Ducks are known for their bizarre penises, stretching up to 20cm in size in an anti-clockwise spiral. That's an impressive organ for a bird often only 60cm long. The females, on the other hand, have vaginas that spiral clockwise, opposite to their menfolk. Ducks also engage in what is politely termed "forced copulation", where the male ducks attempt non-consensual sex with the female, and explosively extend their penises with a technique that takes less than half a second.

Eversion in air: from blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.

This forceful mating is something the females try to avoid. Luckily, evolution is on their side. Female ducks have evolved vaginas that spiral clockwise, and contain sharp turns, which scientists believe were used to prevent insemination by unwanted suitors. This theory has finally been tested by enterprising researchers at Yale, with too much time and glassware on their hands. With sets of cylindrical glass tubes shaped into clockwise or anti-clockwise spirals, they tested how easily the penis advanced through various vaginal configurations. The clockwise vaginas managed to stop the intruding organ, protecting the female duck form unwanted advances.

In fact, the majority of forced copulations don't result in fertilization, and it appears the two sexes are involved in an arms race over their genitalia, with males evolving new attacks and the females defences. The twisted vaginas can completely stop the penis from its explosive exertion, preventing unwanted genes from being passed on. This helps stop undesired advances, and lets females retain control over who will reproduce successfully with them.

It may not be a vagina dentata, but it's a close approximation.

[via Yale]

Today PLoS Biology published a study of fruitflies, a species where the male flies show a marked preference for mating with larger females because they are more fecund. The problem is that the males show such aggressive preferences that they basically badger the females constantly to mate. What this means is that the females are so harried that they have less time to search for food, which degrades their health. Also, among fruitflies, the mating process is itself damaging to the health of the females - fruitfly sperm is toxic.

As a result, the most-desired females become far less capable of generating healthy offspring. And the smaller, less fit females wind up bearing as many offspring as the fitter ones. In the end, the males' aggressive mating with the fittest females ends up preventing their species from evolving into a much fitter group.

Tristan A. F. Long, one of the authors of the study, said:

These larger females are disproportionately harassed and harmed, by males attempting to obtain matings. When these males are ‘choosy' with their courtship, there may be negative consequences to the species' ability to adaptively evolve.

What's interesting about this study is that it's one of the few to point out how male mate choice affects evolution of a species. Usually female mate choice is emphasized, except in species where females are dominant. Here we can see clearly that male mate choice is having a profound and not very salutary affect on the future of fruitfly fitness. The issue here is obviously not attractiveness, but instead the kind of fitness associated with being larger and more fecund. If larger, "attractive" females are harrassed into reproductive uselessness by the males, then any traits they possess that make them healthier (a trait for metabolic efficiency, for instance) won't be able to spread through the population as quickly as it might if males chose mates randomly.

via PLoS Biology

National Geographic photographer Martin Oeggerli took a series of gorgeous, and (oddly) recognizably sexual photographs of pollen in action. In this gallery - and many other photographs of his in the National Geographic gallery - you can see how the plant sexual cycle works. From feather-borne pollen to a piece of pollen that is growing a sperm injector, every kind of flower smut is represented.

You can see more of Oeggerli's work on his website.

via National Geographic (thanks, Marilyn Terrell!)

Geranium
Flowering quince
Forget Me Not
Indian mallow - this pollen shape is designed to stick to bird wings.
Pine
Snowball blossom - pollen has fallen into the stigma of another snowball blossom, and the pollen is swelling with water. One pollen grain is growing a tube that can inject sperm into the flower.
Willow - this piece of pollen will die, because it got trapped between two petals before pollenating anything.

A group of researchers in the United States decided to do an experiment with water striders, in which they observed the mating success of prudent, "nice" males versus aggressive, "psychopathic" males. The latter group tried often to mate with the females very aggressively, and in previous experiments they had the most reproductive success. But these scientists discovered that the success of the psychopaths depended on very specific laboratory conditions

It turned out that other studies of sex among water striders had kept the population contained in a limited area, where females had access to very few males. When the researchers opened up the insects' habitat, allowing the females to roam freely, they discovered that the less aggressive males attracted the highest number of mates.

According to a release about the research, published yesterday afternoon in Science:

"The presence of psychopaths dramatically reduced the productivity of the population," [biologist David Sloan] Wilson said. "When all the males were gentlemen, the females laid about three times more eggs than they did when all the males were psychopaths. And yet within each group the psychopaths were doing better than the gentlemen. How do the gentlemen persist if they're disadvantaged within the group?"

