Though it’s been hinted at anecdotally for years, there’s starting to be more and more sound science and academic agreement behind the idea that semen acts as a natural anti-depressant for women. The first, and still most comprehensive, study to test the hypothesis was performed in 2002 at SUNY and found that not only did women who always had unprotected sex have significantly lower levels of depression than those who used condoms, but that there was no difference in levels of depression between women who had protected sex and women who didn’t have sex at all, discounting sex itself as the reason for the boost in happiness:
“Seminal plasma evolved to control and manipulate the female reproductive system so as to work toward the best interests of the donor — the male,” Gordon Gallup, Jr., an evolutionary psychologist at SUNY Albany and lead author of the study explains. “If you begin to think about semen in those terms, then the fact that semen might have antidepressant properties becomes a lot more interesting in that it may promote bonding between the female and her sexual partner.” Such bonding, Gallup says, could increase the male’s chances of developing a long-term reproductive relationship with a female that would work to his reproductive advantage. Semen is a complex mixture of different compounds, and sperm actually only makes up a small amount of it. When you remove the sperm, what’s left is seminal plasma, a fluid that contains an array of ingredients, some of which can pass through the vagina and be detected in the bloodstream after sex. Three compounds of interest in seminal plasma are estrogen, prostaglandins and oxytocin. Estrogen and prostaglandins have been linked to lower levels of depression, while oxytocin (which women release during birth, breastfeeding and orgasm) promotes social bonding. These and other compounds in semen could function to keep women coming back for more. “I think there’s reason to believe based on some of the evidence we’ve collected that females that are in committed relationships that are having unprotected sex may use sex in part to self-medicate,” Gallup says. “It’s discovered after the fact that being inseminated has effects on mood, and they use sex to modulate their mood.”
There was also evidence that women who had unprotected sex with their partners suffered from “semen withdrawls” after ending a relationship and were “far more devastated and adversely affected [after a breakup] than those that were using condoms.”. And here all these years I thought it was just because they missed me…
After many years of convincing men otherwise, scientists are now claiming that size does indeed matter. However, it’s not the size of your cock (phew!), or even the size of your balls that scientists say matter (besides your chances of being able to star in porn) but rather your anogenital distance (AGD) better known as your taint, that spot between your balls and your ass. According to a new study, the length of a man’s AGD is directly correlated to his fertility:
Men whose AGD is shorter than the median length — around 2 inches (52 mm) — have seven times the chance of being sub-fertile as those with a longer AGD, according to a study published on Friday in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.
That distance, measured from the anus to the underside of the scrotum, is linked to male fertility, including semen volume and sperm count, the study found. The shorter the AGD, the more likely a man was to have a low sperm count.
This offers the prospect of a relatively simple screening test for men, said study co-author Shanna Swan of the University of Rochester Medical Center.
“It’s non-invasive and anybody can do it, and it’s not sensitive to the kinds of things that sperm count is sensitive to, like stress or whether you have a cold or whether it’s hot out,” Swan said in a telephone interview.
I’m not exactly sure what kind of operation Dr. Swan is running out there, but I’m not really down with letting just “anybody” measure my taint. However, if you think I’m not busting out the ruler and the hand mirror as soon as I get home tonight, you’re dead wrong. Daddy needs to know how the swim team ranks!
PROTIP: Never EVER google image search for any of the things mentioned in this post. The procurement of our friendly, only semi-NSFW anthropomorphized radish above came at the expense of a great deal of my innocence. See, the things I sacrifice for you? For the greater good?
by daniel on February 18, 2011
It’s pretty much a given that wherever you go in the world, people are getting wasted. Even Amazon tribes and Mongolian herdsmen know how to get on gurp. Alcohol is, in fact, the world’s leading cause of death among men 15-59. Good job alcohol! However, when it comes to getting drunk, not all countries are created equal. Patriots of every nation like to think that they, and their countrymen, can outdrink those of any other nationality. Fortunately, the World Health Organization has decided to settle it once and for all: the recently released the results of their study of worldwide alcohol consumption, which as you can see in the above graphic, breaks down annual alcohol consumption by country. The winner? Good old Moldova! The land of packages that mysteriously vanish, probably because the mailmen are enjoying their share of the almost 5 gallons of booze drank per capita by each Moldovan every year. The study also broke down each country into the alcohol most preferred by that country’s imbibers. Most of both South and North America of course, drinks beer (shown in Purple in the graph below), while in the hard drinking Scandinavian, Russian and Baltic countries the quaint sounding “spirits” aka booze, (shown below in Orange) was the drink of choice. Whatever you decide to drink, just know that the world drinks with you, my friend. Now who wants to spend Spring Break in Moldova bro?!
