Sex – Page 2 – David Bradley

Tea increases prostate risk, sex and coffee reduce it

UPDATE: Just to be clear, these kinds of studies are often very limited, have many confounding risk factors and cannot “prove” anything. Science and even more specifically, epidemiology, does not prove things, it demonstrates a correlation, often finds causative effects (mostly not), but relies on statistical analysis every time. It would be relatively easy to find a group of prostate cancer sufferers who have never drunk tea, had loads of sex and avoided coffee and “prove” the opposite of what is in the headlines today, i.e. that tea reduces the risk while coffee and sex raise it. Indeed, there have been papers over the years that did just that. There is no definitive answer. If you like tea and sex stick with them, worrying about the risk might lead to cardiovascular problems anyway…

If you’re male and a big tea drinker, then you might have been worried by this week’s news that men who drink a lot of tea are at increased risk of developing prostate cancer. Women needn’t worry about their own health in this regard. I would post the links to the research, but I suspect it would be very easy to pick apart the work and find the flaws in their arguments, not least the fact that they’re inevitably talking relative risk increase and not absolute risk and that the difference is miniscule and could be due to countless other factors, as it almost always is.

Moreover, there have been several reports over the years that are much more palatable that report that sex and orgasm specifically actually lower a guy’s risk of getting prostate cancer. Well, we can live without tea if it really is as hazardous as they claim. It’s all about risk-benefit equations and weighting the balance to that more palatable positive I mentioned…

Actually, just for completeness: Tea research raises risk, coffee research shows a lowering of risk, sex research. But, there was a paper in 2010 widely report on the reduced risk from tea drinking too. So, who knows. Everything in moderation…except maybe that palatable option…

Sexy September

First up is a Wired story that discusses recent research on the female orgasm with twins to see whether there is an enviro-genetic relationship pertaining to female orgasm. The male orgasm (of which there is at least one every 15 seconds, according to an ancient quote from Carl Djerassi) has an obvious evolutionary and practical reason for coming along, evolutionarily speaking. But, the female orgasm? Science isn’t so sure. It’s complicated, often elusive and difficult to pin down in terms of procreation (unless you’ve seen that cervical video that Robert Winston showed on the BBC after the 9 o’clock watershed many years ago) in which case it would seem obvious why it happens. Anyway, these scientists cannot put their finger on it, so we’ll leave them to it.

Second to come along is the revelation that one sperm donor might end up with 150 kids, according to the NYT it happened. The problem is, of course, that if they’re all living in the same town there’s a relatively high risk of inadvertent incest if any of those sons and daughters get together.

Then there’s the inevitable story about size. New research apparently explains the underlying genetic reason why men’s ring fingers are longer than their index fingers and it’s all tied in with exposure to sex hormones during fetal development and supposedly links libido, penis size, sexual orientation and prostate cancer risk to the ratio. CBS has the low down on the down below. However, if those characteristics are all related to one finger being bigger than the other, then how do you explain the fact tht studies show the full range of libido level and penis size across all sexual orientations if the latter is meant to display the opposite finger length ratio?

Finally, the advent and apparent acceptance of internet pr0n is allegedly leading to a growth area in cosmetic surgery for women. According to the BBC, yes good-old Auntie is not averse to discussing such matters, irreversible operations to give women a “designer vagina” on the National Health Service are entirely unwarranted and might even be dangerous. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons says medics need to determine whether a problem exists or whether an alternative solution may be preferable rather than scrubbing up and diving in with a scalpel.

I put this post together to “commemorate” the launch of the .xxx domain names, but no, I’m not registering sciencebase.xxx. Don’t worry, I thought I’d pull together a few of the sexier science stories from around the web. I’m not sure whether you’d ever class them as NSFW (not safe for work), but they are about sex, so keep your finger hovering over the boss button just in case.

Sperm, Discharge, Heroin, and Alzheimers

alkaline-batteries Batteries are included (unfortunately) – A chemical cocktail of toxic gases is released when you burn alkaline batteries, according to the latest research from Spain. The investigating team highlights the issue with respect to municipal waste incineration, which is used as an alternative to landfill and suggests that recycling is perhaps the only environmentally viable alternative.

