Related topics: men

What medieval artists teach us about animal sex

The prevailing view is that animals mainly have sex to reproduce. Until recently, therefore, scientists assumed that animals were relentlessly heterosexual. This is the message conveyed by countless zoos, wildlife documentaries, ...

Online sex ads rebound, months after shutdown of Backpage

Smaller escort websites are vying for the lucrative online sex-for-hire market Backpage.com dominated before U.S. authorities shut it down earlier this year, a move that fractured the industry and forced law enforcement to ...

Could Porn Be Good For Society?

(PhysOrg.com) -- The arguments against pornography are many, ranging from insistence that porn degrades women and is morally reprehensible to the assertion that pornography viewing is the cause of sex crimes. However, over ...

Tinder is a waste of time for most people

Dating apps won't help you much if your goal is to have more relationships. You would probably succeed just as well—or poorly—without it.

New steps in the meiosis chromosome dance

Where would we be without meiosis and recombination? For a start, none of us sexually reproducing organisms would be here, because that's how sperm and eggs are made. And when meiosis doesn't work properly, it can lead to ...

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Sex

In biology, sex is a process of combining and mixing genetic traits, often resulting in the specialization of organisms into male and female types (or sexes). Sexual reproduction involves combining specialized cells (gametes) to form offspring that inherit traits from both parents. Gametes can be identical in form and function (known as isogametes), but in many cases an asymmetry has evolved such that two sex-specific types of gametes (heterogametes) exist: male gametes are small, motile, and optimized to transport their genetic information over a distance, while female gametes are large, non-motile and contain the nutrients necessary for the early development of the young organism.

An organism's sex is defined by the gametes it produces: males produce male gametes (spermatozoa, or sperm) while females produce female gametes (ova, or egg cells); individual organisms which produce both male and female gametes are termed hermaphroditic. Frequently, physical differences are associated with the different sexes of an organism; these sexual dimorphisms can reflect the different reproductive pressures the sexes experience.

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