27
POPSSex, lies and some existential questions.. :-) So many orchids treat their pollinators so nastily, with false promises of food and sex or the occasional dunking of insect visitors into bucket-shaped petals full of liquid, that naturalists have puzzled over the relationship for more than a century. Darwin was so consumed by the odd interactions that after “The Origin of Species,” his next book was an entire volume on the subject, “The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects.”
23
POPS20 Things You Didn't Know About Sex
6 Barbary macaques have a distinctive way to get their mates to make a sperm donation: yelling. If the female does not shout, the male almost never climaxes. 7 How do we know this? German primatologist Dana Pfefferle watched a group of macaques, counting the females’ yells and the males’ pelvic thrusts. She says this work is “quite weird, but it’s science.” 8 Here in the US of A, that kind of stuff ends up on YouTube. 9 Because Barry White sounds terrible underwater: Fish can produce a variety of noises with their bones, teeth, and gas bladders. Grant Gilmore of Estuarine Coastal and Ocean Science Inc. says that male fish probably use some of these sounds to woo females. 10 The spiny anteater, an egg-laying mammal native to Australia and New Guinea, has a penis with four heads, but only two fit into the female at once. 11 The tiny male paper nautilus, an octopus, impregnates the much larger female by shooting his penis (a modified tentacle) into her—and leaving it there.
21
POPSSimple reason helps males evolve more quickly “There’s a health aspect in figuring out differences in gene expression between the sexes,” said Wayne. “To make a male or a female, even in a fly, it’s all about turning things on -- either in different places or different amounts or at different times -- because we all basically have the same starting set of genes.”
21
POPSRape in Ireland: Females at fault!!! I'm very disappointed in the attitude still about rape in Ireland. Even more surprised that other females blame the victim equally with the males. So don't expect sympathy from your sisters. The one ray of sunshine is that the younger the questioned, the more sympathetic the answer. Older people always find it harder to understand the dress of the young. They forget the 60's when we wore even less or none.
18
POPSAll-girl fish that hasn't had sex for 70,000 years According to the report in the BMC Evolutionary Biology journal, one theory is that the fish may occasionally be taking some of the DNA from the males that trigger reproduction, in order to refresh their gene pool. Dr Laurence Loewe, of the university's School of Biological Sciences, said: "What we have shown now is that this fish really has something special going on and that some special tricks exist to help this fish survive. "Maybe there is still occasional sex with strangers that keeps the species alive. Future research may give us some answers."
16
POPS"Cynical Shyness": Violence of the Loner Don't know anything about this idea, but certainly would make sense if factored in with other markers of social inadequacy and emotional furnaces such as repressed homosexuality, sexual and social powerlessnes and so on. While the research is on the horrifying instances of killers, I wonder whether the "cynically shy" isolated loner is common to a less extreme defree degree in 'everyday' manifestations of hatred, malevolence, violent language and despair>