Today, UK government departments BERR and Defra, in conjunction with the Devolved Administrations,
today published a Consultation Document containing draft Regulations setting out proposed systems for the collection, treatment and recycling of waste portable, industrial and automotive batteries.

Cutting heroin analysis – Analysing samples of street heroin just got easier as researchers have developed a statistical method for removing uninformative signals from their near-infra-red spectra of seized samples.

Sperm and eggs – Scientists in Sweden have determined the precise molecular structure of a protein, ZP3, essential to the interaction of the mammalian egg coat and sperm. The work could eventually lead to improved contraceptives, has implications for fertility studies, and might, in some sense, explain how new species arise.

Untangling Alzheimer molecules – Magnetic resonance spectroscopy provides new clues about how a dipeptide molecule blocks the formation of the toxic amyloid beta-peptide aggregates in the mouse brain. The discovery could put paid to the theory that amyloid beta-peptide causes Alzheimer’s disease and suggest a therapeutic lead that focus on the real culprit at an earlier stage.

Ayurvedic Heavy Metal

Before reading on, and specifically before asking why I’ve used a picture of Buddha in an article about Ayurveda…it’s not Buddha, it’s Nagarjuna, redactor of the Sushruta Samhita a sixth century BCE text on surgery, the only treatise for two of the eight branches of Ayurveda. The snake is part of Nagarjuna and is usually depicted as a protective canopy, I’ve never seen Buddha depicted in that way. Apologies for any confusion, but please no more comments or emails telling me I’ve used an inappropriate photo. I don’t believe I have.

Ayurvedic medicines can contain dangerous quantities of heavy metals, including lead, mercury, thallium and arsenic, clinical toxicologists in London have warned. Writing in the International Journal of Environment and Health, they suggest that recent European legislation aimed at improving safety of shop-bought products will have little impact on medicines prescribed by traditional practitioners, imported personally from overseas or bought over the Internet.

The problem is that the heavy metals are not simply inadvertent contaminants of natural herbal products, they are added deliberately in order to supposedly return the body to health by rebalancing allegedly essential minerals. You can read the full article on this via AlphaGalileo.

There are wide and wild claims for Ayurvedic medicine including the ability to treat diabetes, flue, cancer, asthma, flu, acne, boils, diarrhoea, headaches, and that perennial of the alternative remedy market, sex drive. Unfortunately, Ayurveda, although ancient, is no panacea.

Some practitioners are hoping to modernise the Ayurvedic system. However, until it is more widely recognised among users that adding arsenic, lead, thallium and other potentially toxic heavy metals to so-called medicinal preparations is unacceptable, it will remain a practice more associated with the past than contemporary medicine.

Paul I. Dargan, Indika B. Gawarammana, John R.H. Archer, Ivan M. House, Debbie Shaw, David M. Wood (2008). Heavy metal poisoning from Ayurvedic traditional medicines: an emerging problem? International Journal of Environment and Health, 2 (3/4), 463-474

Spray-on Condoms

condom-spray As a kind of follow-up to my Sex and Social Networking post last week, I thought I’d give a mention to the ludicrous idea of spray-on condoms highlighted, in lurid yellow on Geeks are Sexy this week.

This supposedly original idea of applying Latex in spray-on form looks like an April Fool’s joke. First off, it’s not a new idea, especially given the range of colours the inventor is working with. I have heard of several patent applications for similar approaches to contraception and safer sex over the years, they even get a mention in Ben Elton’s book This Other Eden. The idea is fatally flawed on several fronts.

In the heat of passion, I suspect that producing a laboratory-standard uniform layer with no weak points will be impossible and therefore make the device ineffective. However, entanglement of the material with pubic hair would also be a serious issue at the time of desheathing. It’s bad enough removing a band-aid from a grazed knee, but this has the potential to cause much worse pain.

I assume that the process will be safety tested before it is made commercially available, but there are certain characteristics of an aerosol spray that could not be avoided. Primarily, the sprayer and teh sprayee are liable to be breathing more heavily than usual, to have slightly raised blood pressure, and perhaps be open mouthed. The last thing you would want to be near in such circumstances is close to airborne Latex – think potential inhalation, anaphylactic shock and risk of death.

