About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
March 22 2012
Get Fit, Get Off: Women Can Orgasm During Exercise, Especially on the “Captain’s Chair”
Sorry dude, no orgasms for you.
It’s a study that launched a thousand jokes. A new survey puts weight behind the seemingly too-good-to-be-true claim that women can orgasm during exercise.
(Bonus: the paper is published in a very Discoblog-friendly special issue of Sexual and Relationship Theory, all about the science of orgasms.)
Researchers collected online survey responses from over 300 women who reported orgasms or feeling “sexual” pleasure at the gym, even though they were not thinking sexual thoughts. But not all exercise is created equal, and some kinds are more pleasurable than others. Ab exercises, pole climbing (figures!), biking, and weight lifting were the most common orgasm-inducing activities. A piece of equipment called the “captain’s chair” made especially frequent appearances. (Just me or does it kinda sound like an S&M thing?) Anyways, the captain’s chair is used for knee-raising ab exercises like in the image shown here.
So what’s going on, anatomically? The internal part of the clitoris extends into the pelvis, and exercise increases bloodflow and flexes muscles in the area. Sorry, we can’t tell you any more because the science of female orgasms is still poorly developed and even anatomy textbooks are getting it wrong (pdf). The ...
February 14 2012
The Formula for Love, Plus the Best of V-Day Science
Hey, Internet. It’s science here wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day. And we do mean happy—we wouldn’t be here if there weren’t any oxygen in the air right?
Let’s start with a pretty picture. Copy all of the below mathematical function and enter it into Google. Just do it.
sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01,
sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5
…and links to the best V-Day science out there:
You Can Die of “Broken Heart Syndrome”
That soap opera cliche of someone clutching their chest and kneeling over dead after finding out a dead lover has some science behind it. Sudden shocks—even positive ones like winning the lottery—can cause a massive release of adrenaline, causing the heart to freeze up. The hearts of patients who die from this take on a distinctive shape resembling a Japanese octopus trap, which is where the name takotsubo cardiomyopathy comes from.
Why We Celebrate Valentine’s Day: Naked Romans
Every year on Valentine’s Day, writers dig up the origin of the holiday to talk about naked Romans. Sorry, we’re not immune to it either. Those pagan Romans used to run around naked with whips, hitting young women to increase their fertility. (Seriously? Dinner plans ...
December 20 2011
The Perfect Gift This Holiday Season: The Neanderthal Test
If you’ve ever wondered if your slothful spouse—he of the prominent brow and grunted endearments—has caveman blood, wonder no more. Genomics company 23andMe, purveyors of fine genotyping, would like to suggest a gift that will keep on giving this holiday season: the Neanderthal test, which will give you nagging rights for eternity.
The latest gossip says the Neanderthals, the other human species kicking around about 30,000 years ago, did not leave this earth without spreading a few wild oats among our Cro-Magnon ancestors (nudge nudge, wink wink). And genetics, as so many daytime talkshow guests can tell you, is where such secrets go to die. Everyone except Africans (who missed the shackin’ up party that was prehistoric Europe) now has a sort of genetic souvenir, a remnant of our forebears.
That means you can now give a gift that brings new meaning to getting in touch with your heritage. Having recruited one of the biologists behind the first draft of the Neanderthal genome, who developed the test, 23andMe is able to offer you the exclusive opportunity to learn what percentage of your own genome came from those mysterious ancestors. The average is 2.5%, but some of us—perhaps someone ...
December 08 2011
Finally! The Ostrich Penis Provides the Answer to a Long-Standing Question
Penises, as a general rule, are some of the more improbable structures in biology (especially bird penises). There are many ways in which they are marvels of engineering—and prime examples of the truly weird avenues evolution will explore, as long as more babies result. One major miracle is that they manage to stand up, something achieved, in most penises you’re likely to be familiar with, with a huge rush of blood. But bird penises (of course! showoffs) have taken another route. They stand up with lymph instead.
Lymph, if you don’t recall, is blood’s often-overlooked sibling. Charged with aiding in cleaning out the body’s waste and shuttling around various immune components, it circulates in a system of vessels similar to blood vessels (albeit more slowly, since the system’s not hooked up to a central pump) and contains a rich mixture of immune cells, metabolites, and other goodies. Scientists have known for a long time that most bird penises use lymph to get their pick-me-up, but one group of birds had never had their gear fully examined: the ratites, which include ostriches and emus. This gaping hole in our knowledge had languished for a distressingly long time.