Once the females could move between groups, the researchers had their answer. [Researcher Omar Tonsi] Eldakar and Michael J. Dlugos, then also a Binghamton graduate student, devised a wading pool equipped with special doors that could restrict movement between groups or allow the insects to move freely.

"When they opened the doors, the females would leave whenever a psychopath came around," Wilson said. "The whole thing resulted in a heterogeneity in which the females were clustered with the gentlemen. It's the movement of individuals that creates these differences between groups that favor nonaggressive males."

Who knows how much research into sexual selection has been flawed because researchers forgot the crucial ingredient of female freedom?

Ultimately, what's interesting about this study is that it shows why isolated populations might engage in a different mode of sexual selection than a free-ranging population that has a lot of contact with outside groups.

via Science

Min Tan of China's Guangdong Entomological Institute recorded and carefully observed the mating habits of 60 fruit bats she captured in the wild. To her surprise, she found that, in 70 percent of the sexual encounters, the female bat would lick the shaft of her partner's penis. This makes fruit bats the only known species besides humans to engage in regular fellatio.

So why are these bats so batty for fellatio? Tan has a few theories. For one thing, sexual encounters that involved oral stimulation lasted, on average, 100 seconds longer than those that didn't, something that could be conducive to fertilization. Or the female bat could be occupying her mate for as long as possible so that a rival female doesn't snatch him away. The reasons could also be hygenic, as male bats lick their own penises after sex to clear away bacteria and fungi. Or, she could be looking for chemicals that indicate whether the male is a suitable mate, so that she knows whether to reject his sperm or look for a better partner next time around.

As an example, the researchers kindly provided a rather NSFW video that illustrates their findings, complete with frenetic mood music:

[Science Blogs]

While naked women are used to infuse alien planets with exotic allure, naked men are almost always associated with dystopia. In fact, it sometimes seems like the only time we get to see naked men in science fiction is when they're in prison.

Take Twelve Monkeys, for example. Here we get a nice butt shot of Bruce Willis (looking nice and firm!), but of course it has to be in the context of a psychotic near-future dystopia where Bruce is imprisoned. We only get naked Bruce when he's forced to do it in this awful way.

Even worse is A Clockwork Orange, where we first get a glimpse of nudity when our anti-hero rapes and kills a nice lady. Then he's sent to prison and forced to strip in this weird scene. Again, an otherwise nice example of nudity (even with a bit of peen!) is only given to us in a context where we're really not in the mood to scope out Malcolm McDowell's skinny Brit boy bod.

One of the main ways that men bare their butts in science fiction, however, is a little less disturbing. Let's call it the "I'm in some kind of futuristic device and have to be naked" excuse.

That's how we get this incredibly great shot of Jeff Goldblum looking snacky in his teleportation pods from The Fly. You can almost always rely on director David Cronenberg to get a little nudity out of his male leads, which is why we love him so. (Seriously - that naked steam room knife fight scene with Viggo Mortenson in recent Cronenberg flick Eastern Promises? Wow.) Here's Goldblum:

We only get this statuesque sculptiness after Goldblum's been ripped apart at the genetic level and turned into a horrific mutant. So you get a naked guy, but unfortunately he's a proto-monster.

And then there's the best nakedness excuse ever, which is "well for some reason time travel requires you to be naked." Makes perfect sense. That's why we got to see Arnold's butt in every Terminator flick. Unfortunately, this isn't the frisky, sexy goodness you get from naked SF ladies - it's more of a menacing badass thing. Plus, naked Arnold couldn't really float anybody's boat.

Another great excuse to show a guy naked in science fiction is if you stick him in some kind of goo pod. Seriously, how many freakin movies and TV series have naked men covered in goo? I'm not kidding - it's not just Keanu in The Matrix. Here are just a few.

There's Anders in Battlestar Galactica, whose nakedness is just hinted at:

You wouldn't want to show a man without his clothes on if he wasn't somehow part of a machine or being experimented on. That there is functional nudity, not something fun to look at! And in case you wanted to gaze in adoration at this desirable boy object, forget it. He's going to be covered in some kind of industrial solvent or weird polymer that makes him look gross.

Then there's the naked homoerotic goo pod scene from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Yes, that's a goo-covered Robert DeNiro, recently reanimated in a steampunk goo tank, showing off his shapely form.

