We know that dim lights, a little Marvin Gaye, and a lot of red wine usually do the trick to get humans in the mood for some nookie. But what encourages endangered frogs to get it on?
Apparently, they are a fussy lot, and demand that the temperature be just right and that the humidity and day length be just so; only then will they kick off their slippers for a little bit of action. So, the Bristol Zoo obliged a few endangered frogs by building them a love shack, a specially designed “AmphiPod” with controlled natural conditions that will hopefully encourage the endangered frogs to breed.
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In honor of Valentine’s Day, we bring you the story of how hearts really can break. Doctors do occasionally diagnose someone with “broken heart syndrome,” but the patients aren’t necessarily the lovelorn dump-ees of the world.
The heart problem, which is more technically known as stress-induced cardiomyopathy, can be brought on by all kinds of emotional and physical stresses. Externally, someone with broken heart syndrome may appear to be having a heart attack, but the physical mechanism is actually quite different.
ABC News reports:
While a heart attack is usually caused by blocked arteries, medical experts believe broken heart syndrome is caused by a surge in adrenaline and other hormones. When patients experience an adrenaline rush in the aftermath of a stressful situation, the heart muscle may be overwhelmed and become temporarily weakened.
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The next time your partner isn’t in the mood for some nookie, how about tempting him or her with a piece of… er… pork? It may sound strange, but Argentinian President Cristina Fernandez swears that a little bit of pig has a whole lot of pop to it.
Reuters quotes the president:
“I’ve just been told something I didn’t know; that eating pork improves your sex life… I’d say it’s a lot nicer to eat a bit of grilled pork than take Viagra,” President Cristina Fernandez said to leaders of the pig farming industry. She said she recently ate pork and “things went very well that weekend, so it could well be true.”
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Had enough of climate-change deniers harping on the “trick” used by researchers working with raw climate data? The Danish government has their own brand of denial for you—they’d like to pretend the country’s sex industry doesn’t exist, according to Der Spiegel:
Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming climate conference. Now the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings.
The postcards are complete with the catchy and eco-friendly slogan, “Be sustainable–don’t buy sex.”
The Sex Workers Interest Group was unimpressed. So to fight back on behalf of the country’s working girls, they will offer free sex to any delegate that flashes both the government postcard and their conference ID badge.
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Image: flickr / keepwaddling1
Belle de Jour, the best-selling author who penned books about her life as a call girl, revealed her true identity over the weekend. Her name is Brooke Magnanti.
Dr. Brooke Magnanti to be exact. It turns out she’s a cancer researcher who began turning tricks while in grad school.
Via the London Times:
Magnanti is a respected specialist in developmental neurotoxicology and cancer epidemiology in a hospital research group in Bristol. Six years ago, in the final stages of her PhD thesis, she ran out of money and turned to prostitution through a London escort agency, charging £300 an hour. Already an experienced science blogger, she began writing about her experiences in a web diary that was adapted into books and a television drama starring Billie Piper.
It’s not like she didn’t try to find honest work. She told the Times that at one point during her double life she had a job as a computer programmer, “but I kept up with my other work because it was so much more enjoyable.”
So what do you think readers? Is this a commentary on how poorly grad students, and scientists in general, are compensated?
More reactions over at The Great Beyond.
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Image: flickr / keepwaddling1
• 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
