Duck Big Bang Inflation Force Measurement Project

This biology project, called “Force of Duck: Measuring explosive erection“, has a fun fundraising video, and (see the text below the video) speaks for itself, eloquently: A duck pond in the breeding season is like a singles bar on steroids — rife with sexual conflict. Males and females pair off, but male ducks also force sex […]

Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimps

The authors of a study called High Frequency of Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimpanzees do not beat about the bush. “We report on postcoital penis cleaning in chimpanzees,” they write. “In penis cleaning, leaves are employed as ‘napkins’ to wipe clean the penis after sex. Alternatively, the same cleaning motion can be done without leaves, simply […]

“Trojan.. hard evidence.. phallometric device”

“Trojan concluded that the only way to obtain hard evidence was to administer a test using a phallometric device.” So reports Jan Puhl in Spiegel Online about a curious story. The article begins: Controversy Surrounds Czech Use of Erection-Measurement Machine Authorities in the Czech Republic have been using a supposed erotic lie detector to test […]

New book: The Penis Shortener

Erwin Kompanje, the AIR European Bureau’s research researcher, who is also a medical ethicist at the Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, is a passionate collector of historical medical books. His collection inspired him to write De Penisverkorter (The Penis Shortener), short stories (in Dutch) about neglected and forgotten remarkable discoveries in medicine. The title […]

Circumcision and the Penis Microbiome

Intrepid Lance B. Price of the Translational Genomics Research Institute, together with colleagues there and elsewhere, looked long and hard at the penis microbiome — both before and after circumcision. Their report is online: “The Effects of Circumcision on the Penis Microbiome,” Lance B. Price, Cindy M. Liu, Kristine E. Johnson, Maliha Aziz, Matthew K. […]