And how about the scene where Wolverine emerges from the goo, his Adamantium bones freshly installed, and rips the shit out of everything while also showing off his utterly shapely buns? Seriously, we want to see naked Wolverine but not like this! Keep his clothes on when he's fighting, and then strip him down later in a more friendly setting. But no - because Wolvie is manly, he can only be naked when he's penetrating steel walls with his mega-claws.

How often have you said to yourself that you'd like to see Russell Crowe - especially a delicious, young, version - totally naked? He has a seriously sweet bum, and now you can see it for yourself, with a little dancing action. Except of course you only get that when he's a virtual serial killer (in Virtuosity) who has managed to climb out of VR and into a nanobot android body that immediately sets to work killing everybody. Why can't we have peaceful, happy naked men in our science fiction? Couldn't he have ended that sexy little dance by doing something other than chopping off his own finger?

Well, maybe we can get a few peaceful naked men. Once we get away from the goo thing, we've got another class of male nudity in SF: The "I just got a body so I have to be naked" subgenre of bare-assery. The problem with these nudie moments? Too innocent. Nobody wants to leer at somebody who just grew a body! They're almost like kids or something. Except, of course, they really aren't.

There's nothing better than seeing bare-butted Jeff Bridges in Starman. He's come from far away and borrowed the DNA of Karen Allen's dead husband to make himself a body. Later, we actually do get to see him in sexed-up mode, but this "being born" scene gives us the full buttal deal. Forget full frontal. That just never happens.

You can also be naked if you've just regenerated, like Captain Jack did in this episode of Torchwood. Even though Jack is the sexiest guy in the universe, he only gets to give us a double bun when he's feeling completely awful and is covered in dirt. Couldn't we have gotten a little of this naked Jack in a scene with his boyfriend Ianto?

The much-missed show Kyle XY started with a fully naked moment, when the vat-grown Kyle awakens in a forest with an adult body and the brain of a computer. There's something so sweet and innocent and utterly hot about this moment.

When men aren't birthing themselves into nudity, they use nakedness as a way of showing their true selves and scaring the crap out of people. That's one way to read this bizarre and sad sequence in cult film The Man Who Fell To Earth, featuring David Bowie as an alien who has been hiding among humans. At last, he decides to show his girlfriend his true (naked) self - intercut with his memories of having sex back on his homeworld.

When Dr. Manhattan has sex with Silk Spectre in Watchmen, the whole thing quickly devolves into something creepy. Even though we get to see lots of glowing nakedness, and even get a few CGI penis glimpses, the body of Dr. Manhattan is anything but erotic.

So you can tell I'm pretty critical of male nudity as it stands in science fiction. Are there any examples of good, friendly nudity that isn't about deathtripping and mad science?

We got good eye candy on Star Trek Enterprise when it turned out that nudity is required in the decontamination chamber. This is what I'm talking about, people. Even though sadly there is underwear involved, this is a perfect example of male nudity reaching the gratuitous, just-there-to-be-looked-at-ness of female nudity in science fiction. No killing, no scary vats of goo, no "innocent newborn" crap. Just good, old-fashioned erotic nudity purely to make you feel tingly.

Wouldn't you know that Charlton Heston got there first with this whole frisky, friendly version of male nudity? The gun-lover's first-ever nude scene was in science fiction classic Planet of the Apes. He and his astronaut pals decide (totally randomly) to take a naked dip in the water. Why is this scene here? For the same reason all those nude scenes with ladies are there in every other movie. Just so we can take a nice break and check out old CH's sculpted buns.

My point, other than to share pictures of naked men with you on a Friday night, is that something is wrong with the way science fiction deals with male bodies. Male beauty is always being undermined by violence, defaced with goo, or attenuated by its association with birthing. I'm not saying it's wrong to show men engaged in action, or in ugly situations. But I do think it's odd that lovely male bodies are almost always put on display in contexts where we are made to feel uncomfortable or upset by seeing them.

There's something almost schizophrenic about male nudity in science fiction. We see glimpses of men's allure, only to have it erased. It's as if these scenes are titillating you, only to slap you in the face.

As somebody who appreciates the male form, I'd like to be given a few more options in my science fiction, please. Nudity should not have to end (or begin) in tragedy.

