waterfowl genital

A sexual arms race waged with twisted genitals has been discovered in waterfowl. 

The genitalia of the females of these species have at times apparently evolved to make it harder for males to successfully impregnate them, according to new findings that shed light on the eternal war of the sexes. 

Most birds lack phalluses, organs like human penises. Waterfowl are among the just 3 percent of all living bird species that retain the grooved phallus found in their reptilian ancestors.

Male waterfowl are especially unusual in that their phalluses vary greatly among different species in length, ranging from a half-inch to more than 15 inches long. They also display a remarkable level of diversity how elaborate they are, ranging from smooth to covered with spines and grooves. 

Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully fertilizing females. 

After looking at the genitalia of a male duck, "I became immediately intrigued by what the female anatomy would look like to accommodate such a bizarre organ," said behavioral ecologist Patricia Brennan, who researches at both Yale University and the University of Sheffield in Britain. 

Now Brennan and her colleagues unexpectedly find the vaginas of female waterfowl can be just as ornate as male genitalia, full of "dead ends" and other countermeasures that all seemed design to exclude the phallus, findings to be detailed online May 2 in the journal PLoS ONE. 

Like lock and key

In most birds, the vagina or oviduct is a simple tube. However, in some waterfowl, there are sacs in the sides of this tube, pockets that are just inside the opening of the oviduct. These sacs appear "to function as 'dead-ends,' or false passages," Brennan said. "If the phallus were to enter one of these sacs, it would not progress further into the oviduct where it would deposit sperm more effectively." 

Waterfowl oviducts can also possess a series of tight, clock-wise spirals. "Interestingly, the male phallus is also a spiral, but it twists in the opposite, counterclockwise, direction," said Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, one of Brennan's co-authors on the research. "So, the twists in the oviduct appear designed to exclude the opposing twists of the male phallus," behaving like the opposite of a lock-and-key system. 

The number of sacs and spirals in the reproductive tract of various female waterfowl seems to increase as the male phallus gets longer across the 14 different species of ducks and geese tracked by Brennan and her colleagues. 

"I became very good at predicting what the genitalia of one sex would look like by looking at the other sex first," Brennan said. 

This suggests the genitalia of males and females have evolved to surpass each other in a kind of escalating arms race over which sex gets to control reproduction. 

"Despite the fact that most waterfowl form monogamous pairs, forced copulations by other males—the avian equivalent of rape—are common in many waterfowl," said Prum. The length of the phallus of a species is strongly linked with the frequency of forced copulations. 

"In response to male attempts to force their paternity on females, female waterfowl may be able to assert their own behavioral and anatomical means of controlling who fathers their offspring," Brennan said. 

This means that male waterfowl evolve more ornate phalluses to attempt to successfully overcome the physical defenses raised by ever more elaborate vaginas, and vice versa. 

"Some large waterfowl that are highly monogamous, like geese and swans, have small phalluses, whereas other species that are quite small but more promiscuous have more elaborate genitalia," Brennan said. "A larger phallus is advantageous in situations where there is more promiscuity, while more monogamous species have a much reduced phallus."

livescience

13 Questions to Ask Before Getting Married

When it comes to marriage, what you don’t know really can hurt you.

Whether because of shyness, lack of interest or a desire to preserve romantic mystery, many couples do not ask each other the difficult questions that can help build the foundation for a stable marriage, according to relationship experts.

In addition to wanting someone with whom they can raise children and build a secure life, those considering marriage now expect their spouses to be both best friend and confidant. These romantic-comedy expectations, in part thanks to Hollywood, can be difficult to live up to.

Sure, there are plenty of questions couples can ask of each other early in the relationship to help ensure a good fit, but let’s face it: most don’t.

“If you don’t deal with an issue before marriage, you deal with it while you’re married,” said Robert Scuka, the executive director of the National Institute of Relationship Enhancement. It can be hard to keep secrets decade after decade, and reticence before the wedding can lead to disappointments down the line.

The following questions, intimate and sometimes awkward, are designed to spark honest discussions and possibly give couples a chance to spill secrets before it’s too late. nytimes

  1. Did your family throw plates, calmly discuss issues or silently shut down when disagreements arose?
2. Will we have children, and if we do, will you change diapers?
3. Will our experiences with our exes help or hinder us?
4. How important is religion? How will we celebrate religious holidays, if at all?
5. Is my debt your debt? Would you be willing to bail me out?