Such a spray would almost certainly be designed for external use only, and yet the organ destined to be coated not only has delicate surface tissues, but an aperture through which particles and carrier solvent might enter. Penile contact dermatitis anyone? Didn’t think so!

And, speaking of solvents, presumably there will be a carrier solvent in which the Latex will be suspended and transported from spraycan to the surface to be coated. The phrase latent heat of evaporation comes to mind and its attendant rapid chilling effect, so there is also potential for frost-bite or at best stinging pain.

There is perhaps one advantage not noted for this approach to condom application, which may benefit some and that is to do with the issue of size becoming irrelevant…no need to distinguish big, large, or extra large, unless, of course, you run out of spray attempting to get 100% coverage.

One more issue. As you can see from the photo of the inventor creating a condom-shaped mess, the process of applying a spray-on condom does not look like a particularly neat and tidy one. If you have ever had difficulty explaining lipstick on your collar, then you will definitely struggle to explain a lurid yellow smear of rubber on your underwear. It almost makes abstinence seem like a viable option.

Sex and Social Networking

Ultimately, the only truly safe sex is that practised alone or not practiced at all, oh, and perhaps cybersex. However, that said, even these have issues associated with eyesight compromise (allegedly), repetitive strain injury (RSI) and even electrocution in extreme cases of online interactions (you could spill your Mountain Dew on your laptop, after all). And, of course, there are popups, Trojans, packet sniffers and viruses and worms to consider…

No matter how realistic the graphics become in Second Life or how good the 3rd party applications in Facebook, however, unless you indulge in direct human to human contact in the offline world, you are not going to catch a sexually transmitted disease, STD. Real-world social networking is, of course, a very real risk factor for STD transmission, according to a new research report in the International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalised Medicine. This could be especially so given the concept of ~~six~~ five-degrees of separation through which links between individuals are networked by ever short person-to-person-to-person bonds.

According to Courtney Corley and Armin Mikler of the Computational Epidemiology Research Laboratory, at the University of North Texas, computer scientist Diane Cook of Washington State University, in Pullman, and biostatistician Karan Singh of the University of North Texas Health Science Center, in Fort Worth, sexually transmitted diseases and infections are, by definition, transferred among intimate social networks.

They point out that although the way in which various social settings are formed varies considerably between different groups in different places, crucial to the emergence of sexual relationships is obviously a high level of intimacy. They explain that for this reason, modelling the spread of STDs so that medical workers and researchers can better understand, treat and prevent them must be underpinned by social network simulation.

Sexually transmitted diseases and infections are a significant and increasing threat among both developed and developing countries around the world, causing varying degrees of mortality and morbidity in all populations.

Other research has revealed that approximately one in four teens in the United States will contract a sexually transmitted disease (STD) because they fail to use condoms consistently and routinely. The reasons why are well known it seems – partner disapproval and concerns of reduced sexual pleasure.

As such, professionals within the public health industry must be responsible for properly and effectively funding resources, based on predictive models so that STDs can be tamed. If they are not, Corley and colleagues suggest, preventable and curable STDs will ultimately become endemic within the general population.

The team has now developed the Dynamic Social Network of Intimate Contacts (DynSNIC). This program is a simulator that embodies the intimate dynamic and evolving social networks related to the transmission of STDs. They suggest that health professionals will be able to use DynSNIC to develop public health policies and strategies for limiting the spread of STDs, through educational and awareness campaigns.

As a footnote to this research, it occurred to me that researchers must spend an awful lot of time contriving acronyms and abbreviations for their research projects. Take Atlas, one of the experimental setups at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva Switzerland. Atlas stands for – “A Toroidal LHC ApparatuS”. So they used an abbreviation within their acronym as well as a noise word – “A” and the last letter of one of the terms. Ludicrous.

But, Atlas is not nearly as silly as the DynSNIC acronym used in Corley’s paper, I’m afraid. Dynamic Social Network of Intimate Contacts, indeed! I thought the whole idea of abbreviating a long research project title was to make it easier to remember and say out lead. DynSNIC, hardly memorable (I is it a y or an I, snic or snick or sink or what. Students will forever struggle with such contrivances. They could’ve just as easily used something like Sexually Transmitted Infections Contact Social Intimate Networks – STICSIN. This would be a double-edged sword that would appeal to both to the religious right and to the scabrous-minded, depending where you put the break (after the Contact or after Social.