1982's Android is a truly wretched movie, but it does have some hliarious android-sex-related scenes. It's all about female sexuality and the ways in which men try to own it or control it — but luckily, it uses androids to explore that theme. Maggie, a fugitive from the law, arrives on a space station where an evil professor is experimenting with androids. The professor (Klaus Kinski!!) has already created Max, the sex-starved male android. But now he's created a lovely female android, and he just needs a woman's sexual energy to make the female android come to life. At least, that's what I took away from this movie's somewhat kinked storyline. Here's the scene where the professor tries to convince Maggie to charge up his android with sex (it comes before the clip above):

So yay, the female android, Cassandra, is finally activated and "fully functional." And the professor decides to take his new sexbot for a spin. Sadly, it doesn't turn out that well... This last clip is definitely NSFW:

Oh, and Maggie brings two rough-and-tumble male convicts with her, and they share some fantastic dialogue, like this exchange:

"You remind me of the Red Queen, Mendes. The faster you go —"
"Don't be talkin' about queens to me, punk! I'll take you right here!"

Savage comes back with a resounding "Ick" and "No:"

As for the morality of the situation, fucking zombies - the walking dead - is necrophilia, technically speaking, but practically speaking, it comes closer to bestiality. A human being who has been zombified is nothing but an animal, hungry for brains, incapable of thought much less consent. We can kill animals for their flesh, but we mustn't fuck them, HIZZIE; and we can kill zombies for wanting our flesh, but likewise we mustn't fuck them.

Plus, as we noted in last year's piece on zombie feminism, the molested dead have a habit of striking back.

Savage Love (NSFW) [Nerve]

Though there are probably precedents for the dragon sex fetish in the pages of kinky horror pulp Weird Tales, I think it's safe to say the phenomenon was popularized by McCaffrey and her Pern novels. These books, published starting in the late 1960s and continuing into the present, focus on a civilization of humans who evolved from the crew of a spaceship of colonists who landed on planet Pern. Using biotechnology, the humans genetically modify the local firelizards to be giant, flying steeds that the "renewable air force" rides. The genemodded dragons also have psychic links with their riders, which forms when the dragons are hatched and select humans "impress" themselves onto the creatures.

Dragonriders aren't warriors; they are protectors. Pern experiences a seasonal weather pattern called "threadfall," where deadly spores from a neighboring star fall to the planet, destroying everything in their paths. Unless, of course, the dragons can zoom around and burn the threads before they hit the ground. Guided by their trusty humans, the dragons protect all the people of Pern from the terrible thread.

They also have sex. And when dragons have sex, their riders - in constant psychic connection with their mounts - have sex too. This means a lot of "whoa I didn't want to have sex with you but now that our dragons are having sex damn let's do it" kinds of stuff. In addition, the most common types of dragons, the blues and greens, only get impressed by gay boys (and occasionally straight girls). So: Lots of gay psychic dragon sex. This strange scenario has meant that Pern's large and talkative fandom has spent many years debating the sexuality of dragons in discussion forums and at conventions like the Weyrfest at Dragon*Con.

In her infamous essay on Pern's renewable airforce, McCaffrey responded to fan speculation by talking a little about how dragon/human sexuality works:

In the Beginning of Dragonriders of Pern™, females rode green or gold. Males rode blue, brown or bronze. (I made it easier for myself in the beginning by remembering that Boys impressed Brown, Bronze or Blue, and Girls impressed Gold and Green.)

Since greens are females and tend to be 'loving', they mated with any dragon they fancied. When not enough girls elected to stand on the Hatching Grounds after the first disastrous Plague, males with feminine personalities Impressed green dragons. Blue riders, not to mince words, tended to be gay with masculine temperaments. Browns, who were not so inclined to mate with a green's rider, made an arrangement so that two pairs of riders were involved in a green's mating.

The dragons act in the way they were bio-genetically designed . . . While the main and most important application of the [telepathy-enhancing substance] Mentasynth was to increase mental function and innate empathy in the 'dragons,' a secondary use was to allow the newly hatched young dragon recognize the most suitable symbiotic partner. At hatching, the dragon recognizes by the sweat pheromones the appropriate sexual partner. Therefore the dragonet, just out of its shell, would approach only the male or female candidates exuding the proper pheromones for its basic sex type.

The green dragons are particularly sensitive not only to the mental empathy of possible candidates but also to pheromones.

McCaffrey's dragon sex scenario is probably the most highly developed in the world of science fiction, but it's not an aberration. Jane Yolen's young adult Dragon Pit series explores the dragon reproductive cycle in great detail, and the psychic human-dragon bond does involve romance. Similarly, Christopher Paolini's Inheritance series explores dragon sexuality and romance. Main character Eragon's dragon Saphira is the last female dragon alive, so the issue of mating and reproduction is unavoidable for her. There is even a psychic dragon sex subplot in the recent Captain Marvel Annihilation series.

