sex
chrisdrudge | January 15, 2008Smith LJ, Mulhall JP, Deveci S, Monaghan N, Reid MC. Sex after seventy: a pilot study of sexual function in older persons. J Sex Med. 2007 Sep;4(5):1247-53.
Eww, grandparent sex. Given that the study reported 18% of the women and 41% of the men were sexually active, there's potentially lots of old dudes out there banging younger ladies. Or stairway denied and stuck jerking off. Alright, sad AND disturbing! Also, most surprising statement ever: "Among the women, the most commonly cited reason for being sexually inactive was 'no desire,' whereas for most men, it was 'erectile dysfunction.'"
chrisdrudge | January 11, 2008Fain DB, McCormick GM. Vaginal "fisting" as a cause of death. Am J Forensic Med Pathol. 1989 Mar;10(1):73-5.
It's too old to find online, so allow me to summarize the short abstract: Guy and girl are fooling around, guy sticks entire hand and part of forearm up girl's vagina, girl subsequently dies. That's all I've got.
Edit: you can grab the paper here.
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Ivanovski O, Stankov O, Kuzmanoski M, Saidi S, Banev S, Filipovski V, Lekovski L, Popov Z. Penile strangulation: two case reports and review of the literature. J Sex Med. 2007 Nov;4(6):1775-80. Epub 2007 Sep 21.
In essence, improper (and…
purepedantry | January 10, 2008This 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 ones are surgical rather than pharmacological. Also, given the early difficulties in making a pill for men similar to the birth control pill for women, most of the pharmacological forms of male contraception are still in clinical trials to determine that they are safe and effective.
The history of a male birth control is filled with many false starts. For example, the…
clock | January 10, 2008"Why isn't there a birth control pill for men?" is the latest "Ask A ScienceBlogger" question. I am sure my SciBlings will rise to the occasion and explain both the biological and social barriers to the development, production and marketing of such a pill. I will be more light hearted, with a brief look at alternative methods proposed over the years intended to make guys temporarily infertile. Let's start with this delightful, funny, yet informative, movie:
The movie can be found here, via Science of the Invisible (Thanks for the heads-up).
Perhaps this quack had a point after all! Would…
omnibrain | December 28, 2007This is one odd video. This French Orangina TV ad has furries wearing kinky lingerie and an octopus giving a lap dance to a bear.
Check it out:
I guess I shouldn't be surprised after this previous post about a French set of ads on safe sex practices.
-Via BoingBoing-
grrlscientist | November 29, 2007tags: birds, bird sex chromosomes, ZZ, ZW, parrots, sex identification, molecular biology
Evolution of Avian and Mammalian sex chromosomes.
Image: E.R.S. Roldan and Montserrat Gomendio "The Y chromosome as a battle ground for sexual selection" Trends in Ecology & Evolution 1999, 14:58-62.
You all are probably curious to know what is happening with my birds these days, so I shall tell you about how sex is identified in birds, such as parrots, where the sexes look the same. But wait a minute, you ask, what does an update about my birds have to do with identifying sex in parrots?
You…
clock | November 26, 2007..that is adolescence. And the research on what adolescents find attractive. For a few years. Until they gain the gift of speech and hearing, look up, and find beauty in the mind. Unfortunately, some never do.
sporte | November 19, 2007Sexual attraction is all in your brain. At least if you're a nematode.
Ricardipus has a great image if you want to see a nematode picture.
I always thought worms were hermaphrodites (both male and female) but the story, as usual, turns out to be a bit more complex. Researchers at the University of Utah have found that worms have definite preferences for one sex or the other. And, if they kill off certain kinds of cells, the preference for one sex or another can change.
From the University of Utah:
"They look like girls, but act and think like boys," says Jamie White, a postdoctoral…
purepedantry | November 14, 2007Yay 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. Douglas Jr. of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
More bad news: Gonorrhea rates are jumping again after hitting a record low, and an increasing number of cases are caused by a "superbug" version resistant to common antibiotics, federal officials said Tuesday.
