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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 ...
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 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, ...
June 30 2011
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 ...
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 ...
April 19 2011
Gertie the Hen “Sex-Changes” into Bertie the Rooster
Normally, chicken-keepers don’t sweat it when their hens go through short egg-laying dry-spells. But when an egg-less hen grows a wattle in a matter of weeks and starts crowing at the rising sun, it may be time to worry. That’s what went through a British couple’s minds this past year, when their pet hen Gertie began looking and acting like a rooster.
It all started last November, when Jim and Jeanette Howard of Huntingdon, England, noticed that Gertie stopped laying eggs. “Then a few days later I heard her try to crow,” Jeanette Howard told the BBC. “She wasn’t very good at it at first, but she’s progressed nicely.” Gertie then got heavier and developed a wattle under her chin in the next few weeks. And as her feathers grew back during her molt, they were a darker brown than before. Sporting a scarlet cockscomb and a rooster-like strut, Gertie is now outwardly indistinguishable from a cockerel.So how did this happen? There are still many unanswered questions about Gertie’s apparent sex-change, but according to Poultry ...
February 10 2011
A Big-Bearded Bustard Is a Lucky Bustard
If you want to impress a female great bustard, going clean-shaven is probably the wrong approach. According to biologist Juan Carlos Alonso and colleagues at the Spanish National Museum of Natural Sciences, the size of a male bustard’s “whiskers and beard” is correlated with its reproductive success.
The great bustard is a beloved but endangered bird found in Spain and other locations scattered across Eurasia. Males of the species are possibly the heaviest flying birds in the world (rivaled only by the male kori bustard), and each sports whisker-like plumage on either side of its beak, along with neck feathers that resemble a beard. They also engage in showy mating displays, strutting about “like a vicar in a tutu,” according to naturalist Chris Packham in this BBC video.
According to the press release, it was unclear until now what purpose was served by the male bustard’s flamboyant facial plumage. Using transmitters to gather information on wild bustards’ beards over the course of ten years, Alonso and colleagues found that the plumes are related to bustard weight and age, and could communicate information on these stats to fellow bustards.
That information ...
January 13 2011
Houston, We May Have Some Problems: Colonizing Mars and Sex in Space
Strap on your astronaut suit and hold on to your space shoes, because in 20 years, you could just be aboard Earth’s first mission to Mars. At least, that’s the hope of over 400 people who read the Journal of Cosmology’s special edition issue, The Human Mission to Mars: Colonizing the Red Planet, and volunteered to take part in a not-yet-scheduled trip to Mars.
The journal spills the details about the logistics involved in a privately-funded journey to the Red Planet–a book-length brainstorm by leading scientists. What, for example, happens if you get an infection on Mars? How do you have sex in space? And, most importantly, how long do you have to live on Mars before you get to call yourself a Martian? (Ok, I made that last question up, but aren’t you curious?)
Any journey to Mars–especially one with no scheduled return to Earth–is fraught with challenges. As Fox News reports:
“It’s going to be a very long period of isolation and confinement,” said Albert Harrison, who has studied astronaut psychology since the 1970s as a professor of psychology at UC Davis…. “After the excitement of blast-off, and after the initial landing on Mars, it ...
December 28 2010
Are Booze-Drenched Societies More Likely To Be Monogamous?
A new study out in the American Association of Wine Economist’s “Wine Economics” journal suggests that monogamous societies are bigger drinkers than those in polygamous societies. Does this mean that being stuck with only one partner drives us to the bottle, or does drinking make us more likely to settle down?
Actually the answer is most likely neither. Both monogamy and drunkenness seem to be related to economics, or at least, that’s why both seem to have blossomed during the industrial revolution. Jo Swinnen, one of the study’s authors, told The New York Times Freakonomics blog (which seemed to have missed the actual conclusion of the study) that he noticed the correlation over, unsurprisingly, a glass of wine:
The inspiration came from a casual observation (over a glass of wine) that the two social/religious groups that do allow polygamy ((parts of) Mormonism and Islam) also do not consume alcohol. So we wondered whether this was a coincidence or not.
While many studies have compared alcohol and cultural traits, this is the study to look at its relationship with polygamy. The researchers compared the marital style and “frequency of drunkenness” of 44 well-documented pre-industrial societies (24 of which were polygamous; 20 monogamous) and found that monogamy was indeed positively correlated with drunkenness. The paper (pdf) says:
In societies that practice agriculture and animal husbandry drunkenness occurs less than in hunting, fishing and gathering societies….Hunting tribes are said to have more monogamous marriage arrangements than agricultural tribes.
