WHY past generations regarded women as the weaker sex is a mystery to anyone who has examined the question objectively, for they are far stronger than men—outliving them in pretty well every society in the world. Partly that is because men are more violent, and their violence is largely directed at other men. But partly it is physiological. Men seem to wear out faster than women do. Yet no one knows why.Madeleine Beekman of the University of Sydney, Australia, and her colleagues, however, have a hypothesis. As they outline in a paper in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, they think at least some of the blame lies with subcellular structures called mitochondria (pictured), which provide the body with its power by burning glucose and using the energy thus released to make ATP, a molecule that is biology’s universal fuel.Mitochondria are intriguing. They are descendants of bacteria that teamed up with the ancestors of animal and plant cells about a billion years ago. As such, they retain their own genes. And this is where the problems start. To avoid fights between genetically different...
from The Economist: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1lU7xIn
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