6. What’s the most you would be willing to spend on a car, a couch, shoes?

7. Can you deal with my doing things without you?

8. Do we like each other’s parents?

9. How important is sex to you?

10. How far should we take flirting with other people? Is watching pornography O.K.?

11. Do you know all the ways I say “I love you”?

12. What do you admire about me, and what are your pet peeves?

13. How do you see us 10 years from now?

So It Turns Out There's A Lot We Don't Know About Ebola

"If there's anything that this outbreak has taught me, it's that I'm often wrong," says Dr. Daniel Bausch.

He's talking about Ebola. He's one of the world's leading experts on the virus — an infectious disease specialist at Tulane University and a senior consultant to the World Health Organization.

And as he makes clear, he's still got a lot to learn.

The virus came roaring back into headlines this past week. A Scottish nurse who survived Ebola is back in isolation in London, being "treated for Ebola," according to the Royal Free Hospital. The hospital says the patient's "condition has deteriorated and she is now critically ill."

And two new research papers found that the virus can live in a male survivor's semen for up to nine months, and that one man passed it to his sexual partner months after he was released from the Ebola ward.

"If you look back at the classic teaching about Ebola and survivors, it was that once you get better from this disease, even though it may take a while to recover, you made a full recovery and that kind of was the end of it," says Bausch.

And now, with an estimated 17,000 survivors, researchers are discovering all kinds of twists and turns. The semen study is particularly puzzling to Ilhem Messaoudi.

"It's an explosive virus. It replicates like crazy ... and it destroys everything in its path," says Messaoudi, a viral immunologist and professor of biomedical sciences at the University of California, Riverside, who is studying how the virus works in the human body. "So, how is it just hanging out in the testes for like nine months?"

There hasn't been much research — in animals or humans — about what happens after survival. What we do know is mostly from past outbreaks of the virus, in particular, two studies looking at past survivors of the disease and comparing their health to Ebola-free friends and family.

Research on 19 survivors of a 1995 outbreak in Kikwit in the Democratic Republic of the Congo found that most had joint pain and vision problems after the virus. One lost sight. Studies from the 1970s and 1980s had, like recent research, found the virus persisting in the semen and eyes of survivors.

Researchers following 49 survivors of a 2007 Ebola outbreak in Uganda found that— even two years after the illness — they had eye problems like inflammation and blurred vision as well as joint pain, difficulty sleeping, difficulty swallowing and even hearing loss, memory loss and confusion.

Dr. Ian Crozier survived Ebola, only to have his normally blue left eye turn green because of inflammation. Though the rest of his body was Ebola-free, his eye was teeming with the virus.

A third study examining 105 survivors of the 2014-15 outbreak in Guinea found that about 90 percent had chronic joint pain and 98 percent had poor appetites or an aversion to food. They also reported difficulty with short-term memory, headaches, sleeplessness, insomnia, dizziness, abdominal pain, constipation, sexual dysfunction, and decreased libido and exercise tolerance.

Bausch says, aside from arthritis and eye inflammation, it's still unclear which issues are directly related to the Ebola virus and which could be caused by the physical and emotional toll on the body. But something is going on.

"It's clear that there is a post-Ebola syndrome," he says.

Individual cases have opened a window into where the virus goes, and what it's capable of — even after a survivor's body has eliminated it from the bloodstream.

One well-reported example is Dr. Ian Crozier, who survived Ebola contracted in Sierra Leone, only to have one of his normally blue eyes turn green. Though the rest of his body, including his tears, was Ebola-free, his eye was teeming with the virus. The infection almost blinded him.

In a few other cases, Ebola hid out in the uterus. Most women who were pregnant when they got the virus miscarried. But, Bausch says, "a few women have survived with pregnancies intact." When they went into labor, the babies were stillborn and often anatomically abnormal. For months, the recovered mothers had carried babies stricken with Ebola.

How could healthy survivors who tested negative for Ebola still harbor the virus? As Messaoudi explains, it's because the immune system, which is capable of wiping out the virus in the bloodstream, doesn't reach every nook and cranny of the body.

"The immune system is a little heavy-handed at times," she says. Inflammation caused by the immune system's activity could cause serious damage in places like the eyes, brain, placenta, fetus, testes, joint spaces and central nervous system. Messaoudi likens members of the immune system to the Navy SEALs. "They are trained killers," she says, "so if you drop them in the wrong place and they misread their orders, it could lead to really big damage."