Historically, this correlation seems to be found frequently, everywhere from the Roman empire to the Industrial revolution, as the researchers outline in the paper (pdf):
First, we find a historical correlation between a global transition from polygynous to monogamous societies and the growth of alcohol consumption. Second, the Greek and Roman empires were the only societies who consumed only wine in their era and at the same time were the only (and first) to introduce formal monogamy. Third, after the Roman Empire collapsed, formal monogamy was maintained and reinforced by the Christian Church–which was also spreading viticulture around Europe and which became the depositary of breweries and winemaking techniques. Fourth, the industrial revolution seems to have played an important role in the transition to effective/actual monogamy and in the growth in alcohol consumption.
During and after the industrial revolution drinking and the availability of cheap alcohol increased drastically the authors note (pdf):
Many people moved to urban and industrial areas and left behind the closer social structure and hierarchical organization in their villages. Heavy drinking became an important phenomenon among the new working class, induced by their subordinate and exploited status and less constrained by the social structure.
As the industrial revolution changed society, it also changed sources of wealth. Land became less important and human capital and intelligence became driving factors of wealth. The authors suggest that men began desiring “higher-quality” children, making their choice of mate more important. The authors believe these social and economic changes were the driving factor behind the correlation between monogamy and drunkenness, not any direct causal relationship between the two, the paper (pdf) says:
The industrial revolution brought about the major and definitive change towards effective monogamy and popularization of alcohol consumption. Both changes (in alcohol consumption and in marriage arrangements) were induced by changes in social structures, economic developments and technological innovations associated with the industrial revolution.
While this makes sense for the changes during the industrial revolution, it doesn’t seem to fully explain why polygamous societies today abstain from alcohol. Perhaps it has something to do with the recent finding that couples that drink together are happier.
Related content:
Discoblog: Alcohol Makes You Think Everyone Is Out to Get You
Discoblog: Why Do I Feel Woozy? I’ve Only Had One Enormous Glass of Wine
Discoblog: To Animate a Drunken Mess, Use New Algorithms for Wrinkled Clothing and Flushed Faces
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sorry Pedobear, science proves drinking is no excuse.
80beats: Fetal Alcohol Exposure Makes for Booze-Loving Rats
Gene Expression: Polygamy and human evolution: maybe it’s agriculture
DISCOVER: Monogamy Kills
Image: Flickr/Rombla
December 22 2010
December 16 2010
Science of the Obvious: Beauty Sleep Is Real & Tired People Look Tired
Lack of sleep doesn’t just make you sluggish. It also makes you ugly, researchers say.
Sleep-deprived people look 4 percent less attractive, 6 percent less healthy, and 19 percent more tired than they usually do. This doesn’t bode well for the sex lives of insomniacs, study author John Axelsson told MSNBC:
“A good night’s sleep does not only improve your physiological health, it will also make you look healthier and more attractive, which in turn improves the chance of better treatments in a wide range of social situations.”
Two pictures of the volunteers were taken: One after a restful eight hours of sleep, and the other after five hours of sleep followed by being kept awake for 31 hours. Other volunteers rated the pictures for attractiveness and how healthy and tired the participants looked. Derk-Jan Dijk, who wasn’t involved in the current study, told BBC News that the effect is probably worse than the pictures show:
“The photographs were taken during the daytime when the biological clock promotes wakefulness. Can you imagine how sleep loss makes you look at night or early in the morning when the circadian clock (body clock) promotes sleep?”
While participants were taken to extreme levels of sleep deprivation, it’s likely that even losing a small bit of sleep can have deleterious effects on your attractiveness, Axelsson told ABC News:
“We cannot really say when the effects start … if it’s six hours or five hours, but it probably starts gradually,” Axelsson said. “It’s possible that you get these effects through chronic sleep deprivation as well.”
Related Content:
Discoblog: Proved by Science: Sleepy Bees Are Sloppy Dancers
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Writing emails as part of sleepwalking after increase in Zolpidem [Ambien].
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Sleep disturbances in Disney animated films
Not Exactly Rocket Science: To sleep, perchance to dream, perchance to remember
Science Not Fiction: Inception and the Neuroscience of Sleep
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Sleep
Image: Flickr/Furryscaly
December 03 2010
Update: Is Discussing Bat Fellatio With Colleagues Sexual Harassment?