Now, however, through four ...
September 06 2011
150 Kids, Anyone? US Sperm Banks Overdoing It
Sperm banks are a pretty great idea: women who don’t have a male partner or whose partners aren’t fertile can choose a genetic father with characteristics they like, such as a certain height, eye color, hair color, hobbies, and so on. Thousands of children are born each year in the United States to mothers who like the sound of “tall, dark, enjoys astrophysics and Shostakovich” or “blond surfer, Ivy-League educated, great sense of humor.”
But something very strange has been going on over the last couple decades, and the New York Times covers it in a recent piece: some donors’ sperm has been used many, many times—so many times, in fact, that people are starting to get alarmed.
Up to 150 children each have been born from the sperm of popular donors, far more than donors and mothers had anticipated. American sperm banks don’t keep rigorous records of children born from donor sperm, nor do they limit the number of children born from a particular donor (a chance, some might say, for sexual selection to run out of control—those green-eyed geniuses can be mighty sought-after). Parents only find out that their child has dozens of half-siblings when they look up their ...
September 02 2011
German Prostitutes Pay Streetwalking Fee at Parking Meter-Like Machine
Get yer streetwalking permit here!
From 8:15 pm to 6:00 am each day, prostitution is legal in Germany, where working call girls staff brothels, sauna clubs, and other such establishments. In the city of Bonn, which, uh, “boasts” around 200 prostitutes, an average of 20 freelancers go cruising each night, picking up clients on the street and heading to garage-like structures called “consummation areas” the city put up especially for that purpose. They’ve thought of everything, those Germans!
Girls in the various brothel-like establishments have always been subject to a prostitution tax, but streetwalkers, apparently, haven’t being paying. Now, though, the city has a way to make things fair for everyone: a parking meter for prostitutes.
The meter looks just like the sidewalk ticket-dispensers you’ve probably used in numerous cities to park your car, but for about $8.70, this one dispenses a pass allowing the holder to cruise for johns all night. When the city emptied one after the first night, it yielded a haul of $375, prompting various media outlets to comment on how honorable the city’s prostitutes must be. But one has to wonder how many people just bought a ticket for the novelty and ...
August 29 2011
Kinky Skinks Show That Size Matters in Speciation
When a male’s bits don’t fit with a female’s bits, you wind up with reproductive malfunction. But shape isn’t everything, as a team of researchers recently discovered while watching hundreds of skink lizards court and spark.
Most studies looking at how genitalia mismatch contributes to new species take the concept literally: if the bits don’t fit together like lock and key, matings will be unsuccessful. And if the mismatch between the gear of two groups is bad enough, they will form separate reproductive populations, and, eventually, species. But the idea, which was first tossed around more than 150 years ago, has been discounted as a possible source of new species. Differently sized or shaped genitalia is such a big change that it’s likely to come after many other speciation triggers, like mutations or long separations between populations divided by mountain ranges.
But, as this research team points out—and as anyone in the dating pool can tell you—there are other aspects of physical incompatibility that can have an effect on sex, and thus could get speciation started. If the mating posture, chemical cues, or timing are off, even having matching genitalia doesn’t mean a mating will work ...
August 26 2011
Bad News for Roosters: If You Aren’t King of the Henhouse, Your Ejaculate Will Be Ejected
WHAT? Noooooooo!
If you haven’t heard about the corkscrew kookiness that is duck genitalia by now, you need to check that stuff out ASAP.
Ducks’ twisting vaginas and telescoping penises are well-known part of an evolutionary arms race between the sexes that’s been going on for millennia, with each side trying to exert control over which males’ sperm fertilize the female’s eggs—a battle that, especially in birds, is fierce, occasionally violent, and weird as all-get-out. The most recently discovered example of what biologists deem “sexual conflict,” a little behavior hens have developed called sperm ejection, upholds that fine tradition.
