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Discoblog

Archive for the ‘Sex & Mating’ Category

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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.

(more…)

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July 1st, 2011 Tags: dentistry, Japan, robot, robots
by Joseph Castro in Diseases, Injuries, & Other Ailments, Sex & Mating, Technology Attacks! | No comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Where the Ladies At? There’s an App for That

scenetap

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.

(more…)

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June 30th, 2011 Tags: apps, bars, facial-recognition, SceneTap, smartphones
by Veronique Greenwood in Sex & Mating, Technology Attacks! | 4 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Sexy Ad Campaign Targeting Monkeys Makes A Splash

spacing is important

“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.

(more…)

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June 30th, 2011 Tags: advertising, Laurie Santos, monkeys, sex
by Veronique Greenwood in Food, Nutrition, & More Food, Sex & Mating, The Wide (& Strange) World of Animals, What’s Inside Your Brain? | No comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

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, researchers wanted to know what they were saying with these super-high-pitched croaks.

(more…)

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June 17th, 2011 Tags: amphibians, animals, evolution, frogs, nature, sex & reproduction
by Joseph Castro in Sex & Mating, The Wide (& Strange) World of Animals | 2 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

“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.

(more…)

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June 16th, 2011 Tags: pregnancy
by Veronique Greenwood in Contraceptives for Everyone/thing, Sex & Mating, Technology Attacks! | 8 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

If Drug-Slathered, Erection-Enhancing Condoms Won’t Lead Men to Safe Sex, Nothing Will

For men who find that condoms sometimes, um, lessen 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).

(more…)

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May 11th, 2011 Tags: condoms, drugs, infectious diseases, pregnancy, sex, STD, viagra
by Valerie Ross in Contraceptives for Everyone/thing, Sex & Mating | 8 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Everything You Wanted to Know About Semen-Collecting Robots (and Then Some)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6tJk1dVIfw&feature=related

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. (more…)

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May 9th, 2011 Tags: gadgets, semen, sperm, sperm bank, technology
by Patrick Morgan in Sex & Mating, Technology Attacks! | No comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

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.

(more…)

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April 20th, 2011 Tags: attraction, hormones, sex & gender, sexual attraction
by Patrick Morgan in Sex & Mating | 3 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

Catchiest Mating Songs Spread Through Whale Populations Like Top 40 Hits

whale
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? 

(more…)

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April 16th, 2011 Tags: communication, humpback whales, mating, whales
by Veronique Greenwood in Sex & Mating, The Ocean & All Its (Endangered) Wonders, The Wide (& Strange) World of Animals | 2 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

What the Duck? Lady Mallards May Get Down With Bright-Billed Drakes to Avoid STDs

When it comes to mallard bills, brighter is better: A bright yellow bill is duck-speak for “I’m healthy,” attracting more female ducks than dingy green ones. After discovering that avian semen has antibacterial properties, scientists then found that the semen of brighter-billed males killed more bacteria than the semen of darker-billed ones. It implies that by seeking out bright-billed males, female ducks are protecting themselves against bacteria-related sexually transmitted diseases.

In her experiment, University of Oslo researcher Melissah Rowe collected semen from ducks (a feat unto itself—the videos in this link are amazing, but watch at your own risk) of various bill colors, and then tested how well the semen killed bacteria such as E. coli. She found that ducks whose bills had more carotenoids—an organic pigment that brightens bills—also had semen that more effectively killed E. coli. However, they discovered that the semen’s effectiveness against the bacteria S. aureus wasn’t associated with bill color, possibly implying that this bacteria doesn’t pose much harm to ducks.

(more…)

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April 13th, 2011 Tags: evolution, living world, mating, Sex & Mating, sex & reproduction, sexual selection
by Patrick Morgan in Diseases, Injuries, & Other Ailments, Sex & Mating, The Wide (& Strange) World of Animals | 2 Comments | RSS feed | Trackback >

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    • About the Blog

      Discoblog is DISCOVER's compendium of quirky, funny, and surprising science news from the edge of the known universe. It's written by Veronique Greenwood and Valerie Ross. Email tips and suggestions to vgreenwood [at] discovermagazine [dot] com.

      Discoblog also includes the daily feature NCBI ROFL, in which two prone-to-distraction grad students post real scientific articles with funny subjects. Email your tips to ncbirofl [at] gmail.com. Follow the ROFL feed here.

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