sex
grrlscientist | June 27, 2010tags: The Stork Is Real!, religion, sex, sexuality, funny, humor, comedy, satire, fucking hilarious, social commentary, Edward Current, streaming video
Do you really believe that precious life comes from disgusting body fluids? The Truth is, babies are brought into the world by a pure white angel, the Stork.
clock | June 19, 2010Christine Ottery, on her awesome new blog Women's Mag Science (check older posts) did a very interesting interview with Dr. Petra Boynton about the way sex surveys in women's magazines are done, and how misleading they often are. Watch the video:
The quick and dirty world of women's magazines from Christine Ottery on Vimeo.
jgoldman | May 19, 2010Regular readers of this blog know that while I think studying animal cognition, behavior, and communication is (sometimes) fun and (always) interesting, the real importance - the why should I care about this - is because by understanding animals, we can attempt to learn more about ourselves.
I've written about this before. Here are the relevant excerpts:
When human adults show complex, possibly culture-specific skills, they emerge from a set of psychological (and thus neural) mechanisms which have two properties:
(1) they evolved early in the timecourse of evolution and are shared with other…
cwilcox | May 6, 2010This week, Science published two papers about the genetics of Neandertals from a team of scientists based at the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology. The first (which is the only one anyone seems to really care about) gives a draft version of the entire Neandertal genome - a whopping 4 billion base pairs of DNA. They use this information to look for genomic regions that may have been affected by positive selection in ancestral modern humans that led to their separation from Neandertals, and found some very interesting ones that include genes involved in metabolism and in…
clock | April 23, 2010Angela Shelton (@angelashelton), an Asheville NC native, gave a powerful talk at the 140conf in NYC this week:
clock | April 19, 2010Shy about openly carrying condoms around your pocketbook? Well, hide them in a tasteful little case - a variety of styles, including, for those with a sense of humor and fun, these Kitty cases, pre-packaged with two condoms each:
Conflict of Interest: this is Bride of Coturnix's store (look around for other items). Every item sold puts money in our joint account. Which is good for me as I am owing tons in taxes.....
grrlscientist | April 7, 2010tags: Sex, Drugs and HIV -- Let's Get Rational, behavior, disease, prostitution, gay men, drug addicts, sex, STD, HIV, AIDS, poverty, medicine, public health, Compassion Conundrum, Elizabeth Pisani, TEDTalks, streaming video
Armed with bracing logic, wit and her "public-health nerd" glasses, Elizabeth Pisani reveals the myriad of inconsistencies in today's political systems that prevent our dollars from effectively fighting the spread of HIV. Her research with at-risk populations -- from junkies in prison to sex workers on the street in Cambodia -- demonstrates the sometimes counter-intuitive…
sastyk | March 23, 2010Simon came in the door calling "Moooooooomm....Moooooommmm!!" It didn't sound like the "someone is bleeding to death" call or the "Isaiah said my hat looked funny and I beaned him one with a rock and he had the temerity to hit me back and it hurt..." cry, each which has a certain urgency too it. Nor was it even the much more relaxed "by the way, I haven't seen my littlest brother for a long time, like since before lunch, and you told me not to let him fall in the creek, but I really wasn't paying attention" one.
No this was a "Mom, I've got something cool to tell you" call. What, I…
edyong | March 10, 2010The animal on the right is no ordinary chicken. Its right half looks like a hen but its left half (with a larger wattle, bigger breast, whiter colour and leg spur) is that of a cockerel. The bird is a 'gynandromorph', a rare sexual chimera. Thanks to three of these oddities, Debiao Zhao and Derek McBride from the University of Edinburgh have discovered a truly amazing secret about these most familiar of birds - every single cell in a chicken's body is either male or female. Each one has its own sexual identity. It seems that becoming male or female is a very different process for birds than…
razib | March 5, 2010It has been known for years that interracial marriages have higher than expected divorce rates. But I did not know that the rates varied quite a bit contingent on the combination of race & sex. Gori Girl* has a post up, Interracial Divorce in the U.S. - Statistics and How Much They Matter:
- Marriages that do not cross a race barrier, but do have different ethnicities (i.e. white/Hispanic white) have a rate of divorce just a little higher than white/white marriages.
