…but they seem to love gay prostitutes.

(joke stolen from “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me”)

And the other 20% had abstinence-only education.

Finally scientists are telling us what we’ve been telling men forever. Namely, that clitoral and vaginal stimulation actually provide different sensations. Scientists have used MRI brain scans to determine that these two types of stimulation differ because they actually activate different parts of the brain.

This research needs to remain fully funded.

Tall about “friends with benefits”.

Wasn’t too long ago that scientists dismissed the notion of human-Neanderthal mating as absolutely ludicrous - as if humans won’t screw anything that moves and a few things that don’t.

Not sure what to say about this. Interesting to note that they are more popular among the ladies, the men apparently thinking that drinking horse semen might make them gay for horses or something.

A link to a cartoon I published ten years ago this week in the long lost Ripsaw News.

The MRI sex tape in false color, and on a five minute loop, so you can really do some science.

The incredible story of the MRI Sex Tape, which won an Ig-Nobel prize.

…in this footage the woman seems to claim they did it backwards, but the imagery I’ve seen is face-to-face, so they must have come around.

…MRI video footage of sexual intercourse. This is science. The couple is actually doing it missionary style, so tilt your head to the right.

Graphic in a NSFW kind of way, but on the other hand, it’s just science people.

…as other mammals do? Stumbled across this on wikipedia. Here’s Richard Dawkins:

“It is not implausible that, with natural selection refining their diagnostic skills, females could glean all sorts of clues about a male’s health, and robustness of his ability to cope with stress, from the tone and bearing of his penis.”

…So the penis bone evolved away because girls say real men do it without a bone? I don’t get it, but then again I’m not a mechanistic reductionist like Dawkins here.

This is freaking fascinating:

The new theory, proposed by the researchers and driven by ideas from evolutionary psychology, holds that drug attitudes are really driven by people’s reproductive strategies.

When the Penn researchers questioned almost 1,000 people in two subject populations (undergraduate students and Internet users) a clear winner emerged between the competing theories: differences in reproductive strategies are driving individuals’ different views on recreational drugs.

Researcher Robert Kurzban said that while many factors predict to some extent whether people are opposed to recreational drugs, the most closely related predictors are people’s views on sexual promiscuity. “This provides evidence that views on sex and views on drugs are very closely related,” he explained. “If you were to measure people’s political ideology, religiosity and personality characteristics, you can predict to some degree how people feel about recreational drugs. But if, instead, you just measure how people feel about casual sex, and ignore the abstract items, the predictions about people’s views on drugs in fact become quite a bit better.”

Somewhat controversially, the study also concludes that considering morality from the standpoint of strategic reproductive interests is a potentially useful way to understand why humans care about third-party behavior.

Nice website as well.

The verdict is in and: humans and Neanderthals interbred.

The new data indicate that humans may not have replaced Neandertals, but assimilated them into the human gene pool.

“Neandertals are not totally extinct; they live on in some of us,” says Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and leader of the Neandertal genome project.

This has long been the Gonzo Science position.

Had to post this as a student of action-figure videos (a few Gonzo Science productions may be found on this page).

This is a.) hilarious b.) NSFW so much.

If it’s true that this was made by these pre-adolescent girls, as it appears, then I just gotta say, the little film sets they made are pretty ingenious.

A psychiatrist known as Dr. Shock for his notorious attempts to “cure” gay military recruits through electroshock therapy has been charged with sexually assaulting a male patient. Dr. Aubrey Levin, who was arrested in Calgary, Alberta, after he was secretly filmed sexually abusing a male patient, had previously been accused of gross human rights abuses for his treatment of gay soldiers and conscientious objectors in apartheid-era South Africa.

All you haters need to get a room.

An exploration of the late Robert Anton Wilson’s work.

The flavor-

A Non Euclidean Rumination On Subliminal Rationalists and Recalling Robert Anton Wilson

“Belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence.”
-Robert Anton Wilson

“Positivists decline to acknowledge any a priori knowledge. They wish to reduce everything to sense perceptions. Generally they contradict themselves in that they deny introspection as experience. … They use too narrow a notion of experience and introduce an arbitrary bound on what experience is”
-Kurt Godel

Kudos to The Anomalist.

“Pro Family Values”, anti-gay California state senator Roy Ashburn (R), got popped with a DUI last week leaving a gay nightclub. Finally he came out today, saying, “I’m gay.” Congratulations for stating the obvious, dude. Now about that voting record?

He explained his past voting record saying that’s what his conservative constituents wanted.