Several years ago, dragon sex became one of the most hotly-debated topics at the book-oriented World Fantasy Convention when a publisher handed out excerpts of Janine Cross' Touched by Venom, the first book in her intense, harrowing Dragon Temple Saga. The excerpt, which describes a dragon-keepers' ritual on an alien planet, includes a scene where young adepts are beaten with dragon-venom laced whips. Because the venom has aphrodisiac properties, the result is a bizarre parade where young dragon-keepers are marched through the streets covered in blood and brandishing giant erections. Unfortunately, it wasn't the greatest excerpt to hand out: Con-goers found it laughable when they read it outside the context of the rest of the series, which is about a peasant revolt in an oppressive monarchy.

So why does dragon sex inspire such passionate debate? Why, indeed, does dragon sex even happen at all in science fiction?

There is one obvious answer, which is that dragons represent sex because they are enormous, fiery, beautiful, uncontrollable creatures of fantasy. The urge to have sex is one of those giant, burning desires that is particularly difficult to slay. It's also an urge that is fueled by our fantasies. So there's a kind of no-duh analysis of dragon sex, which is nevertheless true, that says simply that dragons are metaphors for sexual desire. This certainly explains the zillions of pages of Otherkin slashfic on the internet.

But of course everything is always more complicated than that.

Let's consider the role that dragon sex plays in books like Yolen's series or Pern - both of which have large young adult audiences. In his book Killing Monsters, comic book writer Gerard Jones talks about why kids are drawn to stories about monsters. He says it's because kids identify with what it's like to exist in a world ruled by the whims of giant creatures and megapowerful humanoids. Though Jones focuses on why kids like to watch monsters engage in violence, I think a similar thing might be said for why young adults might also be fascinated by giant creatures having sex. Sex belongs to the exotic world of adults. It's something that young adults are aware of, possibly in internet-enhanced detail, but it's also not something most of them are experiencing firsthand. So it makes a certain amount of sense that young people might identify with characters for whom sex is something they're connected to mentally, via the acts of creatures more powerful than themselves.

Philip Pullman explores this idea in young adult trilogy His Dark Materials too. When his young adult characters finally have sex at the end of the series, they begin by petting each other's animal daemons. These daemons follow every person around, acting as external representations of their feelings and desires. The same way McCaffrey's characters sometimes express the sexual feelings of their dragons. In both cases, the smaller creatures act out the desires of larger ones.

Dragons are a simple metaphor for sexual desire, and they may also evoke the way young adults feel about sex. But those assertions still don't entirely explain way dragons function in the venom cock scenario from Janine Cross' Dragon Temple Saga.

I would suggest that the dragons in Cross' novels are something like the worms in Dune. Cross' dragons don't have much of a psychic connection to their riders - they are more like animals, and so to the extent that they communicate telepathically it's not much of a conversation. Not only do these dragons provide a drug that fuels a thriving black market economy (like Spice but less useful), but their eggs are a major source of nourishment to the people of the kingdom. And the fastest way to get around is by riding a flying dragon. So dragons are a cornerstone of the kingdom's economy, crucial for food and transport. That's why Cross depicts dragons as being hoarded by the ultra-rich. A major part of the peasant revolt involves redistributing access to the dragons.

Cross is doing something tricky with her dragon sex. She's talking about those uncontrollable, giant forces that I mentioned earlier in connection with Jones' book. But instead of her dragons standing in for adult sexual relationships, they stand in for the often-abusive relationships between aristocrats and peasants. She uses weird scenes of these dragons jabbing their venom-laced tongues deep inside our heroine's special spot to show us how peasants are debased by their aristocratic overlords. At the same time, the peasants are made complicit in their degradation because they crave the high they get from the dragon venom. So Cross' dragons stand in for the overwhelming desire people have for power over each other. Power that gives them the right to enslave, rape, and rule over other people.

Of course, sometimes a dragon is just a dragon. But dragons and sex often go together in science fiction because it's an inherently metaphorical genre. SF stories about fantastical monsters are often fables that contain messages about our own world. A perfect alloy of beauty and violence, the dragon is an enduring figure for the power of sexual desire - and for the way power often finds its most brutal expression in sexual acts.

Top image by Boris Vallejo. Fan art from Dragonchoice.

