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MEN have long wondered what exactly it is that women want. Some pore over men’s magazines, with their promises of “washboard abs”, for guidance. The more scientifically minded look for experimental data. The latest evidence comes from a group of researchers led by Brian Mautz, then of Australian National University. They gathered 105 heterosexual Australian women and showed them a series of digitally generated pictures of men in which three bodily characteristics were varied—height, shoulder-to-waist ratio and flaccid penis size. The women were asked to rate the men as sexual partners.In an article just published in the Proceedings of the...

Query: HuffPost journalist is doing a story about the concept of sex with aliens. Would like to speak with people who’ve had sex with aliens, UFO experts, biological experts who can discuss the potential problems of mating with a foreign species, psychological experts who have studied the phenomenon.

After almost 40 years of legalized abortions throughout the United States — and longer in states that okayed abortions pre-Roe — the U.S. population has been decimated to the point that the nation is seeing the lowest population growth since the 1930s.Abortion has destroyed not only one generation of Americans but a second as well — people who should be boosting the fertility rate in their childbearing years now who were victims of abortions in the 1970s and 1980s. In total, more than 55 million Americans are been victimized by abortions and millions more were never born because their parents...

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and womb. The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes 40 long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women will always face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies....

CNS News broke the story late last month: At a recent press conference held to discuss the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (a.k.a., “Obamacare”), a reporter asked former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a critical question: “One of the services that health care plans have to offer free of charge [under the HHS mandate] are sterilizations… do you agree with the federal government mandating—” At this point, Congresswoman Pelosi cut the reporter off and responded, “You know what, I told you before, let’s go to church and talk about our religion. Right here we’re talking about public policy as it...

Good grief: A sperm bank is bragging that it set the record of having children born with 40 year-old sperm. From the press release, headlined “World Record Shattered:” Late in August, twin girls were born to a couple who used in vitro fertilization (IVF) to achieve pregnancy. On the surface, this may look like just another of the increasingly common success stories for the IVF industry. But this story has its own unique twist that makes it different from every other IVF pregnancy—the sperm used to fertilize the egg was frozen over 40 years ago, shattering the existing record of...

For nearly seven years, Dale Liuzza raised his son as the caregiving parent in a gay relationship. The boy was conceived through a surrogate, a donor egg and a mixture of sperm from both his dads. "We didn't know or care about the biology," said Liuzza, 31, and a behavioral therapist who works with autistic children in New Orleans. "I pretty much raised him. As far as I was concerned, I carried him." But when the men's relationship fell apart, his partner determined he was the biological father and took the boy out of state to Texas and eventually to...

Human egg cells which have been grown in a lab could be fertilised in a landmark experiment that would completely rewrite the rules of reproduction. Scientists want to secure permission to fertilise the eggs, which have been produced from stem cells, to see whether reproduction this way is possible. Scientists are seeking permission to fertilise lab-grown human eggs Researchers are working towards generating an infinite supply of human eggs which could allow older and infertile women to become mothers, the Independent newspaper reports.Furthermore, some scientists have gone as far as to say the tests could uncover an ‘elixir of youth’...

An embryologist removes frozen embryos from a storage tank at the Smotrich IVF Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., in this 2007 photo. (CNS photo/Sandy Huffaker) In 1978, when doctors introduced Louise Brown, the first “test tube” or in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby, to the world, the international media hailed the event as something just short of the definitive answer to infertility. In Time magazine, Dr. Robert Edwards—one of the brains behind Baby Louise’s birth and the acknowledged godfather of the assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry it spawned—boasted: “This is the first time we’ve solved all the problems at once....

CAD, CNC kit used to knock out wood Attempts to recreate the renowned Stradivarius violin continued this week with boffins proposing an all-new approach using CAT scans and CAD software. After studying the anatomy of several instruments using a computerised axial tomography (CAT) scanner, Mora, Minnesota-based radiologist Steven Sirr managed to get hold of a Stradivarius, borrowed from the US Library of Congress, to scan. Along with two instrument makers, Sirr set about creating replicas of Antonio Stradivari's highly-sought violins. More than 1000 CAT scans were taken of the instrument, all of which were analysed and converted into 3D computer-aided...

Study investigates why Indians with African ancestry were more fertile American Indians with African ancestry outdid 'full bloods' in reproductive terms in the early 1900s, despite the odds being against them, according to a new study by Michael Logan from the University of Tennessee in the US. Their increased fertility occurred at a time when things were not going particularly well for full bloods either - in social, economic and health terms. The work is published online in Springer's journal, Human Ecology. One of the major characteristics of the demographic history of American Indians is interethnic marriage. While the majority...