Hens, like many female birds, don’t always have a lot of control over who mates with them. Roosters tend to resort to “sexual coercion,” aka rape, and so a female might have any number of sexual partners that she didn’t get to choose. What’s a hen to do? Well, according to a new study in The American Naturalist, evolve a method for getting rid of sperm from males she didn’t particularly like, thus making sure her offspring are of the best quality.
Scientists had already noticed that hens tended to squirt out semen after some acts ...
August 24 2011
What Caused the Recent Explosion in the Number of Bisexual Men?
By now you’ve probably heard the recent news that male bisexuality is in fact real, in stark contrast with a 2005 study by some of the same scientists that claimed just the opposite. Bloggers and news outlets have unleashed a torrent of witty headlines and snarky remarks about the research, such as CBSNews’ “Study says bisexuality real, but bisexuals say ‘duh.’” Even the Gray Lady herself, The New York Times, got in on the fun with its quip, “No Surprise for Bisexual Men: Report Indicates They Exist.”
Presumably the studies aren’t picking up on a real increase in bisexuality over the past six years, so what’s the deal here—why the sudden change of heart for the Northwestern University researchers?
It all boils down to how the studies found their would-be bisexuals. In the 2005 study, the researchers recruited self-reported bisexuals from newspaper ads. “Last time, they got their guys from an ad in an urban newspaper read by a hipster crowd,” Allen Rosenthal, lead author of the new study, told Life’s Little Mysteries. The researchers chose their participants based on a questionnaire that rated the sexual desires of the men, ...
August 04 2011
Showy Male Birds—You Live Life Like a Candle in the Wind
For male Houbara bustards, extravagant sexual displays come with a price: rapid sexual aging. By studying over 1,700 North African Houbara bustards, researchers in France have learned that the birds, by age six, already begin producing smaller ejaculates with a large number of dead and abnormal sperm. The more showy the bustard, the quicker he burns himself out. As lead researcher Brian Preston said in a prepared statement:
This is the bird equivalent of the posers who strut their stuff in bars and nightclubs every weekend. If the bustard is anything to go by, these same guys will be reaching for their toupees sooner than they’d like.
[Read more about these peculiar birds and see a video of one of their seductive dances at the BBC.]
Image courtesy of Frank. Vassen / Flickr
July 06 2011
Male Black Widow Spiders Try to Avoid Sex That Will Kill Them
Sometimes sex just isn’t worth your life.
For male black widow spiders, standing at just a quarter of the size of their mates, sex involves a very real danger: females of the species have no qualms about turning cannibalistic if they’re hungry after getting down and dirty. But it seems that it’s more than just a game of chance for horny male spiders. Researchers at Arizona State University have now learned that simply walking on the webs of female spiders can provide males with chemical cues telling them if their potential mates are ravenous enough to eat them.
In the study published in the journal Animal Behavior, researchers routinely fed one group of female spiders for several weeks while starving another group (noticeably shrinking their sizes). They then looked at the courtship behavior of the male spiders in a series of tests. In the first experiment, the researchers placed the males on the females’ webs while the cannibals were absent. Here, the males were far more likely to begin their courtship rituals on the webs of cricket-full females.
A male’s courtship dance, the researchers explained, lasts an hour or two and involves tapping different ...
July 01 2011
Coming to a Dental School Near You: The Dental Robot With the Sex-Doll Face
Good news dental students: soon you will no longer have to approach your first victim patient with shaky, unsure hands. Researchers at Showa University in Japan have unveiled a new dental dummy, a realistic robot for dental students to practice on before taking the drill to real, human mouths.
I use the term “dummy” here loosely. Showa Tanako 2, as the researchers call her, has a wide range of human-like features. She can engage in simple conversations, flinch, roll her eyes, cough, and close her mouth like a real patient suffering from jaw fatigue. Oh, and she has a gag reflex.
So how did a group of dental researchers build such a realistic—albeit slightly scary—looking robot? Naturally, they sought help from Japanese sex doll maker, Orient Industry, who helped fashion the robot’s skin, tongue, and mouth. If the doll’s face didn’t look realistic, it wouldn’t “have the same effect on users psychologically,” Showa University professor Koutaro Maki said in the video released by DigInfo. “How doctors and students actually feel in the presence of a patient is a really big factor.”
On top of her movements, speech, and look, Showa Tanako 2 has one final similarity to human patients: she judges. ...
