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American squeamishness about talking about sex has helped keep common sexually transmitted infections far too common, especially among vulnerable teens, U.S. researchers reported Monday. Latest statistics on chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis show the three highly treatable infections continue to spread in the United States. "Chlamydia and gonorrhea are stable at unacceptably high levels and syphilis is resurgent after almost being eliminated," said John Douglas, director of the division of sexually transmitted diseases at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We have among the highest rates of STDs of any developed country in the world," Douglas added in a...

SCIENTISTS have found that - just like some people - fiddler crabs will exchange favours for sex. Male crabs will protect a female neighbour but do so partly in exchange for sex. Australian National University researchers Richard Milner, Michael Jennions and Patricia Blackwell in a study published in Biology Letters looked at how female crabs - those without the large claw - go about protecting their territories, The Courier-Mail reports. They found sexual offerings lead to neighbourhood coalitions, where a male crab protected females from homeless males seeking territory. The males' giant claw is the largest weapon relative to body...

Rather remarkable ways in which millions of dollars were passed out. no wonder no jobs were created. I thought "shovel ready" meant something.

A panel of legal scholars has suggested that Congress remove sodomy as a crime punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a recommendation that could boost efforts to end a ban on gays serving openly in the U.S. military. The Commission on Military Justice recommended that Article 125, which deals with sodomy, be repealed, arguing that “most acts of consensual sodomy committed by consenting military personnel are not prosecuted, creating a perception that prosecution of this sexual behavior is arbitrary.” In its report — dated October 2009 — the commission suggested several changes be made to the UCMJ, including...

Halloween trends are telling. Just ask Robert Thompson, a pop-culture expert and the founding director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. Here's an interesting trend: Halloween has fast become the second-most-decorated holiday. Jack-o-lanterns and goblins and lighted trees are all over the place now. Halloween spending has risen to nearly $5 billion annually -- not bad for a non-gift-giving, non-government-sanctioned holiday. And more adults than ever are dressing up. "The post-World War II years were the golden age of Halloween for kids," says Thompson, "a trend that continued into the 1980s. But in the...

The secret to sex appeal lies with the tampering of pheromones, creating a "sexual tsunami", according to new research. Scientists at the University of Toronto ... discovered that when the pheromone was removed, it created a "sexual tsunami" where the bugs proved attractive to one another, regardless of sex. The research found that male fruit flies with no history of homosexuality attempted to mate with their pheromone-free males ... Even flies of a different species were interested, according to the research team. "Lacking these chemical signals eliminated barriers to mating," Prof Levine said.

The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practise Islam, a landmark study has claimed. Britain has a total of 1,647,000 Muslims - just 2.7 per cent of the British population, and 0.1 per cent of the global Muslim population, the report claimed. The Pew Forum report also revealed that Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon - or North and South America combined. It claimed that about five per cent of Europe's population practises Islam - and that there are more Muslims living in Asia than in the Middle East....

An Italian scientist says he has reproduced the Shroud of Turin, a feat that he says proves definitively that the linen some Christians revere as Jesus Christ's burial cloth is a medieval fake. The shroud, measuring 14 feet, 4 inches by 3 feet, 7 inches bears the image, eerily reversed like a photographic negative, of a crucified man some believers say is Christ. "We have shown that is possible to reproduce something which has the same characteristics as the Shroud," Luigi Garlaschelli, who is due to illustrate the results at a conference on the para-normal this weekend in northern Italy,...

Millions of women drink alcohol before having sex because they lack confidence in their bodies, a study has found. Almost half of those questioned said they preferred sex while under the influence of alcohol because it helped them to lose their inhibitions and be more adventurous. Researchers, who surveyed 3,000 women aged between 18 and 50, found the average woman has slept with eight men, but was drunk with at least five of them. On two of these occasions they couldn't even remember the man's name the next day. Three quarters of women claimed they felt more able to let...

The power of the imagination is well-known: it's no surprise that scary music is scarier with your eyes closed. But now neuroscientist and psychiatrist Prof. Talma Hendler of Tel Aviv University's Functional Brain Center says that this phenomenon may open the door to a new way of treating people with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and other neurological diseases. In her new study, Prof. Hendler found that the simple act of voluntarily closing one's eyes — instead of listening to music and sounds in the dark — can elicit more intense physical responses in the brain itself. This finding may have therapeutic value...

