Research

We’ve all heard what happens to athletes who don’t abstain from sex before the match: they lose. We don’t know how we know or when we first heard it, but we know it and somehow, it seems to make sense. Is it true? The media has been having a field day with this question, especially after digging up a review from the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine from 2000 (um, slow news day?). We can’t be sure they actually read it, given their conclusions.

Last November, a crew of engineers working on a hydroelectric dam on the Madeira River, a major tributary in the Amazon rainforest, discovered six creatures that looked alarmingly like… well, they looked like dicks. Long, flaccid dicks. The news was kept under wraps while experts worked to confirm the trouser snake’s genus. Finally, it seems we have an answer.

Zak’s original field, it turns out, is economics, a far cry from the hearts and teddy bears we imagine when we consider his nickname. But after performing experiments on generosity, Zak stumbled on the importance of trust in interactions, which led him, rather inevitably, to research about oxytocin. Oxytocin, you might remember, is a hormone that has been linked previously to bonding — between mothers and children primarily, but also between partners.

We have heard many rumors about the AIDS Healthcare Foundation since we started reporting on their war on pornography, chief among them that they opposed research into an HIV/AIDs vaccine. Not content to become part of the gossip mill, we decided to dive into the allegations. What we found was disheartening.

When confronted with reminders of their mortality, people have been shown to play up their cultural views, belittle opposing views, and reinforce their self-esteem. In studying these effects, the question of how thoughts of death affected the libido came up.

Right whales, massive sea giants once hunted almost to the point of extinction in the days of the whaling industry — who would have guessed these rotund, leisurely mammals entertained such scandalous sex lives? Not only is the right whale exhibitionist, swimming to the surface of the water to mate, but apparently, they’re quite fond of group sex as well!

The questions of whether couples should wait before having sex, and how long, and if it even matters, are robust perennials for news organizations, eager for traffic. Every year, a good handful of studies come out to feed the slow news days, and blogs trip over themselves to regurgitate the information, delighted to tap into fears or hit the jackpot of all things web: a slut- or virgin-shaming comment war to send those pageviews through the roof.

The Carnal Carnival is a site run by a group of wild science writers who want to bring knowledge to us unwashed masses. This month, they’re surveying studies on orgasm. Ready to take a look at male and female genitals during coitus, as delivered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)?

Ejaculation, biologically speaking, has one function: to shoot semen into the female body, in the hopes that one of the sperm survives the hostile reception long enough to penetrate an egg. “Given these basic biological facts, and assuming that ejaculation is not so premature that it occurs prior to intromission and sperm cells find themselves awkwardly outside of a woman’s reproductive tract flopping about like fish out of water,” Bering reflects, “what, exactly, is so “premature” about premature ejaculation?”

Remember high school? Yeah, Neither do we. But researchers recently released a reminder entitled “Terms of Endearment” — a paper studying the Darwinian mating habits of the high school student.