A paper published this week in Trends in Ecology and Evolution reviewed a series of recent studies about the impact of halting women's ovulation on partner selection. Alexandra Alvergne and Virpi Lumma of the Department of Animal and Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield discussed each of the recent findings and their impact on partner selection and reproduction. They note studies that ovulating women tend to prefer men with more "masculine" features who favor dominance and male-male competitiveness. A study published last year also found that women not on the pill preferred the scent of men with immune profiles dissimilar from their own, while women on the pill preferred the scent of men with immune profiles more similar to their own. The paper authors also note that some studies have found that men can unconsciously detect whether a woman is ovulating, and prefer ovulating women to non-ovulating women.

Their conclusion, cited in EurekaAlert, is that the pill might be causing individuals to select otherwise less-preferred partners, and could be causing humans to have less healthy offspring:

Taken together, an increasing number of studies suggest that the pill is likely to have an impact on human mating decisions and subsequent reproduction. "If this is the case, pill use will have implications for both current and future generations, and we hope that our review will stimulate further research on this question," concludes Dr. Lummaa.

So is the pill really having an impact on which mates we choose? Maybe not. The New Scientist analyzes the claims in the paper and notes that even if the studies have some merit, they don't necessarily reflect real world conditions. One study, for example, asked men to rate women's walks, a signal for attractiveness, but one that we don't pay much attention to. And a study that found lap dancers earn more during the most fertile period of their cycle (winner of one of last year's Ig Nobel Prizes) also found that dancers on the pill and those off the pill earned similar tips during their non-fertile periods. As for the issue of scent (something that may have kept women from mating with close relatives when humans lived in smaller populations), it might be overrated as an indicator of mate selection. A separate study involving speed dating found that while women might prefer the scent of certain men, those aren't necessarily the men they ultimately select as partners.

Unnatural selection: Birth control pills may alter choice of partners [EurekaAlert]
Has the pill changed the rules of sexual attraction? [New Scientist]

According to Cindy Meston and David Buss' Why Women Have Sex, there are exactly 237 reasons for women to have sex. This discovery comes after interviewing 1006 women about their sexual motivations, and even Meston is surprised by the results:

People just assumed the answer was obvious... To feel good. Nobody has really talked about how women can use sex for all sorts of resources: promotion, money, drugs, bartering, for revenge, to get back at a partner who has cheated on them. To make themselves feel good. To make their partners feel bad. [Women] can use sex at every stage of the relationship, from luring a man into the relationship, to try and keep a man so he is fulfilled and doesn't stray. Duty. Using sex to get rid of him or to make him jealous. We never ever expected it to be so diverse... From the altruistic to the borderline evil.

Amongst the evil: "Wanting to give someone a sexually transmitted infection" and "Man-Poaching." But how realistic is that 237 figure? Even Meston is now hedging her bets, telling the British Guardian newspaper:

There are probably a few more.

Anyone fancy coming up with the next 237?

Why women have sex [Guardian.co.uk]

This year's Arse features performances and presentations from a ton of amazing folks, including R.U. Sirius, Jonathon Keats, Ani Niow, Jason Scott, Rose White, Violet Blue, and even yours truly (I'm going to be part of the opening ceremonies on Thursday, showing some gay porn mashups from Japan; and then I'm speaking on Saturday about the future of love). There will be a party at the Center for Sex and Culture, as well as a hands-on technical workshop on Sunday at San Francisco's kickass hacker space Noisebridge.

You can peruse the whole schedule on the Arse Elektronika site, but here's a quick overview:

October 1 (6 PM-midnight): Film festival, opening ceremony and Prixxx Arse Elektronika Gala @ Roxie Theater
October 2 (8 PM-midnight): Art, pixels, interactive performance @ Center for Sex and Culture
October 3 (11:30 AM-9 PM): Talks and discourse @ PariSoMa
October 3 (after 10 PM): Party and performance night @ Femina Potens Gallery
October 4 (12 noon-10 PM): DIY workshops @ Noisebridge

Here's how the organizers introduce this year's theme:

Scottish SF author Iain Banks created a fictitious group-civilisation called "Culture" in his eponymous narrative. The vast majority of humanoid people in the "Culture" are born with greatly altered glands housed within their central nervous systems, who secrete - on command - mood- and sensory-appreciation-altering compounds into the person's bloodstream. Additionally many inhabitants have subtly altered reproductive organs - and control over the associated nerves - to enhance sexual pleasure. Ovulation is at will in the female, and a fetus up to a certain stage may be re-absorbed, aborted, or held at a static point in its development; again, as willed. Also, a viral change from one sex into the other, is possible. And there is a convention that each person should give birth to one child in their lives. It may sound strange, but Banks states that a society in which it is so easy to change sex will rapidly find out if it is treating one gender better than the other. Pressure for change within society would presumably build up until some form of sexual equality and hence numerical parity will be established.
Does this set-up sound too futuristic? Too utopian? Too bizarre?

