Reed is quick to point out that there was no monkey business between gorillas and humans. Of course gorillas are apes not monkeys, but this would be a perfect story for Ricky Gervais podcast star Karl Pilkington. “It certainly wouldn’t have to be what many people are going to immediately assume it might have been, and that is sexual intercourse occurring between humans and gorillas,” Reed says, “Instead of something sordid, it could easily have stemmed from an activity that was considerably more tame.”

Reed suggests that 3.3 million years ago, gorilla lice took up residence in the pubic region in our ancestors, this was probably around the same time that evolution took us from a fully hirsute state to our current nakedness. With no hair on our bodies other than the head and pubic regions, the lice would have been hard pushed to linger anywhere else.

People caught pubic lice from gorillas is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

She and her colleagues have demonstrated that using two indicators for the fertile period in a woman’s menstrual cycle and avoiding unprotected sex during that time is just as effective as the contraceptive pill for avoiding unplanned pregnancies. The study was published in Human Reproduction this week.

The symptothermal method (STM) uses temperature and cervical secretion to pinpoint a woman’s fertile time. The German team carried out the largest prospective study of the method yet and found that if couples abstained from unprotected sex during this time the rate of unplanned pregnancies per year was 0.4% and 0.6% respectively. Out of all the 900 women who took part in the study, including those who had unprotected sex during their fertile period, 1.8 per 100 became unintentionally pregnant.

“For a contraceptive method to be rated as highly efficient as the hormonal pill, there should be less than one pregnancy per 100 women per year when the method is used correctly,” Frank-Herrman explains, “The pregnancy rate for women who used the STM method correctly in our study was 0.4%, which can be interpreted as one pregnancy occurring per 250 women per year.”

The authors were also surprised by the relatively low rate of unintended pregnancies (7.5%) among women who had unprotected sex during their fertile period. “If people are trying for pregnancy you expect a pregnancy rate of 28% per cycle,” said Frank-Herrmann. “Therefore, we think that some of the couples were practicing conscious, intelligent risk-taking, and were having no unprotected sex during the few highly fertile days, but had unprotected intercourse on the days at the margins of the fertile time when the risk of pregnancy was lower.”

Natural Family Planning is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

This was the key message that came from research carried out at the Department of Psychology at University College London by Ellie Parker and Adrian Furnham. They publish details in this month’s issue of the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology.

The team also discovered that men recalled the brand of products whose adverts contained sexual images more often than did women, in fact, the women in the study were actively put off by sexual content in advertising.

Is any of this particular surprising? If you’re watching a sexy movie are you going to be concerned with remember which brand carpet shampoo they advertised during the commercial break. More to the point, given the length of the ad slots on TV these days, it’s quite possible that viewers simply get “couply” during the breaks, inspired by the images they saw before the carpet cleaner and dog food came on.

Of course, the actual study didn’t allow for any extra-ad coupling. Instead, 60 university students (30 men and 30 women) aged 18 to 31, mean age 21, were divided into four groups. One group watched an overtly suggestive episode of Sex and The City, with sexy adverts running during the breaks. The second group watched the same episode with non-sexual adverts. The other two groups got to see an episode of “Malcolm in the Middle” which contained no sexual references, with either sexual or non-sexual adverts.

“The fact that recall of adverts was hindered by sexual content in the shows suggests that there is something particularly involving or disturbing about sexual shows. Interestingly this is something that is also found in shows with aggressive content,” says Furnham.

“Sex seems to have a detrimental effect on females recall for an advertisement,” says Parker. “Sex is only a useful advertising tool when selling to men.”

But, couldn’t it simply be that the ads were simply more interesting than Malcolm in the Middle. Now, if it had been an episode of Friends, things would have been entirely different, all sixty volunteers would either have switched off or fallen asleep.

Sex doesn’t sell is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

According to the study side-effects, such as headache and flushing, are common, but not sufficiently adverse as to dissuade users from abandoning the drug.

The Cochrane Review draws data from eight clinical trials (totalling almost 1800 participants) in which 976 men had been given a PDE-5 inhibitor, and 741 a placebo.

