Reality is always more complicated than you think.
Profile
Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.
Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.
Jake is joined periodically by two wonderful guest bloggers: Kara Contreary and Kate Seip. See the About Page.
DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own or those of my co-bloggers. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments we currently attend.
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Sex:
OK, so that title is a bit glib, but that is definitely how the press is going to spin this story about birds who have stable female-female mating pairs: Almost a third of Laysan albatross nests in the Oahu colony...
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Posted on May 28, 2008 9:03 AM • 5 Comments •
Farris et al. have a paper coming out in Psychological Science about how men tend to misperceive sexual interest in women. I get the sense that this is a big problem for many women. Any woman who has spent more...
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Posted on March 31, 2008 1:53 PM • 18 Comments •
Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson imagines that they may have. As she writes, there are scant signals cluing us in to the sexual life of the male T. Rex. Did he have a penis? Or perhaps just a cloaca, which avians,...
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Posted on February 13, 2008 9:31 AM • 3 Comments •
A post on kissing by fellow SciBling Sheril caught my eye, and I figured, why not pick a friendly argument as my inaugural post at Pure Pedantry (sorry, Jake). She pointed out a recent SciAm writeup summarizing work by a...
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Posted on February 7, 2008 4:45 PM • 3 Comments •
This question came down the pipeline from the SEED overlords: Why don't they make a birth control pill for men? The short answer is that they do make various methods of contraception for men, but most of the more effective...
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Posted on January 10, 2008 10:00 AM • 3 Comments •
Yay us? More than 1 million cases of chlamydia were reported in the United States last year -- the most ever reported for a sexually transmitted disease, federal health officials said Tuesday. "A new U.S. record," said Dr. John M....
Posted on November 14, 2007 4:18 PM • 4 Comments •
Hybrids are sort-of a mystery in evolutionary biology. In the strictest sense, they shouldn't exist because the offspring are often sterile or reproductively impaired. It is to a species evolutionary benefit to limit the number of hybrid offspring in most...
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Posted on November 13, 2007 2:00 PM • 3 Comments •
Ask anyone who's spent any time in a strip club, and one of the things he will almost certainly not mention is the ovulatory state of his favorite gal. But, according to a recent paper by Geoffrey Miller et. al.,...
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Posted on October 14, 2007 12:33 PM • 15 Comments •
Ouch: A Chicago woman who became enraged after discovering her longtime boyfriend's stash of pornography shot and killed him in their South Side home over the weekend, prosecutors said. Jeanette Strowder, 58, is facing a first-degree murder charge in the...
Posted on October 8, 2007 11:13 AM • 0 Comments •
The US government spends millions domestically and billions internationally on abstinence-only education with the intent of lowering the transmission of STIs such as HIV and limiting unwanted pregnancies. Yet abstinence-only education is demonstrably ineffective. The alternative called abstinence-plus education clearly...
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Posted on September 24, 2007 1:56 PM • 12 Comments •
Why must scientists play with salmons' heads like this: Researchers have succeeded in making salmon couples give birth to trout -- using a technique that they argue could help to preserve rare species of fish. Goro Yoshizaki and his colleagues...
Posted on September 14, 2007 12:37 PM • 2 Comments •
That is so gross, yet also very cool. The cowpea weevil or Callosobruchus maculatus has an arms race that is going between the males and females. This beetle species are promiscuous, and there is a lot of advantage for the...
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Posted on August 29, 2007 10:27 AM • 2 Comments •
I hadn't really ever thought about it, but surveys consistently report that heterosexual men have a larger number of sexual partners on average than heterosexual women. However, that really isn't logically possible, is it? I mean, last time I checked...
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Posted on August 14, 2007 8:39 AM • 51 Comments •
I read this article in the Economist that summarizes a paper showing that men wanting to attract women spend conspicuously and women wanting to attract men volunteer conspicuously. All I could think about when I read it was, "Well, I...
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Posted on August 13, 2007 11:05 AM • 4 Comments •
The NYTimes has a lovely primer on sperm. Money quote: Sperm do not really hit their stride until they are deposited in the female reproductive tract, at which point chemical signals from the vaginal and cervical mucus seem to spark...
Posted on June 12, 2007 11:26 AM • 0 Comments •
Many of you will be shocked -- shocked -- to discover that ejaculation turns off men's brains. Well only briefly... Janniko et al., after publishing an earlier paper on the subject in 2003, have chosen again to examine the activation...
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Posted on April 10, 2007 9:42 AM • 10 Comments •
This is not just videos of hairy, fat people having sex. This is actual panda porn we are talking about: Chuang Chuang the panda has been spending his days in front of a big-screen television watching panda porn. Authorities at...
Posted on March 28, 2007 9:20 AM • 4 Comments •
In light of the Lisa Nowak love triangle/kidnapping/nutness NASA is re-evaluating how it...well...evaluates astronauts for psychological fitness for space flights. Part of the problem is one of sex frankly; astronauts are not allowed to have it while on duty. NASA...
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Posted on February 15, 2007 10:37 AM • 9 Comments •
Oh wow. Oh wow. This press release is simply astonishing. Maybe it is because it has been a long time -- and as a consequence I have a mind for dirty press releases. Maybe it is just because I quite...
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Posted on February 12, 2007 10:40 AM • 12 Comments •
It would appear that today will be Sex Day at Pure Pedantry. So be it. I didn't know this but mouse and rat sperm have funny shaped hooks at their tips. To the right is a picture of sperm from...
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Posted on January 24, 2007 10:45 AM • 0 Comments •
Researchers have discovered a way to prevent premature ejaculation. You just cover your penis in lidocaine, the stuff the dentist uses to numb your face: Patients with premature ejaculation who used a topical anaesthetic spray were able to delay ejaculation...
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Posted on January 24, 2007 10:12 AM • 6 Comments •
Ouch. I know I am going to catch hell for posting this, but it is too interesting to pass up. Devendra Singh from UT performed a search of British literature from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. The only consistently...
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Posted on January 11, 2007 11:59 AM • 4 Comments •
It's all about the serotonin: In a relatively small study, 68 young men and women were surveyed about recent headaches and sexual desire. Migraine sufferers reported levels of sexual desire 20 percent higher than those suffering from tension headaches. Overall,...
Posted on January 10, 2007 12:20 PM • 5 Comments •
Hot. This is article is too funny: From bonobo chimpanzees to fruit flies, many female animals mate with multiple partners that often queue up for the event. Studies have shown that the the last male to mate with a female...
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Posted on October 25, 2006 9:07 AM • 1 Comments •
Memoirs of a Skepchick dramatizes the researchers who determined men and women are aroused at the same rate -- talking to a grade school class: "So you watch the men and women get hotter with the night vision goggles?" "It's...
Posted on October 5, 2006 9:27 AM • 0 Comments •
No more excuses, men: "Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal," said Dr. Irv Binik, psychology professor...
Posted on October 2, 2006 9:56 AM • 4 Comments •
Oh my God, best article ever: Having sex in the weightlessness of outer space is the stuff of urban legends and romantic fantasy -- but experts say that there would be definite downsides as well. Spacesickness, for instance. And the...
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Posted on September 29, 2006 4:54 PM • 2 Comments •