When he was a cash-strapped college student 20 years ago, Todd Whitehurst didn't think too deeply on the consequences of donating sperm. Then, when he was 41, he got an e-mail from a girl named Virginia. "She said, basically, 'I'm 14, and I think I'm your daughter,' " explained Whitehurst, now a 45-year-old medical engineer. Shortly after, he found a son, Tyler, now 14. And another, Gavin, now 16. That led to another child, and another, and yet another. "It was definitely overwhelming," Whitehurst said. "I'm not even sure how many children there are." So far he has found nine...

The 946 people in the Austrian town of Hallstatt are up in arms at Chinese efforts to replicate their entire village in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. According to der Spiegel, the Chinese government is so enamored of the UNESCO World Heritage site that it has begun a project to build its own brick-by-brick version of the town. The mayor of Hallstatt, Alex Scheutz, found out about the project when he was approached by Chinese architects eager to arrange a partnership between the two villages. "The people are not very impressed with what's happened behind their back," he told...

We can thank Providence that the earthquake was not 150 miles closer to Tokyo, else Japan's dead might number in the millions. Prime Minister Naoto Kan calls it the worst crisis since World War II. Yet, horrendous as it is, it does not, thus far, compare with that. For the earthquake dead are not 1 percent of those who perished in World War II. Between 1942 and 1945, Japan was stripped naked of an empire that embraced Formosa, Korea, Manchuria, the entire China coast, all of French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia), Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia),...

Media billionaire Ted Turner urged world leaders to impose a sort of “cap-and-trade” system for live births in order to reduce the global population. Under the Turner plan, each person would be entitled to participate in procreating one child. This right could be sold or used. “There are just too damn many people,” Turner complained. “Everywhere I go there are crowds of people. A person can’t get any solitude or privacy anymore. We can’t go on like this. We’ve got to put a lid on this thing before it’s too late.” Turner argued that making the procreative right transferable “would...

A prominent Catholic priest wants European Christians to fight off Islam with a unique weapon: babies.Father Piero Gheddo, an Italian missionary priest, said Wednesday he believes a declining birth rate among Europeans combined with a rising tide of Muslim immigrants could mean that Islam will soon dominate Europe."Certainly from a demographic point of view, as it is clear to everyone that Italians are decreasing by 120,000 or 130,000 persons a year because of abortion and broken families; while among the more than 200,000 legal immigrants a year in Italy, more than half are Muslims and Muslim families, which have a...

She was the most famous baby in America after her birth in 1981 following in vitro fertilization. Yesterday, Elizabeth Comeau gave birth to a baby of her own. She shares her story. People have followed my life all my life. I mean, ALL my life. PBS cameras taped my birth, and I attended my first press conference at 3 days old — I yawned through the entire thing. My baby face appeared on the cover of Life magazine, and stories appeared in many newspapers worldwide, including The Boston Globe, where I now work on its website. I don’t have a...

LONDON, May 18, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Researchers are bragging that within the next ten years, in vitro fertilization (IVF) technology will have advanced so far that it will perform "better than nature" and sex will no longer be necessary for human reproduction."We are not quite at that stage yet, but it's where we're heading,' said Dr. John Yovich, co-author of the study, “Embryo culture: can we perform better than Nature?” as quoted in the U.K. Daily Mail. The study was published in the April 2010 issue of the journal Reproductive BioMedicine. “Natural human reproduction is at best a fairly inefficient process,"...

The Alan Guttmacher Institute (AGI) is at it again.For those not familiar with AGI, it is a $30-million-a-year research group based in Washington, D.C., and New York City. Named for Alan Guttmacher, former president of Planned Parenthood, the mission of the organization is to "advance sexual and reproductive health" around the world. This makes sense, since it was founded in 1968 as the research arm of the largest chain of abortion mills in the United States, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which currently carries out more than 300,000 abortions annually.In other words, a person who believes in...

Hundreds of well-bred rabbits took the opportunity to make new acquaintances and reproduce when a roof collapsed at Sweden's premier rabbit show in Nyköping in February. The Local reported at the time that the Nyköping exhibition, 100 kilometres south of Stockholm, had attracted 1,648 rabbits and their owners to the vast indoor tennis complex. When the roof collapsed in the wake of a spate of heavy snowfalls, many of the prize pets found their cages had opened and they were at liberty to roam as they pleased amid the debris. Workers tasked with clearing the fallen roof soon found that...