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“Although the skull has an affinity with an Asian population, among individuals of such ancestry, there are a large number of structural differences, which are circumvented by closing the eyelids.”

Found buried in the fetal position at Toca dos Coqueiros in 1997 in Serra da Capivara National Park, Zuzu lived in modern-day Brazil nearly 9,600 years ago. Zuzu’s face has been wondered about by archeologists for years. Moreover, there were some controversies about Zuzu’s sex. We could finally see Zuzu’s face thanks to a new facial approximation.


Moacir Elias Santos et al.

“Trying to recover the appearance that an individual had in life thousands of years ago is a way to bring them to the present day, bringing them closer to the public,” first author Moacir Elias Santos, an archaeologist with the Ciro Flamarion Cardoso Archaeology Museum in Brazil, told Live Science.

A sex startup says it’s created a VR-enabled masturbation pod for companies that want to make their employees very uncomfortable, very quickly.

Stripchat, a porn site, announced in a blog post that it’s developed something it’s dubbed a “Wank Pod” to give company employees a place to engage in a little office onanism. The company even installed one in their own workplace, and plans a commercial roll out in the future.

“Each ‘Wank Pod’ is planned to come fully equipped with masturbatory accessories, including a 4K LED screen to watch VR cams boosted by Dreamcam’s technology, an Oculus Quest VR headset, lotion, tissues, and more,” the startup wrote in the announcement.

It will provide a better understanding of how drugs affect men and women differently.

Scientists created male and female cells with the same genetic code from the same person for the first time. This unique set of cells could provide researchers with valuable insights into how sex chromosomes affect various diseases and their role in early development.


CDC/Dr. Laine.

The sex chromosome.

What alternative sex-determining system will we adapt?

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.

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


Usis/iStock.

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

Mammalian sex chromosomes are highly conserved, and sex is determined by SRY on the Y chromosome. Two exceptional rodent groups in which some species lack a Y chromosome and Sry offer insights into how novel sex genes can arise and replace Sry, leading to sex chromosome turnover. However, intensive study over three decades has failed to reveal the identity of novel sex genes in either of these lineages. We here report our discovery of a male-specific duplication of an enhancer of Sox9 in the Amami spiny rat Tokudaia osimensis, in which males and females have only a single X chromosome (XO/XO) and the Y chromosome and Sry are completely lost. We performed a comprehensive survey to detect sex-specific genomic regions in the spiny rat. Sex-related genomic differences were limited to a male-specific duplication of a 17-kb unit located 430 kb upstream of Sox9 on an autosome. Hi-C analysis using male spiny rat cells showed the duplicated region has potential chromatin interaction with Sox9. The duplicated unit harbored a 1,262-bp element homologous to mouse enhancer 14 (Enh14), a candidate Sox9 enhancer that is functionally redundant in mice. Transgenic reporter mice showed that the spiny rat Enh14 can function as an embryonic testis enhancer in mice. Embryonic gonads of XX mice in which Enh14 was replaced by the duplicated spiny rat Enh14 showed increased Sox9 expression and decreased Foxl2 expression. We propose that male-specific duplication of this Sox9 enhancer substituted for Sry function, defining a novel Y chromosome in the spiny rat.

If your morning never starts without a cup of coffee, you may be intrigued to learn that drinking the wildly popular beverage could significantly lower your risk of dying within the next few years, a new study suggests.

The study, published online May 31, 2022, by Annals of Internal Medicine, analyzed data about coffee consumption from more than 170,000 people (average age 56) from the United Kingdom who did not have cancer or cardiovascular disease at the study’s start. The researchers tracked participants over an average of seven years. They also accounted for such factors as lifestyle, diet, sex, age, and ethnicity.

People who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee each day, even with a teaspoon of added sugar per cup, were up to 30% less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. It didn’t appear to matter if the coffee contained caffeine or not, but the benefit tapered off for those drinking more than 4.5 cups each day.