“If taken as prescribed and when no contra-indications exist, PDE-5 inhibitors provide a useful option for men with diabetes who suffer from erectile dysfunction,” says report author Moshe Vardi of the Carmel Medical Center, in Haifa, Israel.

You can read the abstract from the report at the Cochrane Library site. For more on the origins of Viagra and the other PDE-5 that followed in its wake, check out the Sciencebase archives.

Sex and diabetes is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

The new drug, Adjudin, is currently in early clinical trials and is a long way from human use. However, the very fact that drug companies are taking a male oral contraceptive seriously suggests a sea change iin attitudes. It’s not ten years ago that I heard Djerassi speak on this very subject and point out how the likelihood of a chemical contraceptive for men would never arrive.

Apparently, Adjudin triggers re-absorption of immature sperm cells so that they never reach the seminal point of no return infamously faced by Woody Allen in his notorious tale of sex. Chuen-yan Cheng of the Population Council’s Center for Biomedical Research in New York has tested the drug on lab rats and found there to be no obvious side effects other than that the males became infertile. Imporantly, the process is entirely temporary and just 20 weeks off the pill gets the sperm fighting fit once more.

Already, the concept of such a contraceptive has those opposed to any form of contraception chomping at the bit and arguing as to whether such a form of contraceptive contravenes religious doctrine or not. When one considers every sperm as sacred, biblically speaking, then are these immature fledgling sperm being “wasted” or not?

Of course, there are much more serious issues to consider, such as sexual health.

Over on Digg, a comment from “mizzack” in response to the CBS News article on this drug announcement goes like this:

Guy: “Hey, wanna go back to my place?”
Girl: “Sure”
[back at the house]
Girl: “Do you have condoms?”
Guy: “Oh, no, don’t need ‘em. I’m on the pill”
Girl: “Riggggggght. Do you have condoms?”

Perhaps even more important than putative problems couples may face in the distant future should this male pill ever reach market is the fact that Cheng’s team previously reported that animal tests had shown Adjudin, to be toxic when given orally, causing liver problems and muscle wasting. Not exactly two happy things to happen to a guy. In the current trial, Adjudin has been conjugated with follicle-stimulating hormone to purportedly preclude such toxicity. It worked but only when the conjugate was administered intravenously.

So, the choice would be muscle wasting, which may or may not reduce your chance of a date, liver damage or regular injections into the belly to keep babies at bay, the need for a hormone adjuvant, and no intrinsic protection from HIV, chlamydia, syphyllis, gonnorhea, and any of several other STDs.

So, perhaps Djerassi was right after all and we may never see a marketable male pill. Caps off to the father of the pill.

Male pill is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

“Comparing sexual arousal between men and women, we see that there is no difference in the amount of time it takes healthy young men and women to reach peak arousal,” says Irv Binik of McGill University Health Centre.

Rather than using manual intervention or genital connections, Binik focused thermographic cameras on his subjects’ genitals while they watched a montage of material from pornography to horror movies to The Best of Mr. Bean to Canadian tourism travelogues to provide a base of control data.

During the arousal experiment, the male and female subjects watched separate sexually explicit films procured from the Kinsey Institute and determined to be sexually arousing to specific genders. They watched the images through special video goggles to minimize distractions.

Binik remotely monitored body-temperature changes to within a 100th of a degree via a computer in a different room. Both the men and the women began showing arousal within 30 seconds. The men reached maximal arousal in about ten minutes, while women took a minute or two longer.

“In any experiment on sexual arousal done in a laboratory, there is some distraction,” concedes Binik. “But compared to previous techniques involving invasive measures or electrodes, this is minimally invasive and the same measurements are used for men and women, which makes it very interesting that the data ended up being the same.”

He says they’re the same, but if women are lagging behind the men by a minute or two in reaching full arousal, that could make all the difference for some couples, surely?

Colleague Tuuli Kukkonen adds that “This will help diagnose and treat sexual dysfunction in women, such as female sexual arousal disorder, which is poorly understood.” Details of the work will appear in the Journal of Sexual Medicine in January 2007.

