact with her daughters, and saw the eldest for the first time only recently.
After cutting her daughter out of her new film, it seems Madonna has found a more suitable job for her 15-year-old daughter.
Lourdes is reportedly set to take centre stage with her mother on her upcoming world tour as one of her back-up dancers.
The pair recently held rehearsals for back-up dancer roles in London and chose potential dancers together.
“There are risque dancers and some blatantly sexual dance routines — but Madonna is really excited about Lourdes making an appearance,” a source said.
The tour, which will be Lourdes’ first time on the stage with her mum, is set to visit 50 countries starting in Israel in May.
Madonna seems to be getting her daughter prepared to be in the spotlight after recently teaching her a valuable Hollywood lesson by cutting her out of her movie.
“There was a scene where she played Wally as a young girl,” she told MTV.
“And I just kind of dragged her in at the last minute. It was quite unfair of me what I did and what I asked her to do.
“But she was really great and then I ended up cutting her out of the film. Ruthless, I know.”
But it seems Lourdes was made for Hollywood, with Madonna saying she acted professionally about the cut.
“I said, ‘Sorry babe, you’re on the cutting room floor.’ She took it like a champ.”
Kate Middleton travelled to Oxford yesterday to give some budding young artists a helping hand.
The Duchess of Cambridge visited The Art Room, an organisation that helps disadvantaged children increase their self-esteem, self-confidence and independence through art.
Kate is a patron to the programme and seemed to enjoy her first official visit.
As usual, her outfit – a jacquard coat dress by Orla Kiely – was a hit, selling out within minutes of her arrival from London.
The Duchess of Cambridge was in high spirits throughout her visit.
Kate looked lovely in a brown coat dress by Orla Kiely.
All year round
Kate wore her dress with brown opaque tights and chocolate suede ankle boots.
Kate styled her hair in her trademark loose waves.
Kate donned an apron with ‘Miss Catherine’ embroidered on the front.
Kate also revealed the name of her new puppy – Lupo, which means ‘wolf’.
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