June 30 2011
Where the Ladies At? There’s an App for That
Here’s a good use for augmented reality: directing clubgoers to the bars that have the best odds for meeting persons of their preferred gender. And how do you figure that out? Well, a start-up company called SceneTap is doing it with facial recognition.
Mounted at the doors of clubs, cameras will survey the crowd and, using facial recognition software, report the ratio of men to women to a free smartphone app. Forbes reports that 200 clubs, more than fifty of them in SceneTap’s home base of Chicago, have signed up to be included in the service, which will debut next month. The software is not sensitive enough to recognize individuals, stresses CEO Cole Harper—just sensitive enough to see whether that face coming in the door is male or female. The company plans to generate revenue from Groupon-like deals and advertising.
Now, when you get down to the privacy issues, it still seems a little problematic—a little Google Streetview Car—to us. Does the software store those images someplace? Could someone’s whereabouts be ascertained by a human looking at those files? But maybe we’re just paranoid. (If the kind of ladies you look for are on ...
Sexy Ad Campaign Targeting Monkeys Makes A Splash
“Advertising for monkeys” is just too good a phrase to pass up.
Even since ads created for a study investigating whether monkeys respond to billboards debuted at the Cannes Lions ad conference, the headlines have been flowing freely. We learn Yale primatologist Laurie Santos and two ad executives came up with the idea at last year’s TED, after Santos gave a talk on her experiments showing that monkeys that learn to use money are as irrational about it as we are.
Ad firm Proton has now developed two billboards to hang outside capuchin monkeys’ enclosures, and the researchers plan to see whether they will prefer one kind of food, or “brand,” over another when it is shown in close proximity to some titillating photos, including a “graphic shot” of a female monkey exposing her genitals and a shot of the troop’s alpha male with the food.
Once the monkeys have been exposed to the ads for brand A, scientists will see whether they show a preference for it over brand B, which won’t be supported with a campaign. In essence, they’ll investigate whether sex sells for monkeys. Brand A will be ...
June 17 2011
The Better to Ignore You With: Female Frogs Deaf to Males’ Ultrasonic Calls
The concave-eared torrent frog.
Wouldn’t it be nice if we could hear each other over the low-frequency roar of jetliners and subway trains? For some rodents, bats, and marine mammals, environmental noise doesn’t normally pose a problem, as they can communicate at ultrasonic frequencies (greater than 20 kHz, just above our maximum hearing range). There are also a couple of amphibians that exhibit this trait, but in an odd twist, researchers have now learned that female concave-eared torrent frogs are deaf to the ultrasonic components of the males’ calls.
The concave-eared frog is a tree-loving native of the Huangshan Mountains in China. In choosing this woodsy area, the nocturnal amphibians must put up with one minor annoyance: streams that produce constant ambient noise. In 2006, Jun-Xian Shen, a biophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing, and his research team discovered that the frogs get around this sonic clutter by adding ultrasonic frequencies to their normal calls (pdf). The frogs were the first non-mammalian vertebrate found to do this, and scientists have since learned that Borneo’s hole-in-the-head frogs (yes, that’s the actual name) also chirp in ultrasonic frequencies. After finding these ultrasonic noises, ...
June 16 2011
“Mommy Tummy” Suit Gives Men a Chance to Feel Pregnant
For every expectant father who’s ever wished they, too, could feel a fetus kicking their bladder, science now has an answer. Researchers in Japan have put together a suit packed with balloons, sensors, and warm water so you can feel what it’s like to be pregnant.
The suit, called Mommy Tummy, mimics kicking with a system of 45 balloons that inflate and deflate, and movement sensors and accelerometers pick up on the wearer’s activities, so the “fetus,” represented by a four-liter bag of warm water, can respond to exercise or sudden movements with redoubled kicking. Vibrating actuators produce the illusion of wiggling, as New Scientist describes:
When two vibrating sources placed a distance apart move at the same time, it triggers a sensation in between the two points. So by varying vibrating pairs over time, the simulated fetus seems to squirm.
And, in a cool but somewhat unrealistic move, the scientists have hooked the suit up to a screen, so you can watch a simulation of the fetus’ response while you stroke your stomach or walk around. For the thrill-seekers out there, a 9-month pregnancy can be recapitulated in two minutes, or it can be spread out over a longer period for a ...