So, for the most part, the immune system stays away from those sites, making them great spots for viruses to hide out. (That's what other viruses do, like hepatitis B, and herpes viruses, including chicken pox, which hides in neurons for years and has the potential to re-emerge as shingles.)

But those viruses are different from Ebola, says Messaoudi. "Acute viruses like influenza, Ebola, yellow fever, West Nile [virus] — they infect, they replicate, and they're cleared. That's just how we've always thought of them. I've never heard of a yellow fever reservoir or a West Nile reservoir. Maybe they exist, and we just don't know about it."

Messaoudi says one of the most confusing things about the Ebola virus is its size. It's a "no-frills virus" with a tiny genome, she says. Viruses that can hide in immune-privileged places and live for years usually have a lot more genes that allow them to quietly survive.

But Ebola is managing to scrape by in some corners of survivors' bodies, and those places are, by nature, hard to get to. "It presents a huge challenge, because how do we get enough antivirals into these sites?" says Messaoudi. Getting to fluid in the spine requires a spinal tap. Patients with the virus inside their eye might need a fine needle to go straight into the space between the iris and the cornea. "So how do we eradicate those reservoirs?" she asks. "And why do some people end up developing these reservoirs and other people don't?"

Bausch says these questions are important scientifically but not necessarily in terms of disease control. For example, there's a small possibility that the arthritis that so many survivors report is from the virus itself, sitting inside joint spaces. But that would not pose a public health risk.

"Because how do you get infected from someone's joint space? You don't," he says.

But there are some potentially worrisome sites where the virus holds on, like in semen.

As data on survivors trickles in, Bausch says, "There is a sense across WHO and U.N. systems that we need to have renewed efforts in terms of not only caring for survivors but recognizing that there are still transmission issues that may relate to survivors. And that's a tough thing for people to take on, both in terms of the logistics, but also just emotionally."

"The whole thought over the course of this outbreak and previous Ebola outbreaks is: You get down to zero cases, and then you count 42 days, and then you say it's over," he says.

Cases where Ebola lingers in the semen, eyes or even uterus of survivors push the outbreak's finish line farther away.

"We've always known that it wasn't completely over," says Bausch. There's always the possibility that whatever first seeded this outbreak, likely a fruit bat, is still out there. "So, we've always known that there was the potential for reintroduction from the wild. But I think more recently and with these data coming in, we're understanding that there's also this potential for reintroduction from persistent virus production in humans, most notably from sexual transmission" — even though experts still think sexual transmission is rare.

Meanwhile, he says all the evidence points to survivors clearing their systems of Ebola virus over time. But, says Bausch, it's probably not the day that they walk out of the Ebola treatment unit.

To see just how long the virus might linger, the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Ministry of Health of Liberia have launched a five-year project to follow 1,500 survivors of the latest outbreak along with 6,000 of their close contacts. They'll monitor health issues, organ and eye function, and possibly bodily fluid content. It will be the largest controlled study of Ebola survivors to date. npr

Sexual Harassment Case Shines Light On Science's Dark Secret

A sexual harassment case is sending shock waves through the scientific community this week, and raising questions nationwide about how common sexual harassment is in science and why so little is typically done to stop it.

A six-month investigation by the University of California, Berkeley concluded in June that a faculty member, renowned astronomer Geoffrey Marcy, violated multiple sexual harassment policies over the course of a decade.

Marcy has been a leader in the hunt for Earth-like planets beyond our solar system, was head of a $100 million project aimed at finding life on other planets, and has often been touted as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize.

But he resigned Wednesday after a number of faculty members and students in his department publicly released letters condemning his inappropriate behavior with students, and the university's inadequate response in dealing with it.

The school had kept its investigation private — even from its own faculty — until the online news outlet BuzzFeed broke the story last week.

Aside from confirming that "Marcy violated campus sexual harassment policy," the university released no details about what the investigation found. But according to BuzzFeed, the report concluded that Marcy's offensive behavior included unwanted massages, kissing and groping of at least four students, from 2001 to 2010.

One of these students was Sarah Ballard, now a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She first met Marcy a decade ago when she was an undergraduate at Berkeley. He taught her astronomy class and showed special interest in her career, she tells NPR.

"To have a really renowned scientist praise you — and praise your ability — you can imagine, was really encouraging to me," she says.

At first, she and Marcy met a few times at cafes around campus, where they talked about astronomy and her career. But sometimes, she says, the conversation became too personal. He talked about when he was young and about having sex with a former girlfriend.