Courtney D. Corley, Armin R. Mikler, Diane J. Cook, Karan P. Singh (2008). Dynamic intimate contact social networks and epidemic interventions International Journal of Functional Informatics and Personalised Medicine, 1 (2), 171-188

Sex and Sin and Some Science

Lingerie shopping Porn star names originally posted in August 2005, this was something of a joke post about how porn star names have become almost the post-modern equivalent of a person’s astrological star sign, and a whole lot more scientifically valid, if you ask me, with names like Lucky Cocker and Goldie Black common. That’s despite first appearing almost three years ago, this post has had almost 14,000 readers so far in 2008 alone and that figure does not include anyone who read the post on any of the hundreds of sites that syndicate (legit) or scrape (exploitative) Sciencebase content.

Seven deadly sins With this year’s pronouncements from a certain central office in Rome, was it, this post about the so-called seven deadly sins, originally posted in February 2007 has garnered renewed interest from more than 8000 readers in 2008, not counting those who read it purely in the fulltext RSS newsfeed rather than visiting the site. A follow-up post entitled Seven Deadly Sins for Scientists also did very well at the time with a burst of 2000+ readers.

Anandamide cannabinoid This post has had more than 7000 readers this year. I cannot imagine what they’re hoping to find, but given it’s a spoof Beavis and Butthead style script together with a great cartoon about dope, cannabis, weed, skunk, call it what you will, I guess that might have something to do with its popularity.

Viagra sildenafil citrate They do say that almost every pub conversation will eventually boil down to talk of sh*t or sex, well the same goes for blogs, I guess and this post is no exception grabbing the attention of almost 4000 of you so far this year.

Obesity gene A perennial discussion topic on any sci-tech-med-health blog is inevitably going to be the issue of overweight and obesity, especially if scientists have brought up the subject of a genetic excuse, and this post from April 2007, with its Barbie girl photo has caught the eye of about 3500 readers from jan to May 2008

A billion light years from home Finally, another blockbuster this one with 10,000 readers since its ascendance on New Year’s Day 2008 (no, I wasn’t blogging then, it was a post scheduled prior to the break) does rather suggest that Sciencebase readers are not only interested in sex, obesity, pornstar names, sins, and cannabis, but also quite like a bit of astronomy too.

Sciencebase Seedier Side

Censored elephant

Anyone would think Sciencebase resided in one of the seedier corners of the internet. Because of all the recent fuss about the new seven deadly sins, I was just checking out the visitor traffic using Google Webmaster Tools and found some quite worrying search queries that bring you, dear readers, to this cybershore.

Apparently, 4% of the searches on Google Images this week brought you looking for the periodic table of sex!

Well, I have to admit, there is a thumbnail graphic of said item on the site, mentioned in a post Periodic Post, from August 2006. And, Sciencebase ranks #7 in Google for that phrase, so it’s perhaps not surprising. Slightly more worrying is what people were searching for who reached my post Giving Good Headline, which was about the subject of press releases and the best approach to headline writing. Then there are the dozens of visitors looking for Girly Games who found my article on the psychology of video game addiction and how it apparently differs between males and females.

I’m loathe to list some of the other terms people are searching for on Google Images for that brings them to Sciencebase, oh go on then, you twisted my arm: erectile dysfunction, premature ejaculation, seven deadly sins, erotic, and several I’d blush even to type.

Now, Sciencebase, for one reason or another (and it’s not because, it’s that kind of site) somehow ranks quite highly for several of those terms. However, there are a few others that bring visitors to the site for which the site ranks way, way down the search engine results pages (SERPs), and I don’t just mean the bottom of page 1, or page 2 even, I mean bottom of page 73. Now, that reveals true search diligence, I’d suggest. Whoever works their way through 72 pages of results to get to that one item?

Most visitors are not after smut, thankfully, they’re after the site’s hard-hitting science news and views with a cynical bite. Unfortunately, as I was writing this post, I realised that posting it in its original form was unlikely to reduce the tide of filth, in fact it might simply encourage more of those seedier searches, so I’ve removed a few of the less choice keywords, just to make it safe for work and to prevent the site from getting slapped with an adult-filtering ban.