How did he explain his voting record to his boyfriends, that’s what I want to know… According to wikipedia,

Ashburn has voted against every gay rights measure in the State Senate since taking office,^[4]

with the caveat that

all of which subsequently passed.^[5][6][4]

That’s probably how he rationalized it. Meanwhile,

His religion is listed as Roman Catholic in the biography for him printed by CSU-Bakersfield.

As a result of the study, coauthor Tim Spector said, the study “shows fairly conclusively that the idea of a G-spot is subjective.” It didn’t take long, however, for this news to reach the French, who aren’t about to start taking sex advice from across the channel. A group of  gynecologists there convened their own conference in Paris to denounce this assault on female pleasure.

The rest.

…in fruit flies that is: (oops link broke)

after mating, females still slept deeply at night, but ditched the usual siesta in favour of extra foraging and searching for places to lay her eggs,” he says. “This behaviour lasts for around eight days – and our research findings suggest that this change is not by choice.

And so the fruit fly is confirmed to be a prisoner of its own biology, like everybody. Article also contains this gem:

Fruit flies are a good model for looking at sleep behaviour in humans as they exhibit many of the hallmarks of mammalian sleep. For example they sleep deeply at night from which they’re difficult to rouse and they have a preferred sleeping posture. If kept awake through the night, they exhibit tiredness the next day; if fed caffeine, they stay awake, and they become drowsy if given antihistamines.

I find it difficult to avoid anthropomorphising here.

Anyway, aggregating weird science stories like this is the kind of thing that’s made us the #1 animal sex facts site on the web.

Latest extreme animal sex fact for you perverts, about Dawson’s bees (via the BBC):

As a female emerges, the male bees turn on one another, competing intensely to get access to her.

Bundles of male bees form, with each trying to bite and sting another to death.

The result is mass murder, with whole generations of male bees wiping each other out to mate with females.

Click through for video.

A list of all our animal sex posts (including this one) here.

Adds to a short list of documented genital licking in raunchy animal kingdom sex:

Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation.

The paper details various hypotheses to explain the behaviour including added lubrication and that old sawhorse, pair bonding. Swiped this from Bayblab which is quickly becoming a favorite science site around here.

Two points about this article.

1. This shark has a sex organ on its head

and 2:

Since the 1960s experts have been finding specimens of the strange, 3-foot-long (0.9-meter-long) fish, which ended up nameless in museum collections around the world.

It wasn’t until after a team recently searched through shelves of “dead pickled fish” that the Eastern Pacific black ghostshark was recognized as its own new species

Excavate the museums!

Rates of teen pregnancy and syphilis rose during the abstinence only Bush years.

The muriqui’s peaceful reputation stems mainly from northern populations that feed on abundant leaves, and where males patiently queue to mate with females. But in the southern population…, fruit is more widely available than in the north… Because fruit is widely dispersed, females detach from the main group to locate it, making them less available for sex with the males than in the north where everyone stays together to eat leaves. Lacking ready mates, males may become frustrated, creating mutual tension and aggression.

Tense monkeys are violent monkeys.

Here’s a fun little scientific controversy. According to a study, men with damaged sperm can improve their sperm quality by having more sex, increasing the chances of a successful conception. But at least one scientist disagrees on the merits:

“Looking at sperm DNA is just one part of the puzzle,” said Bill Ledger, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Sheffield, who was not connected to the research. “Maybe this will improve pregnancy rates, but we still need to do more studies.”

Ledger said instructing couples with infertility problems to have more sex could stress their relationship. “This may add even more anxiety and do more harm than good,” he said. He said couples shouldn’t feel pressured to adjust their sex lives just for the sake of having a baby.

Let the idiocy that last sentence sink in for a moment. That is quality idiocy, and from a specialist in the field.

Why did nature settle on sexual reproduction when self-cloning appears to be a simpler solution? New Scientist teases the threads apart.

weekly Science of Sex column at Livescience.com 

Some male spiders forget about the female genitals and just stab their partners in the abdomen.

…With their, you know. File under “wonders of nature.” Some insects and squids do similar things.

New York Times.

Wild male chimps share meat with the ladies to boost their mating success.

The fact that the chimp males also shared meat with females not in heat could also add new fire to the debate about chimpanzees’ cognitive abilities, experts add. That’s because the research might suggest that chimps can anticipate future interactions or remember interactions they had in the past.

“Yeah, she’ll remember me when that ass gets all red and inflamed.”

…At least 365 million years ago.

The fertilisation of eggs by sperm outside the mother’s body - external fertilisation - is thought to have evolved before copulation.

The fossil suggests the fertilisation of eggs inside the female’s body evolved sooner than previously thought.