The History of Birth Control
Newsweek presents a pictorial history of birth control methods. We’ve come a long way since the Greek philosopher Aristotle recommended olive oil as a spermicide! Link -Thanks, Steadyburn!
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Ghostshark has Sex Organ on Head
A newly-identified species of ghostshark has been found living off the coast of California. The Eastern Pacific black ghostshark also exists in museums, but has only recently been named as a distinct species, says Douglas Long, natural science curator at the Oakland Museum of California.
The newfound ghostshark belongs to the “big black chimeras,” a group whose species number has exploded in recent years, thanks to improved diagnostic techniques, according to the new study, published in the September issue of the journal Zootaxa.
Chimeras display some unusual features not seen in other living animals, Long said.
Male chimeras, for example, have retractable sexual appendages sprouting from their foreheads. These organs, which resemble a spiked club at the end of a stalk, may be used to stimulate a female or to pull her closer—though these are still assumptions, Long said.
(image credit: MBARI)
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Strategic Gorilla Sex May Explain Human Monogamy
Stony Brook University primatologist Diane Doran-Sheehy discovered something intriguing about the sneaky mating behavior of female gorillas that may explain human monogamy: how female gorillas use strategic sex to her advantage!
Female gorillas use sex as a tactic to thwart their rivals, new research suggests. Pregnant apes court their silverback male to stop other females conceiving.
"It seems to us that mating is another tactic that females use to compete with each other – in this case to gain favour with another male," says Diane Doran-Sheehy, a primatologist at Stony Brook University in New York.
Her team chronicled the sex lives of five female western lowland gorillas and one silverback almost every day for more than three years. "We wondered if, basically, [pregnant] females can mimic [ovulating] females and dupe the male into mating with them and distract him from what those other girls are doing," Doran-Sheehy says.
This kind of competitive behaviour may even help explain how humans evolved into a mostly monogamous species, she says.
Ewen Callaway of New Scientists has more: Link
Previously on Neatorama: 30 Strangest Animal Mating Habits
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Face vs. Body
There have been many studies about what body part attracts the opposite sex, but few studies that compare the importance of body parts to each other. A new study suggests that people assign more importance to faces than bodies when they are looking for a long-term relationship. For a potential short-term relationship, men assigned slightly more importance to the appearance of a woman’s body, while women cared more about a man’s face.
Statistical analysis of men rating women indicated that, even though both the body and face ratings were significant positive predictors of the ratings given to the combined images, the face ratings were stronger predictors of the combined ratings. It was also observed that the ratings for combined images was slightly higher for short term relationships as compared to long term relationships. One other significant observation – when the short term and long term relationship data were analyzed separately, the body ratings stood as more significant predictors to the combined ratings than face ratings, for short term relationships. In the case of females rating men, similar to men – the body and face ratings were both significant predictors with the face ratings being very strong predictors as compared to the body ratings. However, females ratings for men did not show any difference under the short term and long term decisions.
This only makes sense, as we tend to cover our bodies most of the time, but you have to look at that face a lot. Link -via Digg
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Lightning Bolt Interrupts Sex
It’s an old trope in comedy that someone commits a sin and God gets their attention with a bolt of lightning. The real life version played out in the woods near Wert, Germany. Jens Gottlieb and his girlfriend Lisa Gruhn were feeling frisky, pulled off the highway, headed into the forest, and stripped naked. A bolt of lightning struck the ground near them! They started running as a torrential downpour began.
They lost their way and were spotted blundering around in the dark by another motorist in a parking space who called police.
Officers who arrived a short while later managed to find the naked and shivering pair and help them into dry clothes and took them home.
Bet they won’t do that again. Link -via Buzzfeed
(image credit: Flickr user kainet)
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Turtle Sex Causes Massive Delay at JFK Airport
While the horseshoe crab orgy is just a fun and cute animal affair, the turtles from Jamaica Bay are a different story. A group of 78 swinging diamondback terrapins held up one of the most busy runways at JFK on Wednesday. It took authorities half an hour to get the turtles off the runway.
He said that the turtles were perhaps attracted to the sand along one side of the runway, which juts into the water. “They tend to look for sand while they are mating,” he said. “Presumably, all these turtles were feeling amorous.” It is unclear whether the turtles pair off, or if the numbers indicated it was a group activity, he said.