Civilisation would most likely be finished in the event of a zombie outbreak, claim Canadian mathematicians who have calculated the possible devastation caused by an attack by the fictional monsters. Using models developed to calculate the effects of more plausible pandemics, the team from the University of Ottawa have discovered that unless man struck back quickly and aggressively then they would be doomed. The scientific paper, which is published in a book “Infectious Diseases Modelling Research Progress”, looks at an attack by the undead creatures, who infect the living with a bite. In their study, titled When Zombies Attack!, the...

Researchers found that attractive women have more children than their less attractive counterparts and that a higher proportion of those children are female. Once those daughters become adult they tend to be good looking themselves and so the pattern is repeated as women over the generations become steadily more aesthetically pleasing. As attractive couples are less likely to have boy than a girl, men, in contrast, remain as aesthetically unappealing as their caveman ancestors, the scientists claim. The findings have emerged from a series of studies of physical attractiveness and its links to reproductive success in humans. In a study...

While many on the left are super-sensitive when it comes to any inference of voter disenfranchisement or coercion, their thin skins have emerged when it comes to the ongoing charge of liberal indoctrination in academia, demonstrated by the current rise of all things Obamanation. How else to debunk a conspiracy theory on liberal indoctrination in schools? Try a survey conducted by academics. According to the Associated Press, “The research, to be published later this year in the journal PS: Political Science and Politics, analyzes separate surveys on the attitudes of about 6,800 students at 38 universities and how they changed...

Humans have altered Earth so much that scientists say a new epoch in the planet's geologic history has begun. Say goodbye to the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch and hello to the Anthropocene. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made epoch: Vastly altered sediment erosion and deposition patterns. Major disturbances to the carbon cycle and global temperature. Wholesale changes in biology, from altered flowering times to new migration patterns. Acidification of the ocean, which threatens tiny marine life that forms the bottom of the food chain. The idea, first suggested in 2000 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen, has gained steam...

An individual's body motion and body type can offer subtle cues about their sexual orientation, but casual observers seem better able to read those cues in gay men than in lesbians, according to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. "We already know that men and women are built differently and walk differently from each other and that casual observers use this information as clues in making a range of social judgments," said lead author Kerri Johnson, UCLA assistant professor of communication studies. "Now we've found that casual observers can use gait and body shape to...

Very young children who eat French fries frequently have a much higher risk of breast cancer as adults, U.S. researchers reported Wednesday. A study of American nurses found that one additional serving of fries per week at ages three to five increased breast cancer risk by 27 percent. "Researchers are finding more evidence that diet early in life could play a role in the development of diseases in women later in life," said Dr. Karin Michels, of Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School, who led the study. "This study provides additional evidence that breast cancer may...

This paper was prepared by students from Northwestern University Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. We believe this paper will ultimately be faxed, mailed and e-mailed to several million Americans. For this reason, we have chosen to write in a style and format that is easily understood by readers at all levels. This paper has one aim: To show that ample evidence exists to issue an indictment against former President George Herbert Walker Bush (#41, father of George W. Bush) for the crime of murder in regard to the people who perished in terrorist attacks in the...

Startling Study Says People May Be Born Gay By Amanda Gardner HealthDay Reporter October 6, 2003 3:21 PM (HealthDayNews) -- The origins of sexual orientation may be evident in the blink of an eye. In what is the first study to show an apparent link between a non-learned trait and sexual orientation, British researchers have discovered the way peoples' eyes respond to sudden loud noises may signal differences between heterosexual and homosexual men and women that were developed before birth. The authors, whose study appears in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, say about 4 percent of men and...

MONDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDayNews) -- The origins of sexual orientation may be evident in the blink of an eye. In what is the first study to show an apparent link between a non-learned trait and sexual orientation, British researchers have discovered the way peoples' eyes respond to sudden loud noises may signal differences between heterosexual and homosexual men and women that were developed before birth. The authors, whose study appears in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, say about 4 percent of men and 3 percent of women are gay. Scientists have long sought to determine whether sexuality is learned...

MONDAY, Oct. 6 (HealthDayNews) -- The origins of sexual orientation may be evident in the blink of an eye. In what is the first study to show an apparent link between a non-learned trait and sexual orientation, British researchers have discovered the way peoples' eyes respond to sudden loud noises may signal differences between heterosexual and homosexual men and women that were developed before birth. The authors, whose study appears in the October issue of Behavioral Neuroscience, say about 4 percent of men and 3 percent of women are gay. Scientists have long sought to determine whether sexuality is learned...