- Interracial marriages that have one white person and one person of another race mostly only show higher divorce rates when…
milhayser | February 10, 2010
On Neurotopia, Scicurious offers a refresher course on mitosis. This vital process occurs every time a cell divides, as centrosomes pull apart replicated chromosomes with microtubules. Normal cell mechanics limit this "molecular tug of war" to about 50 iterations, meaning we can't keep splitting chromosomes forever. But we can use meiosis make some babies. On Gene Expression, Razib Khan explains that the X chromosome is relatively scarce since males only carry one copy of it, while all other chromosomes travel in pairs. This makes the X chromosome "more susceptible to stochastic…
sastyk | February 9, 2010I've often wondered what I should write after everyone is already living the Zombie attack and is bored with hearing about how to grow food and mend your socks. I figure at some point, the market will be saturated by such things, and people will want to escape - and I should start thinking now about escapist fiction. I was thinking detective novels, but I clearly should have been thinking "porn."
Apparently IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri has already begun preparing for his post-climate crisis second career, by writing what nearly every review suggests is an unbelievably bad smutty novel with…
edyong | January 28, 2010
When our lives are in danger, some humans go on the run, seeking refuge in other countries far away from the threats of home. Animals too migrate to escape danger but one group - the pond-living bdelloid rotifers - have taken this game of hide-and-seek to an extreme.
If they are threatened by parasitic fungi, they completely remove any trace of water in their bodies, drying themselves out to a degree that their parasites can't stand. In this desiccated state, they ride the wind to safety, seeking fresh pastures where they can establish new populations free of any parasites.
This…
sastyk | January 14, 2010Get nine women who have thought a lot about peak oil and climate change together around a dining room table, and perhaps expectedly, the conversation turns umm...blue. Get them around *my* dining room table and the turn to sex is pretty inevitable, given a certain native blueness (this is a polite way of saying "dirty mindness"). The absence of gents from this affair (completely unintended) made us rather uninhibited about certain subjects. And at the end of one conversation, I realized that I've got a rather gaping hole in my body of works on how to go forward into the future - I've never…
edyong | December 22, 2009Patricia Brennan from Yale University is trying to encourage male Muscovy ducks to launch their ballistic penises into test tubes.
Normally, the duck keeps its penis inside-out within a sac in its body. When the time for mating arrives, the penis explodes outwards to a fully-erect 20cm, around a quarter of the animal's total body length. The whole process takes just a third of a second and Brennan captures it all on high-speed camera. This isn't just bizarre voyeurism. Duck penises are a wonderful example of the strange things that happen when sexual conflict shapes the evolution of animal…
razib | December 7, 2009
Well, I don't quite know about that, but that's the sort of take-away from a new paper in PLoS Biology which looks at the downsides of female attractiveness. A Cost of Sexual Attractiveness to High-Fitness Females:
Adaptive mate choice by females is an important component of sexual selection in many species. The evolutionary consequences of male mate preferences, however, have received relatively little study, especially in the context of sexual conflict, where males often harm their mates. Here, we describe a new and counterintuitive cost of sexual selection in species with both male mate…
awild | November 20, 2009Chauliognathus pennsylvanicus
Goldenrod Soldier Beetles
Illinois, USA
Here at Myrmecos Blog we aim for a family-friendly atmosphere. Except for beetle sex. Sometimes we just can't resist.
(There's also plant sex going on here too, if you're into that sort of thing...)
Photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon EOS 50D
ISO 100, f/13, 1/250 sec, diffused twin flash
terrasig | November 19, 2009No matter how early I wake up, it's always five hours later in the UK and I'm overwhelmed by the thought that I'm already behind (I won't even get into the feeling I have when I think of our Australian readers).
So when I start the day reading my Twitter stream, it's usually populated by midday news from England. I follow the NHS - National Health Service - "one of the largest publicly funded health services in the world," and their superb health information site, NHS Choices.
This morning I saw this tweet about the launch of their new sexual health site:
@NHSChoices Our new sexual health…
ejohnson | November 3, 2009
Last week, Dan Delong, an English teacher at Southwestern High School in Piasa, Illinois was suspended for allowing students to read an article on homosexuality in the animal kingdom. The article in question, "The Gay Animal Kingdom," was written by ScienceBlogger Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex, and published by Seed magazine in 2006. Mr. Delong faced a school board hearing on Monday and stood to lose his job over the incident. Jonah, along with many other ScienceBloggers, rallied support for Mr. Delong, as well as science education and literacy everywhere. Mike Dunford of the…
edyong | October 22, 2009By directing the evolution of a worm, scientists have confirmed answers to the age-old question: "What is the point of having sex with someone else?" For most people, that would hardly be a tricky query but it's no reflection on the lives of evolutionary scientists that sex has been one of biology's oldest puzzles.
The problem is this: many creatures can reproduce by fertilising themselves instead of getting someone else to do it, and at first glance they should do much better individuals that cross-fertilise. For a start, they'd ensure that all of their genes reach the next generation,…