Lifeboat Foundation

Gay sex – some humans do it, some penguins do it, and as it turns out, many monkeys do it. It’s only natural, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.

By watching a group of rhesus macaques over a three-year period in Puerto Rico, scientists from the Imperial College of London found it was more common for the males to engage in sex with the same gender than with the opposite.

The researchers reported 72% of the 236 male monkeys either mounted, or were mounted, by other males, whereas only 46% participated in heterosexual sex.

Summary: A new study reveals that the composition of scent compounds on a person’s hand can accurately determine their sex.

The analysis, using mass spectrometry, successfully predicted an individual’s sex with an impressive accuracy rate of 96.67%. In criminal investigations, this could provide valuable trace evidence where other discriminative evidence like DNA is lacking.

Continue reading “Human Hand Scents: A Novel Tool for Sex Prediction” »

The African turquoise killifish is an emerging vertebrate model organism with great potential for aging research due to its naturally short lifespan. Thus far, turquoise killifish aging omic studies using RNA-seq have examined a single organ, single sex and/or evaluated samples from non-reference strains. Here, we describe a resource dataset of ribosomal RNA depleted RNA-seq libraries generated from the brain, heart, muscle, and spleen from both sexes, as well as young and old animals, in the reference GRZ turquoise killifish strain. We provide basic quality control steps and demonstrate the utility of our dataset by performing differential gene expression and gene ontology analyses by age and sex. Importantly, we show that age has a greater impact than sex on transcriptional landscapes across probed tissues. Finally, we confirm transcription of transposable elements (TEs), which are highly abundant and increase in expression with age in brain tissue. This dataset will be a useful resource for exploring gene and TE expression as a function of both age and sex in a powerful naturally short-lived vertebrate model.

The authors have declared no competing interest.

The Y chromosome is the smallest chromosome, and holds the least amount of genes, but scientists are still learning about all of its biological functions. Research has shown that many men start to lose Y chromosomes in blood cells as they get older, and this phenomenon has been linked to some disorders including heart disease and now, cancer. Some studies have suggested that the loss of the Y chromosome may help explain why men tend to die at slightly younger ages compared to women, or why there are sex differences in some types of cancer… Two new studies reported in Nature have explored the link between cancer and the loss of the Y chromosome.

One study used a mouse model to show that a specific gene on the Y chromosome known as KDM5D increases the chance that some types of colorectal cancer will metastasize. The other research report showed that when some cells lose the Y chromosome, bladder tumors are better at evading the immune system, and the risk of aggressive bladder cancer increases.

The immune system employs different immune cells to target infection and disease throughout the body. Immunologists, who study the immune system, have worked on therapies to get more of these cells to the site of infection and at a faster rate. Currently, it is still unclear how effectively the immune system operates in age-and sex-related research. A group at the University of Birmingham have demonstrated specific sex-related differences associated with the immune system in older female mice. This novel research introduces age and sex into the equation and will change the way we study the immune system and improve patient treatment.

A recent publication in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology, by Dr. Myriam Chimen and colleagues found that age is a significant factor that determines cell movement to the major organs in the stomach cavity. More specifically, immune cells were not going to the site of infection, but “leaking” into the stomach cavity from blood vessels. This study has found a clear difference between sexes associated with immunity, as it was previously believed women’s immune system deteriorates faster compared to men. Chimen and colleagues have confirmed this long-standing belief through their work on immune system sex-related differences.

Chimen and colleagues show that the increased immune cell presence in the stomach cavity is from “leaky” blood vessels. “Leaky” is a term used to described blood vessels that do not maintain strong structural integrity. The idea of “leaky” blood vessels occurs in inflammatory diseases such as cancer. Cancer cells travel through the blood system and commonly “leak” out of the blood stream to other sites in the body. The trafficking of cells to other sites allows the spread of cancer throughout the body, further promoting tumor growth.