Bringing up a fruit bat’s oral sex habits with a colleague you don’t know very well may not be the best idea–but according to an Irish court, it doesn’t quite merit the extreme sanctions associated with more flagrant sexual harassment.
Back in May, Discoblog brought you news that a biology professor in Ireland was being charged with harassment by a female colleague after he read from and discussed a racy new paper about fruit bat fellatio. The biologist, Dale Evans, was ordered to attend two years of counseling to correct his attitudes and behavior, and was told that he would be monitored for those two years. But Evans claimed that he’d simply thought the paper was hilarious, had shown it to numerous people that day, and had zero intention of causing offense to his colleague, Rossana Salerno Kennedy. Now ScienceInsider gives us the update:
Evans challenged the ruling, and a judge has now ruled in favor of him, which means that he won’t have to do the counseling. The university’s sanctions on him were “grossly disproportionate,” the judge said. “I won my battle,” Evans tells ScienceInsider.
The High Court judge said that Evans should have received a verbal warning rather than the counseling and monitoring. Evans wasn’t vindicated completely, though. As the Irish Times reports:
The judge refused to grant orders overturning findings of an external investigation that, while Dr Evans had no intention to offend in showing the paper to his colleague, the incident fell within the definition of sexual harassment under UCC’s “Duty of Respect and Right to Dignity” policy.
Related Content:
Discoblog: Ig Nobel Awards Honor Pioneering Work on Bat Fellatio, Whale Snot, & More
Discoblog: A Scientist Finds out That Discussion of Bat Fellatio Is NSFW
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Holy Fellatio, Batman! Fruit Bats Use Oral Sex to Prolong Actual Sex
November 23 2010
To Find Love, the Barnacle Grows a Stretchy, Accordion-Like Penis
To find a mate, most animals must travel—up a tree, down a stream, across the street to the bar. But not barnacles, which spend their entire adult lives cemented firmly to rocks, boats, whales and the like. To compensate for their immobility, barnacles have evolved the longest penises relative to body size in the animal kingdom.
The appendages can reach up to ten times the length of the barnacles’ bodies to allow them to search of a partner. See a video—safe for work!—below.
According to new research published in Marine Biology, the shape of barnacles’ penises varies depending on their circumstances. Barnacles spaced far apart from each other develop stretchier organs, the better for reaching across the gaps, and barnacles exposed to rough waves grow wider ones to stand up against the tide.
Study author Matthew Hoch took advantage of the fact that barnacles grow new penises every mating season (a good thing, since the genitalia sometimes break off in the waves). In July 2005, before their reproductive tissues developed for the year, Hoch identified populations of acorn barnacles at five sites in Long Island Sound, and selectively removed barnacles so that some were densely crowded together, and others had space between them. Then, just before the barnacles’ mating season began in mid-November, he collected organisms from each plot and dissected and analyzed their fresh-grown penises.
Though overall length didn’t change, Hoch found that sparsely arranged barnacles grew penises with more annulations–ringed folds that allow them to stretch farther, like an accordion or a bendy straw. Barnacles living right next to each other developed fewer folds. Though it’s unclear exactly how they sense it, other barnacles’ proximity seems to dictate what kind of genitals they grow.
“Barnacles must perceive something related to the density of crowding and physical contact with neighbors as a cue for estimating the distance over which the penis must reach,” Hoch writes. “Increasing the number of annulations of the penis most likely allows these mating barnacles to reach more distant neighbors.”
In addition, when he compared barnacles from sheltered harbor sites to those exposed to rough Atlantic waves, Hoch found that average penis diameter increased with wave strength. The thicker shape must provide structural support and reduce the risk of breakage in choppier waters, he concludes.
The farther the penis meanders, the greater the potential for wave damage, so penis morphology probably comes down to risk versus reward, Hoch writes. If there are potential mates close by, it’s not worth the extra energy it takes to grow a stretchy penis and the extra risk it takes to use it. But if the only other barnacles around are distant, the investment could pay off with a chance to reproduce.
Lesson for life? Perhaps. But for now we’re probably better off leaving the house.
Related Content:
Discoblog: And the Prize for World’s Largest Testicles Goes to… the Bushcricket!
