Sex in Space (Victorianly), and Listed Cranks, and High-Tech Coffee-Sniffing

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: The Kármán sutra — … The paper is almost Victorian in its voluminous discussion of possible regulatory mechanisms, but nearly complete avoidance of mentioning fornication. The highest moment of titillation comes in the following passage: “The […]

Does the Sex of a Simulated Patient Affect CPR? Where Do Your Hands Go? [research study]

“Does the Sex of a Simulated Patient Affect CPR?” [by Chelsea E. Kramer, Matthew S. Wilkins, Jan M. Davies, Jeff K. Caird, and Gregory M. Hallihan, published in Resuscitation, vol. 86, 2015, pp. 82-87] is a featured study in “Medical Research: Rescuers’ Hands, Ponytail Headache, Elevation for Nursing“, which is a featured article in the special Women […]

Effect of Sex-With-Strangers on Sand Dunes

A new study about erosion might attract more attention than most studies about erosion. It is: “Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the “five S’s.” Characterizing “cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield,” Leví García-Romero, Carolina Pena-Alonso, Patrick A. Hesp, Antonio I. Hernández-Cordero, and Luis Hernández-Calvento, Journal of Environmental Management, […]

“The most viewed medical video in the world” [sex in an MRI]

French medical journalist Marc Gozlan reminds us that the most viewed article in the history of the British Medical Journal led to the creation of what became “The most viewed medical video in the world“. Here is that video: Where did that come from? Here’s the story of how that video came to be, and […]

“MRI Sex: The most viewed article in BMJ”, after 20 years

An editor of the British Medical Journal (The BMJ) told us a few years ago that one particular BMJ paper, published in 1999, has—from the moment that paper was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2000— consistently drawn more web visitors—many, many more—than anything—anything—else published in the history of The BMJ. Everything every […]

The insect sex research adventures of Yoshitaka Kamimura

This insect-sex-reversal-centric profile of 2017 Ig Nobel Biology Prize co-winner Yoshitaka Kamimura appeared a year ago in the Keio Times: Sex-Role Reversal Research in Insects Wins Ig Nobel Prize for Keio Professor Yoshitaka Kamimura …In 2012, Prof. Kamimura was first invited to join a research team led by Kazunori Yoshizawa, an associate professor at Hokkaido […]

Did Bigger Penises Evolve to Protect Hermit Crabs’ Private Property?

Sex, economics, evolution, and stuckness all play roles in this new study about the evolution of larger penises in hermit crabs: “Private parts for private property: evolution of penis size with more valuable, easily stolen shells,” Mark E. Laidre, Royal Society Open Science, epub 2019. (Thanks to Thomas Michel for bringing this to our attention.) […]

Using Smartphone Apps to Find Sexual Partners [research study]

How to use smartphones to pick up sex partners is a problem that’s been studied by scholars. Now, three other scholars have studied those studies. Here’s what they say they found: “Using Smartphone Apps to Find Sexual Partners: A Review of the Literature,” A. Anzani, M. Di Sarno, and A. Prunas [pictured here], Sexologies, vol. […]