The sex of human and other mammal babies is decided by a male-determining gene on the Y chromosome. But the human Y chromosome is degenerating and may disappear in a few million years, leading to our extinction unless we evolve a new sex gene.

The good news is two branches of rodents have already lost their Y chromosome and have lived to tell the tale.

A recent paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science shows how the spiny rat has evolved a new male-determining gene.

Year 2011 This is pretty interesting that insects reproduce asexually even for a long time in their species for instance some have done it for 2 million years 😀 Also this could lead to even humans asexual reproduce if properly done with crispr.

One hope of trying to understand why sex is so powerful and prevalent a mode of reproduction relies on the rare examples of animals that persist long-term without having sex. Now, several species of stick insects join that illustrious circle.

There was once a stigma attached to online dating: Less than a decade ago, many couples who had met online would make up stories for how they met rather than admit that they had done so via an app.

Not so anymore. Online dating is so mainstream that you’re an outlier if you haven’t met your partner on Tinder, Grindr or Hinge.

We bring up online dating to show just how quickly conventions around romance can change. With rapid advances in AI technology over the past few years, these norms may well evolve to include sex, love and friendships with AI-equipped machines.

Exhaled breath VOCs showed variations in concentration associated with the different clips, even though the relative change was less distinguishable compared to the genital response (Fig. 3). For female participants, breath levels of CO₂ and isoprene during the sex clip were significantly lower compared to the anxiety and sport clips (p 0.05, Table S2). For male participants, CO₂, C₂H₄O₂ and C₆H₆O were found to have a significantly lower, higher and higher breath level, respectively, for the sex clip comparing to the other two clips (p 0.05, Table S2). The relative change of CO₂ during the sex clip was in general only 3–4% lower than that during the anxiety and sport clips but was significant for both genders (p 0.05). The minute-by-minute box plot (Fig. 2c) also shows that breath CO₂ appears to lower slightly in concentration for both genders during the sex clip. Isoprene was significantly decreased during the sex clip compared to the sport clip for both genders (males:13%, females:15%, p ≤ 0.001). For women during the sex clip, the isoprene also had a significantly lower level compared to the anxiety clip (12%, p 0.01). For the 1-min data distribution shown in Fig. 2d, participants showed not only elevated isoprene concentration during the sport and anxiety clips but also larger variations among each other reflected by the length of the box representing 25–75% data distribution. Interestingly, isoprene level peaked at the beginning of the sex clip (the second minute) for both genders.

From Fig. 3, it can be seen that several other measured VOCs, C₁₀ H₁₄ O, C₇H₈O, C₈H₁₁ NO₂ and acetaldehyde for female participants, and C₈H₇N for male participants showed large relative changes during the sex clip compared to the anxiety clip and the sport clip. However, no significant difference was identified between the sex clip and the other two clips (Table S2) for these VOCs, indicating the mean values were largely affected by outliers. In such cases, the VOCs identified as having a distinguishable change during the sex clip might be specific to an individual rather than being representative of the whole group of participants. Among the female participants, one subject (No. 39) had substantial elevation of C₁₀ H₁₄ O, C₇H₈O, C₈H₁₁ NO₂ in her breath starting in the end of the sport clip until the end of the sex clip, which caused a significant deviation in terms of the mean values. While for acetaldehyde, subject No. 20 had a much higher relative increase compared to the first neutral clip in her breath than other participants, affecting the mean values. For male participants, two persons with a strong physiological response (No. 6 and 10) had substantial elevated breath levels of C₈H₇N, C₆H₆O and C₇H₈O during the sex clip.

Among all participants, several VOCs showed change according to the genital response of certain individual participants (1 female and 2 male participants). Although the data from those participants were considered as outliers in the previous section, as there were no experimental errors identified and the breath-genital related change occurred in different clip playing order, it is unlikely that those outliers coincidentally followed the genital response pattern. Furthermore, genital response and genital temperature data was rated highly in terms of quality for those individuals. Therefore, we may use these individuals to characterize the breath marker responses for each gender in real time.