• Where’s my fur coat? Hairless bear in Germany is the saddest thing you’ll see today.
• “Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination” opens at the California Museum of Science. On display is a giant Darth Vader mask made of old electronics. All lesser nerds tremble in its presence.
• I did what last night? Woman has a terrible case of the morning afters—transient global amnesia to be exact—that can be triggered by sex.
• Will learning foreign languages be irrelevant one day? Space-age glasses that translate foreign languages are under development.
• If the hairless bear weirded you out, then put a smile on your face with these cute little narcoleptic meerkats that fall asleep while standing up.
The economy may still suck in real life (even if we’ve managed to avoid a Great Depression redux) but in Second Life, it may as well be 2006. New Scientist reports that Americans will spend $621 million (in real dollars) in virtual worlds this year, while the Asian market is dropping an estimated $5 billion (which also fuels the Internet addiction rehab market). Second Life in particular is raking it in with $144 million in transactions in the second quarter of 2009—a 94 percent increase from last year.
What virtual goods are all these real people buying? Well, just about everything, from clothes to art to buildings to sports equipment to…sex gear. Lots of sex gear. And some users are making serious money. As NS puts it:
With its users swapping virtual goods and services worth around $600 million per year, Second Life has the largest economy of any virtual world – which exceeds the GDP of 19 countries, including Samoa.
Give it a couple more years and it might even be too big to fail.
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Image: Courtesy of Linden Labs
Yes, sex sells. But should it sell science? Anatomist Gunther von Hagens plans on opening a new kind of Body Exhibit, one that is akin to a sex show of dead corpses. The Swiss have already granted him the OK to set up the show in their country, as part of the Body Worlds exhibit. He’s tried to put it on before in Berlin, with a male and female corpse having sex, and met with protests. In response, he claimed that the two subjects had signed consent forms prior to their death, and agreed to have their bodies displayed in a sexual way.
Now, Reuters reports he’s ready for a full on show:
Von Hagens and his wife Angelina Whalley show corpses prepared using a technique invented by von Hagens called “plastination,” that removes water from specimens and preserves them with silicon rubber or epoxy resin.
“It’s not my intention to show certain sexual poses. My goal is really to show the anatomy and the function,” Body Worlds creative director Whalley told Reuters in an interview, adding the sex exhibition may open next year.
The regular Body World exhibit has racked up 27 million visitors, but constantly is called controversial for their use of corpses and dissection of skin and internal body parts. And while teaching about anatomy is a noble goal, is there really any educational purpose to this sex show? Or is von Hagens just very good at getting free press?
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Image: flickr/ dustinkeirstead
• Will wearable kidneys spell the end of dialysis forever? And do they come in pink?
• At last! A scientific explanation for why you get chills down your spine during that Jimmy Page solo.
• The animal kingdom’s most gruesome weapon: The Spanish ribbed newt “pushes out its ribs until they pierce through its body, exposing a row of bones that act like poisonous barbs.”
• If we can put a man on the moon, we can put a video ad in a print magazine.
• Ok, so maybe the human dissections of the early 1900s were a bit gruesome—but at least they didn’t use stolen dogs.
• What movies are the ISS residents watching in space? Hint: It ain’t all The Right Stuff.
It’s hard enough for us humans to fight for a mate. But for the now-extinct mussel-like creatures known as ostracods, which lived on Earth about 100 million years ago, “getting in” was only part of the battle.
That’s where giant sperm comes in: Females copulated with multiple males, so it was up for the sperm themselves to duke it out inside of the female’s body. New research based on microfossils of these ancient creatures, led by Dr. Renate Matzke-Karasz in Munich, shows that a male’s sperm may have been even larger than the animal itself. And ostracods aren’t the only animals to produce mega-sperm, according to Reuters:
Giant sperm are still around today. A human sperm, for example, would have to be 40 meters long to measure up against a fruit fly’s. The insect is only a few millimeters in size but can produce 6 cm-long (2.5 inch) coiled sperm.
Now that’s impressive.
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Image: flickr / notsogoodphotography
Despite the fact that they were born at the same time to the same mother, Justin and Jordan look nothing like twins, besides having the same skin color. In fact, they look so different that James Harrison, the supposed father, decided to request a paternity test. Turns out, his instincts were right: One of the infants is his child, and the other is not.
