Curious to know how sex and technology intersect? Arse Elektronika is certain to titillate. This year's theme, "screw the system" looks to explore questions such as:

"What are the labor conditions of non-Western workers who make most of the world's sex toys? What's the environmental footprint of a technologically assisted orgasm? How does the criminalization or stigma of sex tech production harm the communities in which it is produced? What's the product life-cycle and planning horizon of sex tech? What are the barriers to entry for sex tech production? How important is intellectual property to sex tech, and how is it enforced?"

The event kicks off its opening night with the Prixxx Arse award for the best in sex machines, orgasmotrons and teledildonics on Thursday, September 29th at Chez Poulet. The event is organized by the Austrian art collective, monochrom.

Talks at the event include such topics as "Making a Mind Controlled Dildo" and hands on workshops for the DIY crowd.

While Arse Elektronika isn't going to please all, I can't imagine a city better suited for such an event. For the curious, you can check out the full schedule on Arse Elektronika's website.

Image courtesy of cessable

For better quality of life as you age it’s important to keep the fire burning, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society.

Researchers at the Stein Institute for Research on Aging at UC San Diego looked at data from 1,235 post-menopausal women participating in the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) study. The women were asked questions about their health, both physical and mental, as well as sexual activity and functioning.

Though aging was associated with an expected decline in physical health and sexual frequency, overall sexual satisfaction did not decline with age. Additionally, having a satisfying sex life was also associated with indicators of successful aging and high quality of life.

“Feeling satisfied with your sex life—whatever you levels of sexual activity—is closely related to your perceived quality of life,” says Wesley K. Thompson, co-author of the study. “While we cannot assess cause and effect from this study, these results suggest that maintaining a high level of sexual satisfaction may positively reinforce other psychological aspects of successful aging.”

Is it time to start bringing home flowers and candles in addition to the extra calcium and fish oil supplements? Let’s hope so.

Sex may have evolved to cut down on genetic variation.

No, I don’t mean in the red light district of Amsterdam or at Mustang Ranch. What I am talking about is the high biological cost of sex. In fact, it is so expensive it can be hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place.

The main reason sex is so costly is it takes two parents to have a kid. Asexual creatures can do it on their own.

This doesn’t sound like much of an advantage, but it is. Some computer simulations show that a single asexual individual can overtake a population of one million sexual creatures in about 50 generations. That is about 1000 years for people and only 8 years for mice.

So sex needs to have some pretty big advantages to have ever evolved in the first place. Otherwise the first sexual creature would have been quickly swamped out by all of its asexual brethren as soon as it appeared.

In the past, scientists have pointed to variation as one of sex’s big advantage. This probably isn’t the whole story though. Or even most of it.

Sex does create additional variety through the mixing of genes but it probably isn’t enough to explain the rise of sex. You’d have to live in some pretty chaotic times for this variation to offer enough an advantage to an individual to overcome its cost. Eight or a thousand years just isn’t that long in an evolutionary time scale.

A new review out is bringing up an old idea that Muller came up with back in 1932. The main advantage of sex is to provide a safe time to recombine our DNA.

Recombination is simply the swapping of DNA between two identical (or nearly identical) pieces of DNA. For us that means swapping between the chromosomes we got from mom and dad. So DNA is swapped between our two chromosome 1’s our two chromosome 2’s and so on.

This is where part of that variation we were talking about earlier comes from. But more importantly, recombination actually helps repair DNA damage. You can see the effects of no recombination by looking at our sad little Y chromosome which is slowly disappearing because it has no one to recombine with except itself.

But recombination is a double edged sword. Cells need it to repair their DNA but it can cause lots of DNA damage if it isn’t controlled. For example, even with all of our controls in place, 1 in 1000 humans still ends up with one chromosome stuck to another.

You can see what happens with uncontrolled recombination by looking at cancer cells. These cells end up with extra chromosomes, chromosomes stuck together, and lots of other chromosomal problems because they recombine willy-nilly. They do well for themselves but are definitely bad for the individual.

So it makes sense to contain recombination to some easily controlled time. Sex may have arisen and took over the world because it provides a safer way to keep harmful DNA damage in check. The variation that everyone goes on about may simply have been a beneficial side effect.

After just nine generations, the sexual beasts on the left are already being swamped out by the asexual ones on the right.

See the following for more information:

Muller’s Ratchet
Extra chromosomes and new species

Banana Slugs are hermaphrodites, which means they are an animal that has both female and male reproductive parts

Forty and Fabulous is the theme for Pride this year. San Francisco’s Pride Celebration and Parade has been going strong since 1970. Pride recognizes and celebrates the diversity that has put San Francisco on the map. NightLife at the California Academy of Sciences kicked off the Pride weekend with some help from Juanita MORE, Verasphere, SF Cheer and Jane Tollini. In prepping for the festivities and specifically Jane Tollini’s talk – “How Animals Get Down”, I had to research a specific Academy animal and its claim to fame.