by daniel on February 14, 2011
If your plans for Valentine’s Day include taking a couple bong loads before bedding your old lady, you might want to think twice. Or think once, as the case may be. A new review reported in the most recent Journal of Sexual Medicine found that not only does the active ingredient in marijuana, THC, get absorbed directly into the penis, causing erectile dysfunction and fewer erections, but that men who smoke weed have a higher risk of “inhibited orgasms and pain during sex.” Uhhhh…
Researchers found receptors for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in marijuana, in penis tissue from five male patients and six rhesus monkeys. These receptors were mainly in the smooth muscle of the penis, Shamloul said. Additional lab studies suggest that THC has an inhibitory effect on the muscle. “This is a more serious effect on the erectile function because the smooth muscle makes up 70 percent to 80 percent of the penis itself.”
People tend to focus on the possible upsides of marijuana more than the possible downsides, said Sharon Johnson, a professor of social work at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, who has studied marijuana use and sexual health in the past. Her study, published in 2004 in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that marijuana users have a slightly elevated risk of inhibited orgasms and pain during sex.
The study also discounted previous studies in which marijuana users reported that using the drug actually enhanced their sex life, proposing that the respondents “may just have been experiencing the drug’s altering effects on the perception of time.” Kind of like how when you’re stoned, Totino’s frozen pizzas seem like delicacies, or Aqua Teen Hunger Force seems like the greatest television show ever. I guess as long as you’re both super baked it wouldn’t really matter. Maybe sprinkle some Viagra on top , you know, get creative. Or you could just stop sucking on that glass dick and give your woman a good old-fashioned horsefuck for once. Now that’s romance.
by daniel on February 10, 2011
For those who’ve someone remained impervious to the idea that Diet Soda is not only just as bad for you as real soda, but possibly worse (“but theres NO SUGAR OR CALORIES IN IT!!!1″) a the results of a comprehensive new study might be the straw that breaks the diet soda camel’s back. The study followed over 2500 New Yorkers and found that those who drank a daily diet soda had a 61% higher risk of a “vascular event” including heart attacks and strokes, even after accounting for other lifestyle and dietary factors:
For the new study, researchers surveyed 2,564 north Manhattan residents about their eating behaviors, exercise habits, as well as cigarette and alcohol consumption. The study volunteers were also given physical check-ups that included blood pressure measurements and blood tests for cholesterol and other factors that might affect the risk for heart attack and stroke.
The increased likelihood of vascular events remained even after Gardener and her colleagues accounted for risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol levels. Pointing the finger more squarely at diet drinks, the researchers found no increased risk among people who drank regular soda.
You mean you can’t just take out all the naturally delicious parts of soda and replace them with a bunch of chemicals and live happily ever after? Who’da thunk it??! Anyways, that picture pretty much sums it up. There’s this thing called water. It’s free and actually good for you. Unless you want it brought to you on a boat from Fiji then its like $5, and horrible for the environment. See, we can fuck pretty much anything up these days. Bud Light Lime? I rest my case.
It seems like human nature, especially when you’re particularly bummin’ out or failing ultra hard at life, to look at those around you and assume they all live awesome, joy filled, perfect lives, thus amplifying your personal feelings of sadness, failure, isolation, etc. And a study of college students by a Stanford PhD candidate postulates that Facebook, by virtue of people’s carefully crafted online image of themselves, is amplifying this natural tendency:
Jordan and his fellow researchers asked 80 freshmen to report whether they or their peers had recently experienced various negative and positive emotional events. Time and again, the subjects underestimated how many negative experiences (“had a distressing fight,” “felt sad because they missed people”) their peers were having. They also overestimated how much fun (“going out with friends,” “attending parties”) these same peers were having. In another study, the researchers found a sample of 140 Stanford students unable to accurately gauge others’ happiness even when they were evaluating the moods of people they were close to—friends, roommates and people they were dating. And in a third study, the researchers found that the more students underestimated others’ negative emotions, the more they tended to report feeling lonely and brooding over their own miseries. This is correlation, not causation, mind you; it could be that those subjects who started out feeling worse imagined that everyone else was getting along just fine, not the other way around. But the notion that feeling alone in your day-to-day suffering might increase that suffering certainly makes intuitive sense.