Mia Washington, the mother of the “twins,” admitted to cheating on Harrison, her fiancé, prior to becoming pregnant. But she didn’t have any idea the pregnancy was a result of two separate sets of sperm.
Biologically speaking, this can happen when two or more eggs from the same woman are fertilized during the same ovulation period by two different men. When this rare event occurs, it is called heteropaternal superfecundation—and we really mean rare: There have only been about 10 other cases of this, according to the president of Clear Diagnostics’ DNA lab, Genny Thibodeaux. And in those cases, it was more obvious because the children were of different ethnic backgrounds.
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A recent survey of the animal kingdom has found that, like humans, animals just wanna have fun.
To anyone who’s ever spent time with a dog, it may seem obvious that animals can enjoy play for the sake of it—though this hasn’t been so well documented in the scientific realm. Jonathan Balcombe, a research scientist with the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, has now gathered a list of ways that animals get pointless pleasure, and published it in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science. A few examples:
- Herring gulls play “drop-catch,” tossing around clams and other small, hard objects.
- Hippos go to the spa. When a hippo wants to unwind at the freshwater springs, they relax with their legs spread out and mouth wide open, and let the surrounding fish suck off parasites, flaky skin, fungus, and other blemishes. Sometimes they get so relaxed that they fall asleep.
- Dolphins use vibrators. They’ve been caught making low-pitched buzzing clicks near each others’ private areas, and researchers say it seems to be an enjoyable experience.
- Certain birds have been caught masturbating, while goats, hyenas, primates, bats, and sheep appear to engage in oral sex.
In order to have fun, animals must have a brain that can process the pleasure. Some aren’t so lucky: Sponges and jellyfish aren’t conscious enough to really know what fun is.
If you’re too far away from your honey to exchange real kisses, you may soon be able to kiss him or her over the phone, using the—you guessed it—KissPhone.
You actually kiss the phone—on its big, pink lips, to be precise—and the pressure, temperature, percussion speed, and “sucking force” of your mouth are measured. The phone then transmits these signals to your partner’s KissPhone, which reproduces the conditions of the kiss.
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Jerry Coyne—author and renowned evolutionist—thinks so:
It is the conventional wisdom in human sexuality that semen tastes bad. Anyone with minimal sexual experience knows that although many women will perform fellatio on their partners, most bridle at the thought of swallowing the ejaculate. Its flavor is frequently characterized as revoltingly bitter or salty. The “swallow or spit” dilemma faces any woman who performs such an act, and whose partner regards swallowing as a gesture of love…
Why does semen taste so foul? One answer, of course, is that the chemicals necessary to make an ejaculate effective have the side effect of tasting bad. Semen is only about 5% sperm, with the remainder of the fluid consisting of a complex mixture of compounds from the prostate gland and seminal vesicle…
But this proximate answer will not satisfy the diligent evolutionary psychologist. After all, natural selection could presumably add some sugars or good-tasting stuff to semen if it were advantageous to do so. Why does it not do so?
A moment’s reflection gives the answer.
Natural selection maintains the repugnant taste of semen so that a man’s sperm will wind up in the appropriate place: the vagina and not the stomach. So long as sperm tastes bad, women will not be tempted to swallow it, but will turn their male partner towards conventional intercourse, which of course is the only act that will produce children.
Well, there you have it! Now all we need is a way to test this hypothesis. Volunteers?
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Image: iStockphoto [not actual semen]
Oxytocin is the brain’s love hormone—without it, we might not ever fall in love or attempt monogamy. We know that the hormone releases “happy” feelings during events from nursing to orgasm, and is the reason why people feel a chemical “bond” with a partner. And now, scientists have found that the hormone can also boost the sex appeal of complete strangers.
A University of Bristol study tested 96 men and women in a double-blind test by spraying them with either oxytocin or a plecebo. The subjects were then asked to rate pictures of 48 men and women for attractiveness, and 30 for trustworthiness. Sure enough, the participants that had sniffed the love hormone tended to rate the random people in the pictures as better looking or more trustworthy.
Psychologist Angeliki Theodoriduou, who led the study, found that regardless of their gender or mood, the people under the influence of oxytocin were more likely to like the strangers in the pictures.
While the researchers didn’t look at why oxytocin has such pull, they reckon the hormone’s effect on the brain is so strong that it suppresses any fearful emotions people would normally feel.
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