Some of the delays lasted up to an hour and a half -but hey, at least the turtles got their sexy on, which is a much better excuse for a delayed flight than most of the ones we hear.
Link Via Consumerist
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Rating Attractiveness: Consensus Among Men, Not Women
Here’s another case of science proving what we all knew in the back of our minds. Men pretty much agree on what makes a woman attractive, while women have their own ideas about what is attractive in men. A survey led by Wake Forest University psychologist Dustin Wood showed pictures of people to 4,000 adults of all ages, and had them rate the photographs for attractiveness on a scale of one to ten.
Men’s judgments of women’s attractiveness were based primarily around physical features and they rated highly those who looked thin and seductive. Most of the men in the study also rated photographs of women who looked confident as more attractive.
As a group, the women rating men showed some preference for thin, muscular subjects, but disagreed on how attractive many men in the study were. Some women gave high attractiveness ratings to the men other women said were not attractive at all.
(image credit: Flickr user mod as hell)
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Could You Pass 6th Grade Sex Ed Class?
A short quiz that tests whether you could pass sex ed. It’s trickier than I thought.
From the Upcoming 
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Kinda Sutra
People talk about the “misconceptions” they had as children concerning sex and reproduction in the film Kinda Sutra.
Where exactly do babies come from? And how are they really made?
Mixing humorous animation and interviews, Jessica Yu poses these questions to a variety of adults and youngsters who explore their earliest understanding of sex, conception and how the two, uh, intersect.
Cute and funny, but probably NSFW unless you wear headphones. Link -via Metafilter
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Study Says: Spanking Brings Couples Closer Together
To be fair, there may be other ways to explain their conclusions – and you might not need the clamps, harnesses and whips to replicate that kind of closeness (simply cooking a meal together might do the trick as well). Still, there is a stigma associated with S&M that critics are calling into question.
SPANKING is stressful at first, but it could bring consenting couples closer together. That’s the implication of two studies of hormonal changes associated with sadomasochistic (S&M) activities including spanking, bondage and flogging.
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They Paid You For That? 7 Pointless and Crazy Science Experiments
Have you every read about some new science experiment or research study that just seems… well, stupid? If you’ve ever gotten to the point where you’ve wondered what other bogus things they’ll pay people to learn about, you’re in luck. Here’s 7 of the most ridiculous studies ever:
Sex, Drugs and Science
If this first group of studies show us anything, it’s that scientists are as drugged up and crazy as the junkies up the street from me.
Elephants on Acid:
If you were going to see the effects of LSD on an elephant, wouldn’t you start with smaller doses and progressively increase the dosage until there was a noticeable change in their behavior? I sure would. But the researchers on this one aren’t like you and me.
Instead the researchers working on this one started off by injecting the poor beast with 3000 times the dosage needed for an average human, despite the fact that elephants weigh around 50 times what the average human weighs. Within two hours, the animal died. The scientists defended their actions by saying they had used LSD plenty of times and were sure it was safe. They then concluded, “elephants are highly sensitive to LSD.”
Apparently another scientist found their results to be suspicious, so he gave elephants LSD in their water. In his study, the elephants acted a little funny, but were totally fine.
Turkey Arousal:
We’ve all heard stories detailing how stupid turkeys are -like the one that says they’ll drown if you leave them in the rain. Well, some of those turkey stories may be bogus, but two Penn State researchers discovered that turkeys are so stupid they can be trained to be aroused by little more than sticks.
Their experiment consisted of creating a model female turkey that could be progressively deconstructed. The scientists would then gauge the turkey’s interest in the “female” and then remove some parts of her body and try again. They were expecting the birds would lose interest after is was stripped down enough. Surprisingly, the turkeys were aroused even when the model became little more than a stick with a head. I guess this not only shows how stupid turkeys are, but how perverse they are too.
Source | Photo Via Vicki’s Nature [Flickr]
Semen As an Anti-depressant?
I always thought scientists were supposed to be unbiased. I mean, if you’re hoping for certain results, might that affect your research? Obviously these researchers bypassed that concept, by attempting to prove that semen works as an antidepressant. They decided to study this theory by interviewing college women who were sexually active. Their conclusions proved that women who had sex without condoms were less depressed than women who used them.