As does the idea that Facebook might aggravate this tendency. Facebook is, after all, characterized by the very public curation of one’s assets in the form of friends, photos, biographical data, accomplishments, pithy observations, even the books we say we like. Look, we have baked beautiful cookies. We are playing with a new puppy. We are smiling in pictures (or, if we are moody, we are artfully moody.) Blandness will not do, and with some exceptions, sad stuff doesn’t make the cut, either. The site’s very design—the presence of a “Like” button, without a corresponding “Hate” button—reinforces a kind of upbeat spin doctoring.
The moral of the story: your friends are all just as miserable as you. Except me, of course. My life is non-stop awesome. But as far as everyone else: don’t believe the hype.
A new study, appearing in medical journal The Lancet, ranks alcohol as the most harmful drug, above such crowd favorites as heroin, crack, cocaine, meth and weed:
The study involved 16 criteria, including a drug’s affects on users’ physical and mental health, social harms including crime, “family adversities” and environmental damage, economic costs and “international damage”. The modelling exercise concluded that heroin, crack and methylamphetamine, also known as crystal meth, were the most harmful drugs to individuals, but alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the most harmful to society. When the scores for both types of harm were added together, alcohol emerged as the most harmful drug, followed by heroin and crack.
So we get that alcohol, heroin, meth are bad for everyone. But does this mean we can do steroids and shrooms and still be pillars of the community? It didn’t really work out so well for this guy. But who knows, maybe in the future, alcohol will be on the outs and bars will just serve LSD and Ketamine. You can call up your buddies after work, like “Hey man, wanna meet me out for a couple doses later?” I’m sure people would be a lot less boring. And bar bands would be a LOT more interesting. Maybe the future wont be so bad after all…
A recent study of American and German workers which showed, to absolutely not a single damn person’s surprise, that skinny girls make more than fat girls, also showed, somewhat more surprisingly that thin men make substantially less than their huskier peers. In fact, even men considered overweight continue to earn more per pound than their lighter friends up until the level of “obesity” at which point the trend reverses. The study found the ideal weight for baller status was 207 pounds:
The study is the first look at the effects of being very thin on men vs. women. Separate studies of 11,253 Germans and 12,686 U.S. residents led by Timothy A. Judge of the University of Florida found very thin women, weighing 25 pounds less than the group norm, earned an average $15,572 a year more than women of normal weight. Women continued to experience a pay penalty as their weight increased above average levels, although a smaller one — presumably because they had already violated social norms for the ideal female appearance. A woman who gained 25 pounds above the average weight earned an average $13,847 less than an average-weight female.Men were also penalized for violating stereotypes about ideal male appearance, but in a different way. Thin guys earned $8,437 less than average-weight men. But they were consistently rewarded for getting heavier, a trend that tapered off only when their weight hit the obese level. In one study, the highest pay point, on average, was reached for guys who weighed a strapping 207 pounds.
One theory is that people who care enough about what other people think about them to conform to the pervading “standard” of appearance are probably better workers in general. Another theory could be that since most bosses and CEOs are old dudes, they promote all the skinny, attractive girls, and the average looking guys less likely to bang all the hot girls. Guess the real losers here and the skinny guys with overweight wives. Bummer.
by daniel on September 15, 2010
A new report in leading science journal PLoS ONE concludes that popular people get the flu on average of two weeks before the rest of the public, and probably like MONTHS before total losers get it:
The popular pay a price: they get flu first, on average two weeks sooner than most others, two experts report in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS ONE. ”Being at the center of the network tends to make you happy but it also exposes you to disease,” James Fowler of the University of California, San Diego, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
Other than just feeling redemption about their nerdy teen years, the studies authors conducted the study to explore possible uses of the so-called “friendship paradox” to more accurately track the spread of disease:
Fowler and Nicholas Christakis of Harvard University in Massachusetts said the so-called friendship paradox could be important to working out how a flu pandemic or some other nasty virus is likely to behave. ”This would allow an earlier, more vigorous, and more effective response,” Christakis said in a statement.
This is how the friendship paradox works. If a person is asked to name a friend, that friend is statistically likely to be more popular than the original individual.That is because if people are asked to name a friend or two, they are more likely to choose someone who connects them to others, Fowler says. An example is a party, where most guests would name the host as a friend as opposed to the wallflowers at the fringes of the gathering.
“Our method goes and picks people at random and then we ask them who their friends are and then we study the friends,” Fowler said.
“We studied the H1N1 pandemic last fall in a small group of students. This friend group — they got the flu about two weeks earlier than the other groups.”
Bummer bro! Other side effects of popularity include: getting laid a lot, being super stoked all the time, people buying you drinks at bars and getting lots of comments on your Facebook pictures. Totally not worth it.
