Sixteen legs, all told, are involved in the kind of one-on-one sexual activity celebrated in this new study: “Spider behaviors include oral sexual encounters,” Matjaž Gregorič [pictured here, right], Klavdija Šuen, Ren-Chung Cheng, Simona Kralj-Fišer & Matjaž Kuntner, Scientific Reports, vol. 6, no. 25128, epub 2016. The authors, at Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of […]
Category: Improbable Sex
Research — about sex — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
The special HUMAN HEADS issue of the magazine is out!
The special HUMAN HEADS And GARLIC issue (vol. 22, no. 1) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now out! It’s bursting (as are all our issues) with carefully culled, improbable research snippets about everything, from anywhere, more or less. This is the very first issue of our all-PDF era. We hope you enjoy it, and that you will […]
The special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine!
The special IG NOBEL issue (vol. 21, no. 6) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now out! Articles include: “The 2015 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony“ “Improbable Sex“ …and more, more, more, including outstandingly improbable research snippets from many fields and countries. We encourage you to subscribe (or, if you like, buy it as a single issue).
Rob Lowe’s Research on Men’s Ratings of Sexual Attractiveness of Adolescent Girls in Bulgaria
Rob Lowe and two colleagues write about their research on men’s ratings of the sexual attractiveness of adolescent girls in Bulgaria. Their study is: “Heterosexual Men’s Ratings of Sexual Attractiveness of Adolescent Girls: A Cross-Cultural Analysis,” Paul Bennett , Rob Lowe, and Hristina Petrova, Archives of Sexual Behavior, November 2015, Volume 44, Issue 8, pp. 2201-2206. The […]
The special DOGS (and Cats) issue is out!
The special DOGS (and Cats) issue (vol. 21, no. 4) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now out! Articles include: “Cats and Dogs Research Review“ “Ig and Beyond: Dogs on Faces, Mice on Art“ “AIR Vents (letters from our readers)“ …and more, more, more, including new helpings of “Improbable Medical Review”, “Boys Will Be Boys”, “Soft Is […]
Spine motion during coitus (with commentary on the implications)
Physicists and engineers, among others, might be able to appreciate the care that went into this study of female spine motion during coitus: “Documenting female spine motion during coitus with a commentary on the implications for the low back pain patient,” Natalie Sidorkewicz [pictured here] and Stuart M. McGill, European Spine Journal, Volume 24, Issue 3, March […]
Conscientiousness with Fellatio as a Mate-Retention Activity
Conscientiousness and aggreeableness are key to whether women are able to keep up a relationship with a mate, if fellatio is involved, suggests this new study: “Women’s mate retention behaviors, personality traits, and fellatio,” Yael Sela [pictured here, above], Todd K. Shackelford [pictured here, below], Michael N. Pham, Virgil Zeigler-Hill, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 85, […]
Podcast #9: Psychotic security guards
Psychotic security guards figure heavily in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. LISTEN on Play.it or iTunes (or DOWNLOAD it, and listen later). SUBSCRIBE on Play.it or iTunes, to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams tells about: Psychotic security guards. (Silva, J. A., G. B. Leong, and R. Weinstock (1993). ‘The Psychotic Patient as Security Guard.’ Journal of Forensic Sciences 38 (6): 1436–40.) Extracting the wrong tooth. (“The Case of the Wrong […]
Not quite Artificial Intelligence: the mating of junk + mail
The Huffington Post reports another misstep on the road to Artificial Intelligence: “Man Who Tried To Have Sex With Mailbox Found Dead“. (TECHNICAL NOTE: This male-on-mail sex where one participant is alive and the other is not, does not qualify as homosexual necrophilia.) Here’s a medical journal report about a similar, perhaps simpler attempt, 28 years earlier, by […]
A rock, a paper, a scissors, a bunch of lizards
Hannah Fry, in this Numberphile video, tots up the cases of rock-paper-scissors mathematics as applied to lizards: This goes back, more or less, to a sex study published in the year 2000: “Polygyny, mate-guarding, and posthumous fertilization as alternative male mating strategies,” Kelly R. Zamudio and Barry Sinervo, PNAS, 2000 97 (26) 14427-14432. Here’s a photo of rock-paper-scissors/lizards […]