We may not forget that mankind is a sexual and tool-using species. And that's why our annual conference Arse Elektronika deals with sex, technology and the future. As bio-hacking, sexually enhanced bodies, genetic utopias and plethora of gender have long been the focus of literature, science fiction and, increasingly, pornography, this year will see us explore the possibilities that fictional and authentic bodies have to offer. Our world is already way more bizarre than our ancestors could have ever imagined. But it may not be bizarre enough. "Bizarre enough for what?" — you might ask. Bizarre enough to subvert the heterosexist matrix that is underlying our world and that we should hack and overcome for some quite pressing reasons within the next century. Don't you think, replicants?

I love a conference about sexual futurism that begins with a long discussion of Iain M. Banks. And so will you!

Find out more at the Arse Elektronika site, and buy tickets here. (Tickets are for the events Thursday and Friday night, as well as Saturday lectures. Saturday night performances and Sunday workshops are free and open to the public.)

If you are unfamiliar with the roiling cauldron of memes represented by this video, you will feel as if you've stepped off the cultural deep end and into an alternate reality. So let me sort it out for you a little bit.

The buttsechs motorcycle guy is supposed to be popular 1980s bisexual porn star Billy Herrington. Talented at karate, Billy starred in a bunch of karate-themed porn flicks, as well as wrestling. He had a nice time and retired in the 1990s. Enter the popular Japanese video-sharing site Nico Nico Douga. One of the members of the site uploaded a chunk of one of Billy's old videos, and it exploded into a crazy meme.

I'll quote from the source of all internet-related knowledge, Wikipedia:

Thousands of mash-up parody videos of him have been made, many of which utilize deliberate mishearings (soramimi 空耳) of lines from his films. He is affectionately called "Big Brother" (兄貴 aniki) among the Nico Nico Douga community, and most of his videos are deliberately mistagged with "Wrestling Series (レスリングシリーズ resuringu sirīzu))", "Forest Fairy" (森の妖精 mori no yousei), "Philosophy" (哲学 tetsugaku), or both.

Herrington visited Japan in February 2009 to attend in a live online event hosted by Nico Nico Douga and Garage kit maker Good Smile Company. Herrington said that he is flattered and humbled by his fans' creativity. A limited-edition Herrington figure was announced for a July 2009 release. Two other limited-editions Herrington action figures were announced for the Halloween and Christmas holiday. The Halloween figure is due to release October 2009 and the Christmas one is due to release on December 2009 both are Nico Nico Chyokuhan exclusives.

In South Korea, especially on DC Inside, audio of Billy Herrington's dialogues, including "Oh my shoulder", became internet meme.

A meme expert on Reddit explains this particular video in even more granular detail:

It's a combination of several 2channel / Nicovideo memes. The ones I recognize:

Overall, the thing is a parody of the racing scenes from the racing anime Initial D, which all look kind of like this:

There is also a "Gutter run" in there, which is kind of the main characters signature move, where he hooks his wheels into the gutter to be able to go around the curve faster.

The dudes on the bike are from a gay wrestling porn movie. It's popular on nicovideo and has sparked things like this:

The steamroller is from Jojos Bizzare Adventure.

The person driving the Steamroller is Kagamine Rin, a Vocaloid personification. She and Rin are somehow associated with steamrollers now, presumably because both are yellow.

And that, my friends, is how a bisexual porn star from America became a funny action figure in Japan. It's just what internet pioneers dreamed of back in the early 1990s. The web has become a place for cross-cultural sharing.

Thanks, Eliot!

There will be a huge amount of publicity when products like this hit the market. As soon as the media starts writing about 'My fantastic weekend with a sex doll', it will be like the iPhone all over again, but the queues will be longer.

I am firmly convinced there will be a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them. The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind.

Let's talk about sex ... with robots [Guardian]

This is one of the best destructo-scenes from early 1990s flick Eve of Destruction, which features the nuke-hearted creation of a mad scientist who made one small miscalculation when building her AI. She decided to base its mind on her own, without getting therapy first. And our mad scientist was, sadly, raped by dudes who called her a bitch. Which makes the cyborg who inherited her memories a little, well, sensitive.