Of course, their research was extremely preliminary and they didn’t even bother to take into account additional factors, like the fact that women not using condoms are more likely to be in serious
relationships. It doesn’t take a scientist to figure out that this might play into someone’s relative level of happiness. But like I said, this study was about as unbiased as all those tobacco company ones that couldn’t connect smoking with cancer.
Source | Photo Via Zen [Flickr]
Paging Dr. Obvious
The rest of these studies are amazing -in that someone actually bothered to research things so obvious:
Head Banging is Bad For You:
Who would have ever thought that aggressively and repeatedly throwing your head up and down would be bad for you? Gee, I never would have imagined that spinal damage and brain trauma could have resulted from head banging. Obviously, I’m being sarcastic. After years of dating a metal head, I can assure you that head banging can certainly make you retarded…or at least, it doesn’t help your intelligence at all.
The only good thing researchers found was that head banging is unlikely to leave you unconscious. What is really funny is the researcher’s suggestions for the metal genre. They suggest metal bands play more
mellow tunes and less “beat oriented” music. They also urged label to place anti-head banging warnings on their cds. Oh, and listeners were advised to start listening to “adult-oriented rock” instead of heavy metal. Yeah, that’s gonna happen real soon.
Source | Photo Via Cayusa [Flickr]
Male science nerds likely to be virgins:
Hmmm, who is most likely to be a virgin, a party-girl, a jock, or a nerd? Think about it. No surprise here; male science nerds between 16 and 25 are the most likely to not have had sex.
At least the study provided some legitimate reasons for this statistic, rather than the typical “nerds are pimply and boring” theories of popular media. The study reasoned that these nerds were the population segment least likely to be in situations where they would meet potential lovers. Apparently, doing homework and going to the library doesn’t help you meet chicks. Hey, at least they’re being productive. Interestingly, female art students were the most sexually active.
Source | Photo Via Miss604 [Flickr]
Bullies Like Seeing Pain:
If bullies were compassionate they would sit around crying whenever they picked on people. The fact that they don’t do so might just indicate that they are mean. Why did anyone need to set up a study to confirm that bullies enjoy seeing other people in pain?
An interesting thing about this study is that it was the first time anyone used fMRI to evaluate how respondents reacted to different emotions. Instead of being empathetic like the brain of a normal person, bullies mind’s activate their reward centers when they see videos of other people being picked on.
Source | Photo Via ZZClef [Flickr]
Television Viewers Are Unhappy:
It’s common knowledge that television and other forms of entertainment are a way for people to escape their problems. If you run home to watch tv instead rather than hanging out with friends, you might be unhappy. Did we really need a scientist to tell us that people who socialize are generally more happy than people who sit at home watching tv all day? What’s more crazy is that they needed over 30 years of data to back up their claims. The only unique thing the study discovered was that many viewers are actually addicted. (Marx was right about television, is this evidence that the scientists are commies?):
“Addictive activities produce momentary pleasure and long-term misery and regret,” said Steven Martin, co-author of the study. “People most vulnerable to addiction tend to be socially or personally disadvantaged. For this kind of person, TV can become a kind of opiate in a way. It’s habitual, and tuning in can be an easy way of tuning out.”
Funny, I’ve was using the audio/visual equivalent of heroin the whole time I was researching this. I swear I could quit any time.
Now that I’ve written this, I think I’ve got a couple of ideas I could get funded. For example, are people happier when they’re warm at home or cold in the middle of nowhere? Or maybe I could find out if donkeys really die when they take a bunch of cocaine and other drugs at a bachelor party. Do you guys have any ideas for awesome studies?
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The Recently Deflowered Girl
The Recently Deflowered Girl is a 1965 etiquette book for those awkward moments you hadn’t planned for, written by Edward Gorey under the name Hyacinthe Phyppe, an expert in such matters. In each “deflowerment” situation, the proper thing to do apparently is to provide a witty comeback. The entire scanned book is online with Gorey illustrations. This is SFW, unless you have a child nearby who knows what the archaic word “deflowerment” means. Link -Thanks, luke!
Update: The original post has been deleted, but I found another copy. Link
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