Women as fast as men, almost is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

According to Greenpeace, these plastic devices can contain “extremely high concentrations of phthalate plasticisers which allegedly pose a risk to human health and the environment”. The organisation wants the European Union to ban the use of phthalates in sex toys as it already has done with phthalates previously used in the manufacturer of PVC childrens’ toys.

The Daily Telegraph reports how, “The environmental group said it was shocked to find that seven of the eight sex toys it had tested contained between 24 and 51 per cent of phthalates.”

Their actual report shows that individual phthalates in a range of products are at at trace amounts. They do report the presence of 490 g per kilo of di-isodecyl phthalate (DIDP) in one device as determined by GC/MS.

There is so much disinformation about phthalates on the web, that it is almost impossible to track down the actual levels of additives used as primary plasticisers in PVC products. I’d assume the percentage needs to be relatively high to make the devices we’re currently discussing “plastic” enough, but 51% seems very high regardless.

Moreover, where are the tests revealing how much of this “shocking” percentage might actually leach out of such a device during normal usage? And, even if there is a degree of leaching, does that correlate with actual risk to health. These questions are yet to be answered for any devices whether sex toys, children’s toys or medical devices.

Any thoughts?

Sex and phthalates is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Mosts chemists get to see some wacky periodic tables during their careers – circular ones, spiral ones, ones that rearrange all the elements etc etc. Then there are the foody ones and then there are the giant periodic tables, the arty farty ones, the online version, the flash table.

And, then there’s the periodic table of sex.

I didn’t think it was real at first, but several sciencebase visitors have been searching for this incredible object during the last few days, so I thought I’d uncover the truth. Apparently, just such a PT exists, its elementary in the most lewd way, but is available from Amazon. Apparently, allposters.com have stopped selling it, so I’d grab one while you can: Periodic table of sex

It’s not every post I get to categorise as chemistry, sex and geek all at the same time, but this one was simply begging for it. I hate to think what good-ole Dmitri Mendeleev would have made of it though, but surely it’d make the perfect gift for the chemistry student in your life. Wouldn’t it?

Periodic Post is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

Plan B is an “emergency” contraceptive, backup birth control, in other words, a form of contraception often referred to as a morning after pill. It comes in the form of two levonorgestrel pills, which are taken orally after unprotected sex. Plan B reduces the risk of pregnancy. Those who oppose it on ideological grounds posit that it is tantamount to an abortion despite the fact that the timescale within which it must be used can be shorter than the time within which conception generally occurs.

More on Plan B from the FDA here. The FDA announced at the end of July that, “It is proceeding to work with [Barr] to resolve the remaining policy issues associated with the marketing of Plan B as an over-the-counter option.”

Will keep you posted on this or you can subscribe for free to FierceBiotech to get the low down.

Plan B contraceptive is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog

A heart drug that went into clinical trials in the 1990s has become the linchpin for efforts to develop a medication to treat female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD), researchers are reporting. An estimated 40 percent of women have FSAD or another form of female sexual dysfunction, the difficulty or inability to find satisfaction in sexual expression.

Compounds that sustain the activity of vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) are a major target of drug research efforts. VIP controls blood flow to the vagina, and decreased blood flow is believed to be one factor in female sexual dysfunction. VIP is degraded in the body by several enzymes, including an enzyme called NEP. Blocking NEP thus allows VIP to continue working.

David Pryde and colleagues at Pfizer in the UK (the company that brought us Viagra) began work with Candoxatril, a powerful NEP inhibitor tested in the 1990s for chronic heart failure. By re-engineering Candoxatril’s molecular structure, they developed a compound with the key actions needed for an FSAD drug.

The new compound blocks NEP, takes effect rapidly, and continues having an effect for a relatively short time. “The compound demonstrates excellent efficacy in a rabbit model of sexual arousal and was expected to be similarly efficacious in humans,” the researchers state in the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. The compound is undergoing clinical evaluation as a potential treatment for FSAD.

A hearty approach to female sexual dysfunction is a post from: Sciencebase Science Blog