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Ballistic Penises and Corkscrew Vaginas — The Sexual Battles of Ducks
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Horrific Beetle Sex – Why the Most Successful Males Have the Spikiest Penises
80beats: Scientists Make Rabbit Penis Replacement Parts; Male Rabbits Rejoice
Video: Vimeo / Casey Dunn
November 10 2010
And the Prize for World’s Largest Testicles Goes to… the Bushcricket!
A cricket’s constant chirping may seem a bit ballsy, but just wait until you hear about their testicles. For at least one species of cricket, the tuberous bushcricket (Platycleis affinis), the testicles take up 14 percent of the insect’s body mass!
The Daily Mail made a stunning observation:
To put this into perspective, a man with the same proportions would have to carry testicles weighing as much as five bags of sugar each.
The discovery, made by a team led by Karim Vahed, was published in Biology Letters today. Vahed said in a press release that he was surprised by the finding:
“We couldn’t believe the size of these organs, they seemed to fill the entire abdomen. We are also interested in the reason why they are so large. An almost universal evolutionary rule appears to be that such variation in relative testes size is linked to female mating behaviour; testes tend to be larger in species where females are more promiscuous, as has been demonstrated in various species in fish, birds, insects and mammals.”
Traditionally scientists have seen that promiscuous partners lead to bigger balls through male competition. Each male wants to make more sperm than the rest so that his boys have the best chance of winning the race, either by sheer volume or through an ability to mate more often. This seems to be the case in these crickets, Vahed explained in a press release:
“It looks as though the testes may be that big simply to allow males to mate repeatedly without their sperm reserves being exhausted,” Dr Vahed said. “This strongly suggests that extra large testes in bushcrickets allow males to transfer relatively small ejaculates to a greater number of females. Males don’t put all their eggs (or rather sperm!) in one basket.”
The researchers discovered that each female bushcricket takes many mates, up to 23 in a two-month adult life. It seems this lifestyle has driven the males’ evolution of mega-testicles, giving them the stamina to keep up with these promiscuous ladies, explained The Guardian:
The theory, while speculative, has some evidence to support it. After mating with one female, tuberous bush crickets were ready to mate again within an hour, while other species with smaller testes took as long as five days to be ready.
Related content:
Discoblog: Toasty Testicles From Laptops Could Make for Less Fertile Nerds
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Squirrels masturbate to avoid sexually transmitted infections
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Gut bacteria change the sexual preferences of fruit flies
80beats: A “Sadistic” Spider’s Unusual Mating Habits Are Tough on the Female
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Sex
Image: University of Derby
November 01 2010
Sexy Black Truffle Porn: Not as Exciting as You Hoped
Scientists are starting to unravel the sex secrets of the black truffle, that rare and expensive delicacy, in hopes of making its cultivation easier.
It turns out the fungus has two different sex-like states, and both must be present to reproduce. One truffle can only be one of the sexes, and while that may not sound odd to us humans, it’s very out of place in the fungus world. Fungi are usually able to reproduce asexually and self-fertilize, lead author of the paper Francesco Paolocci told The Telegraph:
“It was long assumed that the truffle was like other fungi, but we know now that it needs the help of a partner. It has members of two different sexualities, a bit like male and female.”
Still, that doesn’t sound too complicated, right? Well, what’s hard is getting close enough to your partner to “score” when you are stuck in single-sex colonies on oak trees that are yards away from each other (which bears a striking resemblance to my undergrad experience). The researchers were the first to find that truffles tend to grow in single sex bunches, Paolocci explained to The Telegraph:
“But we found that individual trees are only colonised by a single sex of the fungi. Even when we started with a mixed colony, it quickly became dominated by one sex or the other. To produce the truffles, you have to have the two different sexual strains meeting in some way, but they can be quite far away from each other.”
It is likely that in nature this meeting is accomplished via animals that dig in the dirt and transfer spores from one colony to the other. This could help explain why it is so difficult to cultivate the ridiculously expensive foodie-magnet; when trees are impregnated with the fungus, only about 30 percent of the colonies survive.
The truffles themselves are actually the fruiting body produced by the “female” sex, which is the sex that lives on the tree roots. The “male” truffle fungus is found in the soil, Paolocci told The Telegraph:
“In order to have a productive truffle ground we need to have both the male and female strains. We have genetic markers that help us identify the male and female strains, and this can be used to increase production. It could help bring the price of these fungus down.”