Then one day, Marcy gave Ballard a ride home. He parked the car by her house. "The fact that we were in the car together suddenly made me feel really uncomfortable," she says. "I think I really realized that the tenor of the mood was really wrong."

As Ballard started to get out of the car, the professor "reached over and was rubbing the back of my neck," she says. She left the car — and stopped getting together with Marcy outside of class.

Ballard says she was afraid to report Marcy. She didn't want to hurt her chances of going to graduate school. It's a common and very real conundrum for many women hoping to pursue university research careers, says Katie Hinde, a biologist at Arizona State University.

"Academia has a particular climate that allows sexual harassment, sexual assault and sexual abuses to persist," Hinde tells NPR. Last year, she co-authored one of the few studies aimed at figuring out how common sexual harassment is in science.

Hinde and her colleagues surveyed roughly 500 women doing fieldwork in a range of scientific disciplines. Seventy percent of those women told the researchers they had experienced sexual harassment, often from their mentors or supervisors — "people who had power over their career, who had power over their research," Hinde says.

In science, letters of recommendation from mentors are particularly crucial to obtaining a coveted faculty position, Hinde says. When a mentor sexually harasses or assaults a woman, it backs her into a corner: She can either report the offense, and possibly hurt her career. Or she can try to ignore it.

In fact, most harassment is never reported, says Heather Metcalf, research director of the Association for Women in Science.

Women are often told to keep quiet about lewd comments, touching and leering, she says. "There is a bit of a norm for those behaviors to sort of be brushed off, rather than be taken seriously."

An incident last summer involving the prestigious journal Science shows how common this attitude is, Metcalf says. A young female scientist wrote to the journal's advice column, asking what she should do about a situation in the lab where she worked.

"She was really enjoying the scientific work she was doing, but she was feeling really uncomfortable because she kept catching her supervisor trying to take a peek down her blouse," Metcalf says.

The magazine columnist essentially advised the woman to say nothing — to turn a blind eye, Metcalf says. Science eventually retracted the column.

But the culture of keeping silent about sexual harassment continues.

In Marcy's case, it took years of complaints before the university took up its investigation. Then it disciplined him privately.

The university, which declined an interview with NPR, confirmed in a written statement that Marcy was told to follow strict behavior guidelines or "be immediately subject to sanctions that could include suspension or dismissal." This agreement was the "most certain and effective option for preventing any inappropriate future conduct," according to the statement.

Michael Eisen, a molecular biologist at Berkeley, disagrees.

"In essence the university convicted him," Eisen says, "and what was so stunning to me was that Marcy got, at best, something you would describe as a slap on the wrist."

By not punishing him, Eisen says, "they're all but ensuring this kind of behavior is going to continue from others. Basically they're saying there are no consequences for this type of behavior."

In the days since the news got out, many scientists have demanded consequences.

Thousands of scientists have signed an online petition supporting the women Marcy harassed. And 24 faculty members in the department of astronomy at Berkeley signed and released a letter Monday that said, in part, "we believe that Geoff Marcy cannot perform the functions of a faculty member."

Marcy hasn't responded to NPR's request for an interview. He denies some of the allegations, but prior to his resignation, and to the publication of the BuzzFeed story, he posted a public apology "for mistakes I've made" on his faculty website.

Why Do European Zoos Kill Healthy Animals?

On Thursday, the Odense Zoo in Denmark is scheduled to dissect a lion for the educational benefit of children on school holidays.

The 9-month-old female lion was considered "surplus." Officials at Odense said they had too many female lions. And they also were concerned about inbreeding, according to reports. The lion was offered to other zoos, but when no takers were found she was killed and stored in a freezer earlier this year.

The zoo has been dissecting animals in front of guests for 20 years. The zoo's killing and dissection of this lion has outraged some, especially in the U.S. It's cumulative anger, because last year the Copenhagen Zoo carried out a similar double play — killing a healthy animal, Marius the giraffe, with a bolt gun then dissecting the body in front of schoolchildren and feeding the remains to its lions. At that time, Copenhagen Zoo Scientific Director Bengt Holst came under widespread fire outside Denmark;petitions called for his resignation.

But it's not just Denmark. The European Association of Zoos and Aquaria (EAZA)issued a statement on Tuesday supporting the Odense Zoo's plan. The statement notes that "culling of animals is one of a range of scientifically valid solutions to the long term genetic and demographic sustainability of animal populations in human care." It goes on to say that the dissection "for educational purposes is a valid choice of the zoo."