Syphilis is rising, too. The rate of congenital syphilis -- which can deform or kill babies…
purepedantry | November 13, 2007Hybrids 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 cases, so biologists often attribute hybrids to mistakes on the animal's part. The animal mistook a similar species for one of its own.
However, Karin Pfennig, publishing in Science, shows that under some circumstances animal's will choose to mate across-species.
Pfennig looked at two species of frogs from the American Southwest: Spea…
revere | October 20, 2007The Erectile Dysfunction (ED) drugs already carry the required warnings we know from our misspent youth: Warning: you can go blind doing this. Okay, it says you may experience sudden loss of vision. Same thing. Now a new warning is being added: Warning: it might make you hard -- of hearing:
The impotence drugs Viagra, Cialis and Levitra will get prominent warnings on the risk of sudden hearing loss, U.S. regulators said.
[snip]
The FDA found 29 reports of sudden hearing loss in people who took the erectile dysfunction drugs since 1996. More than 40 million people worldwide have used the…
kcontreary | October 14, 2007Ask 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., how much money he spent on her may have more to do with where she is in her cycle than he'd comfortably acknowledge.
Miller and his co-authors set out to see if they could find any economic evidence for human estrus, a period of increased sexual attractiveness, receptivity and proceptivity occuring around the time of peak fertility. The prevailing consensus is that human estrus has…
purepedantry | October 8, 2007Ouch:
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 Sunday shooting of Jesse Martin, 54, her boyfriend of about 15 years, police said.
Surely she knew before. I mean she had been dating him for 15 years.
Anyway, word to the wise: hide your porn better or get a more accepting significant other.
purepedantry | September 24, 2007The 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 does not make the situation worse -- as some critics have argued -- but it doesn't appear to work that well either. What's a person concerned with public health to do?
Two reviews this year Underhill et al. look at the effectiveness of abstinence-only and abstinence-plus…
clock | September 20, 2007I thought the LiveJournal debacle taught them a lesson. I guess not. Melissa posted about this a couple of weeks ago, and Tara did it today again because the issue has not been resolved yet. So did PZ Myers (Janet Stemwedel and Dr. Joan Bushwell also chime in). Facebook is deleting pictures of breastfeeding and banning users who post them. Now that Facebook is not just for college crowd, there are more and more moms and dads on the network, proudly showing off their offspring to the world. Including offspring in the moments of feeding bliss.
But, you know that in this country there are…
purepedantry | September 14, 2007Why 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 at the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology in Japan had previously shown that male salmon could be injected with cells from closely-related trout to produce viable trout sperm. When the sperm were introduced to trout eggs, healthy trout offspring were produced...
Now the researchers have taken the work a step further, showing that salmon…
omnibrain | September 14, 2007In what sounds like a whole lot of hand waving (but hey! I study vision what do I know!), scientists have 'discovered' that creepy old men running after their daughters friends has led to an increase in life expectancy for human kind. Just think that people like Woody Allen, Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, and Michael Jackson have led to your grandma living a much longer life. Ok.. maybe not M.J. since he likes little boys and they don't have babies but Woody Allen - totally!
Basically...
Human ability to scale the so-called "wall of death"--surviving beyond the reproductive years--has…
purepedantry | August 29, 2007That 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 males to be the last one to have mated with a particular female in terms of reproductive success.
This issue has spawned a variety of weird behaviors and adaptations. For example, the males have spines on their intromittent organs (read: insect penises) that puncture the females insides. This is to discourage them from mating with other males. In response the females…
clock | August 28, 2007If we are not there at the moment of birth, how come we can bond with the baby and be good fathers or good adoptive parents? Kate explains. Obligatory Reading of the Day.
Update: Related is this new article by former Scibling David Dobbs: The Hormone That Helps You Read Minds
Update 2: Matt responds to Kate's post.
Update 3: Kate wrote a follow-up: Why help out? The life of an alloparent
purepedantry | August 14, 2007I 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 it took two to tango. Mathematician David Gale demonstrates why these results cannot be right in the NYTimes:
One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7…