sex
edyong | April 8, 2009Many men think of little else besides sex and meat, but male chimpanzees will sometimes exchange one for the other. Chimps are mostly vegetarian but they will occasionally supplement their diet by hunting other animals, especially monkeys. Males do most of the hunting, but they don't eat their spoils alone - often, they will share the fresh meat with females, even those who are unrelated to them. Some scientists have suggested that this apparently selfless act is a trade - the males are giving up their nutritious catch in exchange for sex.
Cristina Gomes and Christophe Boesch from the Max…
purepedantry | March 27, 2009What you think about during sex matters.
A guy who doesn't want to, ahem, proceed too quickly will think of baseball or something non-sex related. A girl who wants to proceed more quickly might focus on surrounding milieu of a loving environment. These are stereotypes, I know, but the fact that we have them does confirm that what we think about during sex matters: what we attend to changes the nature of the experience.
In this vein, Mind Hacks links to a great review of the role of attention in sex. Vaughan makes the point that we tend to view sexual dysfunction as a problem of…
edyong | March 27, 2009Termite colonies are families - millions of individual workers all descended from one king and one queen. But the colony itself tends to outlast this initial royal couple. When they die, new kings and queens rise to take their place. These secondary royals are a common feature of some families of termites, and they will often mate with each other for many generations. But there is more to this system than meets the eye.
Kenji Matsuura from Okayama University has found that the secondary queens are all genetically identical clones of the original. There are many copies, and they have no…
zooillogix | March 26, 2009It might not seem like the an 8 inch long leopard slug could put on an amazing sex show. After all, they can be real slimeballs. But actually, these hermaphroditic gastropod mollusks' sexual behavior is quite... well... beautiful.
video link:
The foreplay for the fertilization, which consists of a lot of licking and nibbling, can last up to 2.5 hours. That's about 793 days in slug time. And when it's all over with, both slugs (slowly) retreat to cold and damp hideaways in order to lay their respective sets of eggs.
If you're thinking about eating these monster slugs, please don't.…
clock | March 15, 2009You must have been sleeping if you have missed SciCurious' post Friday Weird Science: Condoms and 'Blunt Puncture' the other day. If you missed it - go now and read it.
But, the comment section also produced the idea that Sci should do an anonymous survey of the readers who have experienced condom breakage so she can do the analysis targeting the questions/factors not considered by the original article she blogged aboout, make a cute graph or two, and generally have a good excuse to blog about this topic yet again ;-)
So, now you need to do the survey. A couple of minutes of your time and it'…
edyong | March 1, 2009If you've ever complained about having bad sex, you really have no idea. Human women may have to complain about poor stamina or incompetent technique but the female seed beetle (or bean weevil; Callosobruchus maculatus) has to contend with her partner's nightmarish penis - an organ covered in hard, sharp spikes. Just see if you can look at the picture on the right without wincing.
It's no surprise then that females sustain heavy injuries during sex. But why have male beetles evolved such hellish genitals? What benefits do they gain by physically harming their partners?
It's possible that…
clock | February 14, 2009w00t! Miriam Goldstein had a piece published in Slate! The real references to that piece arehere.
purepedantry | January 29, 2009I was struck by this post over at the Well blog. In spite of media attention, teens are not engaging in more sex:
The news is troubling, but it's also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today's teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.
Today, fewer than half of all high school students have had sex: 47.8 percent as of 2007, according to the National Youth Risk Behavior Survey, down from 54.1 percent in 1991.
A less recent report suggests that teenagers are…
ksharpe | January 22, 2009Review by Scicurious, from Neurotopia
Originally posted on: January 19, 2009 1:27 AM
It is rare that a non-fiction book, let alone a non-fiction book about science, makes me laugh so hard I have to put the book down until I can get off the floor. In fact, I would say it's only happened once. That once was during this last week, when I finally got to read "Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex" by Mary Roach.
I don't know why I never read the book before. You'd think as the lover of all things Weird Science, Sci would be all over this thing. Me, I blame grad student poverty.
So…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009Really? This is just a little creepy. A non-for-profit will help you tell your one-night-stand that you may have exposed him or her with an STI via an e-card:
Steve, a health care worker in his 30s, had been told more than once that he had been exposed to a sexually transmitted infection. So when it happened again, he was not upset -- even though this time he learned about it through an anonymous online postcard, e-mailed by a man with whom he had had sex.
