Flannel Shirt

Men won't become extinct

I don't really understand this article, but it's supposed to be reassuring that the Y chromosome won't disappear.

Masturbation myths

Here's an article on myths about masturbation. Long story short, it's good for you.

This is my favorite myth, which is actually a truth:

Others, including medical doctors and sexual partners, will be able to tell if you masturbate.

Of course, they look to see if you have hands. There's the answer.

Stop the presses! Men and women have different personalities.

This news release doesn't have much detail. It would be nice to have seen a good summary. There are differences between men and women. This has been a matter of discussion for a long time.

A little New Orleans philosophizing.

Boy or girl?

A new blood test of pregnant women will enable them to know the sex of their child as early as the first trimester. Here:

"Generally, early fetal gender determination has been performed by invasive procedures such as chorionic villus sampling or amniocentesis. However, these invasive procedures still carry a one to two percent risk of miscarriage and cannot be performed until 11 weeks of gestation. Moreover, reliable determination of fetal gender using ultrasonography cannot be performed in the first trimester, because the development of external genitalia is not complete," said Hyun Mee Ryu, M.D., Ph.D., a researcher involved in the work from the Department of Obstetrics and Gynocology at Cheil General Hospital and Women's Healthcare Center at the KwanDong University School of Medicine in Seoul, Korea. "Therefore, this can reduce the need for invasive procedures in pregnant women carrying an X-linked chromosomal abnormality and clarify inconclusive readings by ultrasound."

To make this discovery, Ryu and colleagues collected maternal plasma from 203 women during their first trimester of pregnancy. The presence of circulating fetal DNA was confirmed by a quantitative methylation-specific polymerase chain reaction of U-PDE9A. Multiplex real-time polymerase chain reaction was used to simultaneously quantify the amount of DYS14 and GAPDH in maternal plasma. The results were confirmed by phenotype at birth.

"Although more work must be done before such a test is widely available, this paper does show it is possible to predict the sex of a child as early as the first few weeks after conception," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "At present, parents are sometimes given the wrong information about the sex of their unborn child; this test should prove helpful in resolving any uncertainties of today's ultrasound observations."

Rose Bowl controversy

A controversy is brewing in the Pacific Northwest as the Oregon Ducks prepare for the Rose Bowl against some guys from back in the Midwest somewhere.

The young woman above is demonstrating the Oregon "O". You'll see fans making this sign in the stands when the Ducks do something good on the field.

The controversy is that that this:

is "vagina" in sign language.

This could lead to confusion in Pasadena on January 2nd.