Of course, who wouldn't be sensitive when that dude says, "Say hellooooooo." Gross!

When the cyborg escapes the lab, with a thermonuclear device in her heart, she's just trying to explore. But then these asswipes remind her of the whole bitch thing, and she goes on a mission of revenge. Which could end in mega-explosions. Starring the awesome Gregory Hines as the cop who has to reel in the damaged bot, this is actually a pretty good twist on the standard cyborg flick. Plus there are sleazy beard dudes who get it right where it counts.

Eve of Destruction via IMDB

Apparently when this woman had seizures, she felt that her voice had become deeper and her arms were hairy. Once, when a female friend of hers with her as a seizure came on, she thought her friend was turning into a man too. The woman had no history of mental illness, nor did she have symptoms of gender identity disorder.

After imaging her brain, the researchers discovered that she had some damage to her amygdala, and weird electrical activity in her right temporal lobe during seizures. Had they discovered some gender identity center of the brain, which when damaged results in the feeling of changing sex? Absolutely not. In fact, there is no such center in the brain.

Instead, the researchers believe that this unusual case is simply one flavor of a more general experience of self-alienation that comes during epileptic attacks.

Reports ScienceNow:

More likely, [New York University neurologist Orrin Devinsky] says, the amygdala is one node in a network of brain regions essential for self-identity. When neural activity in this network goes haywire, a range of bizarre experiences can result, Devinsky says. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote of feeling the presence of God in the moments preceding a seizure. More common, Devinsky says, are feelings of déjà vu or its opposite, jamais vu, the sense that a familiar environment has become unfamiliar. "In epilepsy, you can experience these intense and extreme emotions and in some cases misidentification of yourself and where you are in relation in the world," he says.

via Science Now

The Vamp is from Tantus and well it sparkles....

But don't take their word for it, watch it glisten with an unholy sheen in the sunlight, just like Edward. Warning: video is not for the faint of heart.

And that's not even the best part. The Vamp can stay cold, like a *ahem* vampire's man-bits would be — or should be, I guess. No, I'm not making this up — this is what it says on the site:

Updated by popular request... Yes the The Vamp retains hot and cold temperature. Toss it in the fridge for that authentic experience.

So if "nuked the fridge" is the new "jumped the shark." Can "sparkle-cocked" be the new "nuked the fridge?" I can see it now... "oh man they really sparkle-cocked in that last episode." Make it happen!

According to the scientific paper from Contraception journal that describes this device:

Over a period of 7 years, broken condoms returned to a supplier (SSL, Durex) via consumer complaints were examined to determine the cause of failure. Also, some consumers who reported breakage but did not return condoms were sent a questionnaire on the causes of breakage. Finally, theories proposed for the mechanism of breakage were investigated on a laboratory coital model. RESULTS: Nearly 1000 (n=972) returned condoms made from natural rubber and polyurethane were examined. Visible features on those that were broken, were classified. Evidence combined from examining returns, questionnaire responses and the coital model strongly suggests a single predominant mechanism of failure we named "blunt puncture," where the tip of the thrusting male penis progressively stretches one part of the intact condom wall until it ultimately breaks.

I love that this machine is called a "coital model." I feel like there might be an aftermarket for it on eBay.

[via NCBI ROFL]

The chemicals industry very commonly uses fungi to generate useful chemicals. The fungus T. reesei, with its ability to convert useless plant waste into very useful glucose, leads the pack. It's referred to as the "industrial workhorse."

Most of the fungi that we use to generate these chemicals reproduce asexually. T. reesei, originally extracted from moldering army uniforms 50 years ago, was assumed to reproduce only asexually. But in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team from Vienna, Austria, reports that they have found a way to get T. reesei to reproduce sexually. (No word on whether this involved Barry White records or champagne.)

Sexual reproduction is often better for a biological population than asexual reproduction. Sex allows for the correcting of minor mutations and spreads genetic variation across a population. Sexual crossing in T. reesei will allow the fungus to kick up its efficiency in glucose production and therefore better serve the bio-fuels industry.

T. reesei's sexual reproduction will also allow scientists to create stronger and more specialized strains of the fungus more easily. Sexual variation will open the door to better and better chemical synthesis using T. reesei. Who knew that sex could solve so many problems?

Sexual development in the industrial workhorse Trichoderma reesei [PNAS]