"What was important was that I was being notified that there was a possibility that I may have been exposed to syphilis," said Steve,…
purepedantry | December 29, 2008Ha! I knew it. The quiet animals get more play than the loud obnoxious ones:
During bison mating season, the quietest bulls score the most mates and sire the most offspring while studs with the loudest bellows see the least action, according to a surprising new study by researchers at University of California, Davis, and Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. The researchers also found that the volume of a bull's bellow was not related to its weight or age.
"We were expecting to find that the bigger, stronger guys -- the high-quality males -- would have the loudest bellows, because…
clock | December 12, 2008Hmmm, I am wondering if this is connected - adult sites are feeling the crunch so....are they now funding scientific consumer research?
clock | November 27, 2008Serbian Ministry of Health, as part of their fight against AIDS, inserted a condom inside a women's magazine this month. The condom is German-made, named "Bumper-Bumper" and in a fun-looking package:
[Image from]
The timing is unfortunate (I'm sure it was planned months in advance and was too difficult to pull back at the last moment) - this was mailed out just 2-3 days after a guy in Belgrade killed his wife - a pretty brutal case of domestic violence that everyone is talking about (this is not something that happens often there).
Question #1: Why are condoms not sent to men? Are the…
awild | October 17, 2008
Cycloneda munda - Polished Lady Beetle
Champaign, Illinois
It's a depressing time to be a lady beetle aficionado in the midwest. Most of the beetles I've seen around town are pesty invasives like the multi-colored lady beetle (from Asia) and the seven-spotted lady beetle (from Europe). But one native species, Cycloneda munda, is hanging on, perhaps because it is smaller than the competition and able to subsist on smaller prey. A couple weeks ago I photographed this pair enjoying an intimate moment on the fall goldenrod.
photo details: Canon MP-E 65mm 1-5x macro lens on a Canon 20D
ISO…
clock | September 29, 2008Amanda is in the middle of reading Michael Kimmel's Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men and has posted the first, preliminary review, with some very interesting explorations by the commenters as well (I guess the MRAs did not get there yet to ruin the discussion). The review is focusing on the societal gender roles as the cause of the hook-up culture as well as the perception of it as being negative.
Much younger, sarahmeyers looks at the setting for the hook-up culture and identifies her own - highly urban, career-oriented, highly-connected (online and offline).
Possibly…
clock | September 19, 2008 You probably know that I am quite interested in the history, current state, evolution and future of the institution of marriage, mainly because it is an important indicator of societal attitudes towards sex and towards gender-relations, which is the key to understanding political ideology. Between May 29, 2005 and February 23, 2006 I frequently mentioned Stephanie Coontz and particularly her latest book - Marriage, A History, e.g., in New History Of Marriage, Stephanie Coontz On Marriage, Op-Ed on the 'End of Marriage', Don't Know Much About History.... and What 'traditional' marriage?.…
clock | September 13, 2008This was first posted on http://www.jregrassroots.org/ forums on July 10, 2004, then republished on Science And Politics on August 18, 2004. That was to be just the first, and most raw, post on this topic on my blog. It was followed by about a 100 more posts building on this idea, modifying it, and changing my mind in the process. You can see some of the better follow-ups here. Also, I have since then read Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage by Stephanie Coontz, which is a much better and more scholarly work than E.J.Graff's book. Below the fold…
clock | August 7, 2008...but if you do, I hope it was enjoyable! And edifying, of course. Kind of science that is amenable to experimentation at home.
purepedantry | August 7, 2008Yet another piece of evidence for the futility of abstinence education. Masters et al., publishing in the journal Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, show that an adolescent's attitude about sex is a much stronger indicator that they will actually have it than their attitudes about abstinence.
The study followed around 300 teenagers from Seattle over a year after interviewing them about their attitudes about sex and abstinence and their intentions to have sex or abstain. They wanted to know how their initial attitudes and intentions about sex and abstinence interacted over time…
grrlscientist | August 1, 2008tags: sex, abortion, feminism, family planning, medicaid, Department of Human and Health Services, contraceptives, birth control pills
This morning, I heard an astonishing interview on WNYC that discussed a Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) draft document that was just leaked. This document proposes to redefine nearly all forms of birth control, especially birth control pills, as a form of abortion and allows any federal grant recipient to obstruct a woman's access to contraception [PDF]. Considering that roughly half of all American women use birth control pills, I think this…