According to the BBC, between 3,000 and 5,000 healthy zoo animals are killed in Europe every year.

Here in the U.S., the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) says flatly that incidents of killing healthy surplus animals "do not happen at AZA-accredited zoos and aquariums." The whole thrust of captive management in this country centers around birth control.

Certainly, I can't picture elementary school children gathered at the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park or the San Diego Zoo to observe as an animal, once put on display to delight them, is taken apart joint-by-joint for their anatomical enlightenment.

A yawning cultural gap clearly exists in the European and American visions for the role of zoos in captive management of animals.

Earlier this week, I contacted the Copenhagen Zoo to ask Bengt Holst for his views on the Odense Zoo controversy. Told that Holst is traveling for business, I was directed to a page from the zoo's web site that he wrote. Key passages, which I excerpt here, explain that European zoos focus on the health of populations rather than of individual animals:

"When an animal's genes are well represented in the breeding programme and there is no place for the animal in another zoo, the European Breeding Programme has agreed that the animal is to be euthanized.

We see this as a positive sign and as insurance that we in the future will have a healthy animal population in European zoos. The most important factor must be that the animals are healthy physically and behaviourally and that they have a good life whilst they are living whether this life is long or short. This is something Copenhagen Zoo believes strongly in."

Why not administer birth control in order to achieve this same end, healthy animal populations? Holst continues:

"In Copenhagen Zoo we let the animals breed naturally. With naturally we mean that they will get young within the same intervals as they would in the wild. That means that the animals get to carry out their natural behaviours."

I'm struck by the terrible irony represented here: Zoos like this enclose animals in captivity, allow them to practice "natural behavior" of mating and reproduction, then slaughter them when they are no longer viewed as helpful to the project of coaxing visitors through the gates.

In a televised interview from last year, Holst talks about the killing and dissection of Marius the giraffe, defending the "natural" act of feeding Marius's body to lions. "Why protect schoolchildren from real life?" he asks.

But listen to the very first answer Holst offers to the interviewer. It is revealing: Children weren't invited to attend the slaughter of Marius because "when looked upon, the killing can be pretty cruel."

Zoos are entrusted to care for animals. There is no place in zoos — there should be no place, despite differences in cultural attitudes — for cruelty. npr

First penile transplant recipient 'to become father'

His girlfriend has reported that she is about four months pregnant, and this showed that the "transplant worked", said Andre van der Merwe.

The 21-year-old recipient, whose identify is being protected, lost his penis in a botched circumcision.

The operation took place in December.

Surgeons at Stellenbosch University and Tygerberg Hospital performed a nine-hour operation to attach a donated penis.

Dr Van der Merwe said he was "very pleased" when he heard that the man's girlfriend was pregnant, and had not asked for a paternity test as there was no reason not to believe the couple.

Further transplants

"This is what we intended, that he should be able to stand up and be able to urinate and have intercourse, so it is a milestone for him," Dr Van der Merwe told the BBC.

He had not expected the man to be infertile, as he had an issue with his penis, not his testicles, the surgeon added.

Dr Van der Merwe said the surgical team is yet to review the success of the operation, and may then carry out further transplants.

The boy had been left with just 1cm of his original penis as a result of the botched circumcision. He was 18 and sexually active at the time.

When attaching the donated penis, the surgical team used some of the techniques that had been developed to perform the first face transplants in order to connect the tiny blood vessels and nerves.

There have been attempts at penis transplants before, including one in China.

Accounts suggested the operation went well, but the penis was later rejected.

Doctors say South Africa has some of the greatest need for penis transplants in the world.

Dozens, some say hundreds, of boys are maimed or die each year during traditional initiation ceremonies. bbc

Last One Standing: Last Male White Rhino Under 24/7 Surveillance

The last male rhino left standing is now under strict surveillance to protect him from illegal poachers. Armed guards are keeping a watchful eye for Sudan, the rhino.

Sudan now becomes the last male rhino of its kind. He is now under protective care at the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya. Belonging to a rare, white rhino sub-species, Sudan is one of the five remaining white rhinos in the world. Together with his two female companions, they are the only ones left that roam free since the other two are housed in a zoo.

Efforts have been doubled to help protect the last male species in hopes that he could breed with the other female rhinos of his kind. To ensure that Sudan is closely monitored, he wears radio transmitters and had his horns cut off to hopefully discourage poachers from hunting him.