Related content:
Discoblog: To Satisfy Lust for Truffles, The French Will Try to Clone Them
80beats: How a Fungus Makes a Jet Stream to Carry Spores Abroad
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Who needs sex? – Rotifers import genes from fungi, bacteria and plants
The Loom: Respect For the Fungus Overlords
DISCOVER: The Biology of…Truffles
Image: Flickr/ Kjunstorm
September 16 2010
In the Light of a Streetlamp, Young Blue Tits Get More Action
It can be hard to sleep with a light shining in your window, but for the male blue tit, this night-lighting gives him a sexual advantage. Researchers have found that male tits that live near streetlights wake up and start to sing on average three minutes earlier than the rest of the gang.
These birds are more likely to be chosen as mates because under normal conditions, early risers are the strongest fully grown birds. When adventurous lady-birds go looking for extramarital affairs in the morning light they are attracted to early risers because they assume they are the macho, macho men of the group.
As a result, any male blue tit–even a young and scrawny fellow–that lives within 50 feet of a streetlight gets about twice as much extramarital action, and has more offspring than male tits that live in other parts of the neighborhood.
Study author Bart Kempenaers told Science News that they don’t know what effect this might have on the population:
From an otherwise unattractive male’s point of view, streetlights must be great. But Kempenaers says he doesn’t have data on the consequences for the blue tit population as a whole if artificial light inspires many females to mate with males that they would normally shun.
The study found that male blue tits weren’t the only ones influenced by artificial mood-lighting. The females were also affected: They started laying their eggs about 1.5 days earlier than the females that nested further from the lights.
Kempenaers says that light pollution is usually ignored in favor of other, more obvious pollution. But, he says, it’s plenty disruptive for mating behavior in these birds, and for many other behaviors in many other species. As biogeographer Travis Longcore told Science News:
The new paper “deals with things that aren’t as obvious as dead bodies on the ground but are no less profound,” he says.
There may soon be bad news for these blue tits masquerading as studs: Companies are currently working to develop and test street lights that are less ecologically disturbing. I guess those poor birds will have to find some other way to pull the wool over the eyes of their potential mates.
Related content:
80beats: Bird Sex Round-up: Why Monogamous Birds Cooperate, Why Finches Cheat
80beats: Finch Mothers Can Subconsciously Control the Gender of Their Little Ones
20 Things: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Sex
Not Exactly Rocket Science: Male bowerbirds create forced perspective illusions that only females see
Image: Flickr / Ben Fredrickson (xjrlokix)
June 03 2010
The Tell-Tale Underwear: Genetics Co. Finds Out Who’s Been Cheating
Worried your man is cheating? Don’t rely on hunches, send his undies to the lab. Some suspicious people are paying upwards of $500 to air their dirty laundry, and a DNA-testing company is happily testing suspected spouses’ condoms, sheets, and tighty whities for genetic signs of infidelity.
Chromosomal Laboratories Inc., the same company that has offered paternal-testing giveaways on Father’s Day, is now in the unmentionables business. The company offers a smorgasbord of tests starting with a UV-light sweep and going as far as a microscopic search for sperm heads.
On the version of the company’s website designed for suspicious men, the biological sleuths describe a test for Prostate Specific Antigen and boast: “The technique is extremely powerful because it can confirm the presence of semen even in samples from sterile or vasectomized men.”
An order sheet (pdf), which “should not come in contact with any of the samples,” allows concerned lovers to mark the quantity of saliva, sperm, or DNA tests that the lab should perform. A similar site exists for women testing their husbands’ or boyfriends’ garments since the company can also screen for vaginal fluid, and a simple cheek swab can rule out the concerned partner’s own DNA that might contaminate the “sample.”
The Phoenix New Times broke the story, interviewing Melissa Beddow, an analyst for the company:
Beddow says stealing someone’s underwear and testing it for DNA isn’t an invasion of privacy because the tests aren’t used in court–although, in some cases, like divorce proceedings, Chromosomal Laboratory’s results can be admitted into evidence.
Related content:
Discoblog: Scientists Examine Underwear Astronaut Wore for a Month
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in the cold.
Discoblog: NCBI ROFL: Study proves cheating good for marriage.
DISCOVER: Einstein’s Theory of Fidelity
DISCOVER: The Mating Game’s Biggest Cheaters (photo gallery)
Image: flickr / Egan Snow
May 20 2010
Mixed-Up, Adopted Ducks Try to Mate With the Wrong Species
May 04 2010
Chimps Use Tools to Improve Their Sex Lives
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