May 11 2011
If Drug-Slathered, Erection-Enhancing Condoms Won’t Lead Men to Safe Sex, Nothing Will
For men who find that condoms sometimes, um, lessens their enthusiasm, some good news: Durex may soon be selling erection-enhacing condoms with a pharmaceutical boost.
The condoms, developed by UK biotech company Futura Medical, are lined with a gel that increases blood flow. The gel’s active ingredient, glyceryl nitrate, has been used for as a vasodilator for over a century. The tricky part was getting the gel to stay in the condom without degrading the latex, but the company found a way (and quickly patented it).
Men who enrolled in the clinical trial took the condoms home and gave them a test run (the things we do for science!). Both they and their partners reported longer, larger, and harder erections, presumably while grinning.
The condoms are now being reviewed by European regulators, and if approved, they could be on shelves there later this year. The product is meant specifically for men who have trouble maintaining an erection while wearing a condom, but there’s no prescription required, so anyone will be able to pick up a box from the nearest drug store. No such luck for American consumers, who will be ...
May 09 2011
Everything You Wanted to Know About Semen-Collecting Robots (and Then Some)
Ever since last month’s China International Medical Equipment Fair in Shenzhen, China, a curious video (above) has been spreading across the blogosphere. The gadget in question is apparently an automatic sperm collector, an all-in-one machine into which men can donate sperm (hands-free). The video treats the entire subject in a rather ridiculous manner, raising two questions: How does this gadget actually work? And does anyone actually use them?
Today, there are in fact several companies selling automatic sperm collectors on the internet (here, here, and here, for example). Your average sperm-collecting gadget consists of a kiosk with a monitor that provides stimulating visuals (!), complimented by sounds (!!). A little lower is a “semen-collection sheath,” which purportedly simulates the feel and movement of a vagina.On top of visual stimuli, another company says that their gadget uses “infrared heating to simulate the temperature of female vagina [sic],” which consists of two inflatable tire-like structures. Once enveloping a penis, the sheath continues vibrating until the man, er… successfully donates his sperm.
The robotic sperm collector apparently has a “high success rate of 95%.” (I’ll leave it at that.) And it’s touted ...
April 20 2011
I Like Your Ring Finger. Let’s Mate!
When it comes to sexual attraction, it turns out that men might better be concerned with the length of their fourth (or ring) fingers than the length of anything else. Researchers have discovered that women tend to be more attracted to men whose ring fingers are longer than their index fingers.
We’ve known for a while that the length ratio between the second and fourth fingers of a man may indicate how much testosterone he was exposed to in the womb, with longer ring fingers indicating more testosterone exposure. And many researchers have taken this finding to new levels, including a study from last December that revealed that the risk of prostate cancer drops by a third in men with longer index fingers.
In the present study, “the aim was to understand what make a man attractive,” and whether these characteristics “were in part conditioned by the foetal environment,” University of Geneva, Switzerland, researcher Camille Ferdenzi told COSMOS. Men with higher testosterone tend to have deeper voices, more symmetrical faces, and a distinct body odor. And so with this in mind, Ferdenzi had 80 university women between 18 and ...
April 16 2011
Catchiest Mating Songs Spread Through Whale Populations Like Top 40 Hits
All the single ladies, all the single ladies…
Whales catch earworms, too, show scientists from the University of Queensland in Australia in a new study. Each breeding season, males start out singing a new tune, which might incorporate bits of golden oldies or be entirely fresh. These new songs are then passed from whale to whale for 4,000 miles, usually starting from the western edge of the Pacific near Australia, a veritable humpback metropolis, to French Polynesia in the east, a comparative hinterland: a possible cetacean case of cultural trends starting in the big city and propagating to the country. Another hypothesis from the Hairpin:
What if Michael Jackson was reincarnated as a whale and is now living off the coast of eastern Australia?
This MJ-style spread of songs is cultural transmission on a massive scale, a scale that hasn’t been seen beyond humans before. Over the course of 11 years, researchers saw (or rather, heard) these songs ripple across six whale populations and thousands of miles of ocean. One song even turned up in the Atlantic. There are several possibilities as to how, points out Wired Science: “The songs could be carried by ...
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
