Science Guide

1. Single ladies, forget <a href="http://anamoure.blogspot.com/2008/07/yet-another-reason-to-love-living-in.html">Dallas</a>, and check out India!

<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7466916.stm">BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7466916.stm</a>

"In one site in the Punjab state, there are just 300 girls to every 1,000 boys among higher caste families"

2. A Pop Quiz.

Q: What's wrong with this performance review?
<a href="http://pics.livejournal.com/tridevyataya/pic/0005s5ks/s640x480"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px;" src="http://pics.livejournal.com/tridevyataya/pic/0005s5ks/s640x480" border="0" alt="" /></a>

A: That girls in the picture are wearing ties.

<a href="http://kingsnake.com/oz/crocs/cp3.jpg"><img style="float:right; margin:0 0 10px 10px;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 300px;" src="http://kingsnake.com/oz/crocs/cp3.jpg" border="0" alt="" /></a>Those must be girls. If you studied biology, you know that in the crocodilian societies male-to-female proportion is opposite to what we see in Punjab state.
Crocodile embryos do not have sex chromosomes, and unlike humans sex is not determined genetically. Sex is determined by temperature, with males produced at around 31.6 °C, and females produced at slightly lower and higher temperatures. The average incubation period is around 80 days, and also is dependent upon temperature. So unless mother tries really hard, the child will be a girl. Better yet, Further, Matter et al. (1998) found that some some organochlorine (OC) pesticides which have been found in alligator eggs and semm from Lake Apopka can override the temperature-dependent sex determination mechanism in crocodilians and induce sex reversal (male to female).

3. Ana Moure on Age.

Asking directly is not a very reliable way of measuring a girls age, - this applies to both crocodilian and human females; but several techniques can be used to derive a reasonable guess. For human girls you can find their male former classmates on Facebook, and see which year they graduated from the high school. The most common method of finding a crocodile's age is to measure lamellar growth rings in bones and teeth—each ring corresponds to a change in growth rate which typically occurs once a year between dry and wet seasons.