Afters I’d put the finishing touches to this piece, I checked the site’s top searches in GWMT again, just to see if there had been any additional phrases of interest. I discovered that Sciencebase is now ranking for “polar bears willie soon” in blog searching. Asa search phrase that has to be pretty unique. I assumed it was from someone in the UK urgently tracking down Arctic bestiality sites, or Inuit innuendo, until I realised it’s actually two phrases – Polar Bears (the Arctic beast in question) and Willie Soon (the climate change skeptic) – both of which I mentioned in my CO2 refusenik post recently. It seems that Sciencebase is not quite the quagmire of filth some of the site’s visitors had hoped after all.

Male Semen is Redundant

Male sperm

You’ve seen the kind of thing: “Warehouse Razed to the Ground in Fire”, as if razing didn’t already mean the building was levelled. Worse, “Balloon Ascends Up into the Air”, ascending down is very difficult, simultaneously, at the same time, if not impossible; so too is descending up.

However, the award for the most redundantly tautological headline of the year has to go to Scientific American for Male Semen Makes HIV More Potent, that’s male semen as opposed to the female variety, is it? It’s an important discovery, nevertheless that a chemical constituent of semen affects the immune system facilitating viral infection.

Scientific American is probably not the first and original nor the ultimate and last publication to use this phrase though. DoctorNDTV ran a story with the title: Male semen loss concerns and risky sexual behaviour. Then there’s a research paper in the Journal of Avian Biology that discusses bacteria found in the “male semen” of red-winged blackbirds. Even the venerable and well-respected New Scientist recently published an item on insect courtship and egg laying. Apparently, the trigger for egg laying “is a small protein called sex peptide (SP) in the male’s semen.” Again, the word male, while perhaps making the sentence smoother, is totally redundant and not needed.

A search for the phrase “male semen” on PubMed produced not hits, although “male sperm” came up several times in various journals. So as not to appear sexist, I also did the equivalent searches for “female semen” and “female sperm” and quite surprisingly got several PubMed hits. One paper on mythology mentions how at one time in human history a godly being or other supernatural entity was thought to intervene in the merging of male and female semen to bring about conception. Not quite a modern biomedical reference point, then. The phrase “female sperm” gave absolutely no hits, unsurprisingly.

Maybe the clue as to why these various publications qualify the word semen lies in those papers discussing the mythology of reproduction. A quick Google shows that there are many references to religious and proto-religious texts that discuss both male and female semen as if they were both real. Perhaps by qualifying semen as male in modern writing, rather than simply discussing semen, there is some referential nod to humanity’s misconstrued understanding of reproduction. But, modern understanding of reproductive biology defines semen as a product of the male reproductive organs that acts as a transport medium for sperm, so, like I said, it’s redundant.

I asked linguistic guru Steven Pinker of Harvard University, whose book The Stuff of Thought I reviewed on Sciencebase recently, about this apparent paradox. Pinker told me that he suspects that, “the cause is not a nod to the ancients, but a desire to call the reader’s attention to the fact that it’s
the naturally occurring fluid that encourages the potency of the virus, not some externally administered product.

“Semen Makes HIV More Potent implies to me,” he said, “that adding semen increases the potency, rather than that the HIV exploits the properties of the semen it finds itself in.” He adds that it is peculiar that this may be the case. “Odd that the redundancy should do that,” he told me, “but somehow I think it does.”

Intriguingly, after I contacted Pinker, I saw that the journal Nature, as opposed to the popular science magazine, Scientific American, had covered the same story. In Nature, however, their piece was entitled – Semen boosts HIV transmission. So, for some reason they felt semen does not need a masculine qualification of any kind. The tautology of the phrase “male semen” may seem trivial, but it is an important issue.

People caught pubic lice from gorillas

Gorilla No, it’s not some kind of deviant gorillas in the mist story, apparently, millions of years ago our ancestors picked up pubic lice (crabs) either by sleeping in gorilla nests (without the gorilla) or through eating our silver-backed cousins. David Reed and colleagues at the University of Florida publish details of their findings today in BMC Biology journal.

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.