Blogs / Discoblog

Millions of Americans can’t smell, and there’s no treatment or cure for it. And if you’re on the pill, you may even have trouble sniffing out a good mate! But new research shows that falling in love can also alter a woman’s sense of smell, suggesting that smell serves as an evolutionary mechanism that reinforces monogamy.

Johan Lundstrom, primary investigator at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory at Monell Chemical Senses Center, found that when women are deeply in love, they lose some of their ability to differentiate the smells of their male friends.

To test this theory, Lundstrom took 20 female volunteers and measured how in love they were by having them fill out a questionnaire called the Passionate Love Scale. The women were asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 1 to 9 for questions such as:

I sense my body responding when [BOYFRIEND] touches me.

Sometimes I feel I can’t control my thoughts; they are obsessively on [BOYFRIEND].

I’d get jealous if I thought [BOYFRIEND] was falling in love with someone else.

Lundstrom then gave a T-shirt to each of the women’s boyfriends, one female friend, and one male friend, in order to collect body odor samples.

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Remember how all the Prozac we’ve been flushing through our systems (and our sewers) was entering the water supply and messing with the fish? Well, a new argument claims that this is precisely what’s going on with men who’re having a little trouble in the fertility department. And just who is making this rather dubious claim? None other than the Pope himself.

According to His Eminence, the demon birth control is finding its way from the urine of loose women into the otherwise-pure systems of unsuspecting males, robbing them of their baby-making mojo.

Pedro Jose Maria Simon Castellvi, president of the International Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, stated that the pill “has for some years had devastating effects on the environment by releasing tonnes of hormones into nature,” and as a result “[w]e have sufficient evidence to state that a non-negligible cause of male infertility in the West is the environmental pollution caused by the pill.”

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Here’s something to think about the next time a stranger on the subway is suddenly seized by a sneezing fit:  A new report [subscription required] describes people who experience uncontrollable sneezing when thinking about sex, or after doing the deed itself.  The researchers, who conducted an admittedly unscientific survey by scouring Internet chat rooms, believe that this strange phenomenon is more common than reported.

Harold Maxwell and Mahmood Bhutta of West Middlesex University Hospital in London decided to investigate the issue after one patient, a middle-aged man, complained of uncontrollable fits of sneezing when thinking about sex.  Searching through the medical literature, they could find only one similar case of a man who reported severe sneezing after orgasm.  Perhaps the phenomenon is under-reported because people who suffer from it are embarrassed, they thought.

So the researchers turned to the anonymity of the Web: After a survey of chatrooms, the researchers found 17 people who reported sneezing triggered by sexual thoughts, and three who reported sneezing triggered by orgasm.

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• Try wrapping your mind around this: Doctors find a tiny foot, thigh, and hand growing in a baby’s brain. Could be a teratoma or a shrunken identical twin.

• Someone skilled with a crochet hook should add a “foot-in-brain” to the The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art.

• Taking technology to the grave: “It’s comforting to the family to think mom’s playing her iPod or dad’s still got the cell phone that was attached to his ear all the time,” says a funeral planner of the new burial trend.

• When the sun goes down, “sexsomnia” turns a gentle husband into Mr. Hyde.

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Ever wonder why one of Santa’s all-male reindeer team was named Vixen? Well, here’s a real gender-bender: Deer experts studying depictions of Santa’s reindeer (alas, photographic evidence is rare) say Rudolph and all the rest actually appear to be females.

What’s more, female reindeer are likely to be pregnant during the winter months. So, has Santa been roof-hopping and gift-hauling on the backs of pregnant female reindeer or these years? The evidence is in the antlers.

Reindeer, or caribou, are the only deer in which both sexes grow antlers, which are shed and regrown every year. Bucks usually shed their antlers by December, having given them plenty of use battling other bucks during the mating season in summer and fall. Immature males and non-expecting females lose their antlers in early spring. Pregnant females keep their antlers as a means of defense ’til late spring, when their calves are born. This means that when Christmas Eve rolls around, the only fully-grown reindeer that still have antlers are female.

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Humans aren’t the only species that use pearly whites to judge the fitness of a mate: Apparently teeth are also important to a certain species of whales. The beaked whales have earned the reputation as the most bizarre whales in the ocean, spending the majority of their lives foraging for food and living in seclusion. For years, scientists have wondered why these strange whales have tusks, especially since it hinders their bite.

It turns out these seeming-unnecessary teeth are important for mating—a discovery that marks the first time scientists have found a secondary sexual characteristic (like antlers) that shaped evolution in a marine mammal.

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Apparently it’s a pretty close call, according to a recent survey.

Over 2,000 respondents were asked if they would forgo intercourse for two weeks, or surrender Internet privileges for the same amount of time. About half of the women in the survey chose chastity so long as they had the succor of the World Wide Web. This percentage remained consistent across all age ranges, from 18 to 44 years old.

The men surveyed craved action in the bedroom a bit more than World of Warcraft and other online. . . pursuits, though just barely: About four out of 10 males aged 18 to 34 opted for the Internet over sex during the hypothetical two-week time frame.

Other findings of the survey, conducted by the market research firm Harris Interactive and sponsored by (no surprise) the mega tech-vending Intel Corporation, purport to show why for some, the pleasures of the Web beat the pleasures of the bed. (more…)

• Look up! The biggest full moon in 15 years (if you’re in the Northern hemisphere) will rise tonight…like an extra-large pizza.

• There are more than one billion people in the world who speak Chinese. Still, the Max Planck Institute didn’t bother to find one to proofread the calligraphy splashed across the cover of their science journal. The “classical poem” turned out to be a racy brothel ad.

• Is it a boy or a girl? A baby’s sex may be determined by the father’s genes.

• Scientists find that bats’ echolocation can hit 110 decibels—about as loud as an iPod on full volume.

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This just in: Nerdy 16-to-25-year-old male science students are the most likely to be virgins of any of 185 students at the University of Sydney, according to a new study. Australian psychotherapist Stephen Carroll asked students in different departments about their sexual past and their knowledge of Chlamydia. While the male science students had the least amount of sex, female art students reportedly had the most, and also knew the least about the common STD.

What’s going on for all those lonely science majors? They’re spending too much time in the lab, according to Carroll. And given that the majority of science classes are still predominantly male, these deprived men probably aren’t going to find dates in their physics or engineering class. Maybe they should consider enrolling in drawing or painting 101.

Credit: flickr/ motoyzf222

What do John McCain, Seal, and Harry Potter have in common? Facial scars and, according to a new study, an advantage in attracting women—but only for a fling. Researchers from the University of Liverpool report that women prefer men with facial scars as short-term partners over men without facial scars. For long-term relationships, however, scars don’t make a difference.

The researchers came to this conclusion after showing 147 women images of men’s faces with mild scarring or without, and asking the women to rate the men as potential short-term or long-term mates. Previous research has shown that women prefer men with square jaws and well-defined brow ridges for short-term mates and more feminine facial features for long-term mates. The researchers offer an explanation for their new results in the press release:

“Women may have rated scarring as an attractive quality for short-term relationships because they found it be a symbol of masculinity, a feature that is linked to high testosterone levels and an indicator of good genetic qualities that can be passed on to offspring. Men without scars, however, could be seen as more caring and therefore more suitable for long-term relationships.”

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