Originally, there were four white rhinos transferred from Dvur Kralove Zoo in Czech Republic. The translocation of these creatures was carried out to let them live in a favourable breeding ground in an attempt to save the species from extinction.

The environmental conditions at Ol Pejeta are ideal for the rhinos to start breeding and hopefully raise the population of the rare species. However, late in 2014, Suni died of natural causes, pushing the species nearer to extinction.

In the 1960s, more than 2,000 northern white rhinos roam the land, according to the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. However, due to increasing poaching activities, the number was reduced to 15 by 1980, and in 2015, only five remain alive. msn

clouded leopard

The clouded leopard, a native of Southeast Asia, is among the most charismatic, secretive and least understood cat species in the world. In 2002, the Thailand Clouded Leopard Consortium was created to learn more about this species and create a self-sustaining captive population.

Janine Brown, reproductive physiologist and head of the Endocrinology Laboratory at the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute (part of the National Zoological Park), talked with Smithsonian Science News about the consortium and how it has helped the clouded leopard. smithsonian

Scientists Catch Up On The Sex Life Of Coral To Help Reefs Survive

For the first time, biologists have caught a rare type of coral in the act of reproducing, and they were able to collect its sperm and eggs and breed the coral in the laboratory. 

The success is part of an effort to stem the decline in many types of coral around the world.

To understand how this works, you need to know that coral reefs are actually colonies of tiny organisms encased in hard skeletons. In many kinds of coral, the whole colony reproduces at once, in a spectacular event called "broadcast spawning." Males eject clouds of sperm into the water, and then females do the same with eggs. The sea creatures cross their fingers (or whatever the coral equivalent of that is) and hope for the best.

Scientists have observed this sort of thing before, but not with pillar coral, a rare type found in the western Atlantic and Caribbean that forms columns, or pillars. Marine biologist Kristen Marhaver, of the University of California, Merced, says that's because the researchers' timing was off. "For years, scientists were underwater about 30 minutes after the pillar coral spawned," she explains.

They were late in those expeditions because they were focusing on a different type of coral — elkhorn. As it turns out, elkhorn coral spawns just after the pillar coral does. Typically divers were still suiting up for the elkhorn spawning, Marhaver says, when the pillar coral was busy reproducing beneath their boat — and the divers would miss the pillar coral action completely. 

Three years ago, Marhaver and colleagues — with a group called Caribbean Research and Management of Biodiversity, on the island of Curacao — figured that out. Eventually they nailed down the pillar coral's mating moment.

The moment came "three days after the August full moon, 100 minutes after sundown," she says. So the next time they spawned, Marhaver was in the water waiting, and saw what looked like a cloud rising from the reef. npr

Reproductive processes of planktic foraminifera Orbulina universa

skip to 2:30 for the best part :)

wes anderson version of a porno

CDC Considers Counseling Males Of All Ages On Circumcision

In the past 15 years, studies in Africa have found that circumcision lowers men's risk of being infected with HIV during heterosexual intercourse by 50 to 60 percent. Being circumcised also reduces men's risk of infection with the herpes virus and human papillomavirus.

Those health benefits prompted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's proposed recommendation that doctors counsel parents of baby boys and teenagers, as well as men, on the benefits and risks of circumcision.

"The compiling of the different data sources may really be sufficient for someone who is a heterosexual male to consider the benefit of circumcision," Dr. Susan Blank, a pediatrician and chairwoman of the American Academy of Pediatrics' circumcision task force, told Shots.

In 2012, the American Academy of Pediatrics said for the first time that the benefits of circumcision outweigh the risks, and that insurers should pay for the procedure. npr

Sex 'emerged in ancient Scottish lake'

Scientists believe they have discovered the origin of copulation.

An international team of researchers says a fish called Microbrachius dicki is the first-known animal to stop reproducing by spawning and instead mate by having sex.

The primitive bony fish, which was about 8cm long, lived in ancient lakes about 385 million years ago in what is now Scotland.

The research is published in the journal Nature.

...Prof Long added that the discovery was made as he was looking through a box of ancient fish fossils.

He noticed that one of the M. dicki specimens had an odd L-shaped appendage. Further investigation revealed that this was the male fish's genitals.

"The male has large bony claspers. These are the grooves that they use to transfer sperm into the female," explained Prof Long. bbc