Below are a few of the tidbits I’ve learned about in my tenure at the Academy which prove equally intriguing:

The most popular docent cart at NightLife is the baculum cart. Baculums are penis bones that are found in most mammals. They range in sizes depending on the mammal and aid in sexual intercourse. One of the largest Baculums belong to the walrus and Alaskan native Americans would polish and carve these baculums for clubs or knife handles. They are known is there culture as Oosik.

Banana Slugs are hermaphrodites, which means they are an animal that has both female and male reproductive parts. In some cases of mating, a male reproductive member will become stuck; if this happens it is chewed off and discarded; thus making the slug a female.

There is a species of Cichlids called the Cross Dressing Cichlids. In this species there are three sexes – a dominant male, a non-dominant male and a female. The beta male resembles the female and when the alpha male is protecting his female harem the beta male will mate with the females. It is also interesting to note males can change between dominant and non-dominant.

Clownfish live in small groups in a single anemone. They are one of only a few species of fish that are immune to the anemone’s toxicity. Within a group of Clownfish there is a breeding pair that cohabitate with smaller non-breeding males. When the female dies, the dominant male changes sex and becomes the female. This strategy is defined as sequential hermaphroditism.

Penguins like most birds, reptiles and amphibians reproduce by what’s known as a cloacal kiss. The cloaca is a single orifice that is used for many functions; namely, urinating, defecating and mating. Thus, both male and female penguins have cloacas. Mating is achieved by bringing the cloacas together to touch.

Often it is very difficult to sex a snake as all the reproductive parts are internal. Biologists will use a special probe to determine the sex of a snake in captivity. Males have two members that protrude during mating calling hemepenes. Other than during mating, it is hard to tell the difference between a male and female. I learned this the hard way when I went to pull out a Ball Python for an outreach program. It was curled around its cage mate and I realized too late that they were mating when I interrupted!

I have often heard that homosexuality is not natural. Yet is has been observed, researched, and documented in many species – so has sex changes, several sexes in one species, hermaphrodites, harems, polygamy and sexual cannibalism. An interesting article was written up in the New York Times entitled, "Can Animals Be Gay?" If you are interested in learning more about the diversity of reproduction methods in the animal kingdom and why this diversity is needed; these two books are great:

Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex by Olivia Judson

Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People by Joan Roughgarden

37.7699 -122.467174

The woman who could probably give me a definitive answer is evolutionary biologist and award winning science journalist, Olivia Judson. Her first book was entitled Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to all Creation. It uses a playful literary tool to elucidate the evolutionary components of sex. The book sets up the chapters as advice columns. One such insect from the book complains:

"Dear Dr. Tatiana – My name's Twiggy and I'm a stick insect. It's with great embarrassment that I write to you while copulating, but my mate and I have been copulating for ten weeks already. I am bored out of my skull, but he shows no signs of flagging. He says it's because he's madly in love with me, but I think he's just plain mad. How can I get him to quit? – Sick of Sex in India".*

By anthropomorphizing animals and posing questions as a catalyst, Judson is able to fuel a fascinating outlet to dive into some of the racier sides of sex and really investigate the evolutionary reasons why they exist. No rock is unturned throughout the book. Frustrated birds, mammals, insects, reptiles, and bacteria write in and reveal quite startling behavior. The prologue of the book asserts that:

"Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice to all Creation is a unique guidebook to sex. It reveals, for example when necrophilia is acceptable, and who should commit bestiality with whom. It discloses the best time to have a sex change, how to have a virgin birth, and when to eat your lover. It also advises on more mundane matters – such as male pregnancy and the joys of a detachable penis."**

Most information is retained when it is enjoyed. My friend first recommended this book a few years ago. He was required to read it in his college class Darwin and Darwinism. We laughed about the required reading list, but I have often given this book to friends who have no interest in science and they have all enjoyed it despite the fact that delving into evolutionary biology is often quite difficult. More so, I found out only recently, this book is also part of the reference material for our docent program at the museum. Every year, Animal Sex Tours are led by the docents throughout the museum. The tours sell out every time and a great deal of creative insight has stemmed from this book. If you, as a reader, are curious – find out more about the author and the book at http://www.drtatiana.com/index.shtml. It is definitely a great science read for the beginning of spring!

Cat Aboudara is the Special Projects Manager at California Academy of Sciences and works in the public programs division. The Academy is a wonderful fit for her because of her curiosity about the natural world and her experience in working with native California wildlife.

* Judson, Olivia. Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creatures. 2002; Henry Holt, New York. Page 6.
** Judson, Olivia. Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice for All Creatures. 2002; Henry Holt, New York. Page 2.