By Erin Garcia de Jesús My early days of nursing a newborn felt like I’d transformed into a 24-hour diner. A demanding yet adorable customer flagged me down with piercing cries to demand milk around the clock. Unfortunately, I was also on clean-up duty, wiping spit-ups and poopy butts. Breastfeeding is hard work. But after reading science journalist Elizabeth Preston’s book The Creatures’ Guide to Caring, I’m glad I’m not a burying beetle. The critters use mouth and anal secretions to knead small dead animals into slick balls of meat. Parent beetles then bury the smothered carcasses and lay their eggs nearby. Some species even feed their brood regurgitated bits of carcass, helping the young beetles grow to 200 times their original size in just six days. “A newborn human growing at that rate would be the size of a beluga whale in less than a week,” Preston writes. Suddenly my own kid doesn’t seem so heavy. The Creatures’ Guide to Caring was born out of Preston’s growing fascination with the biology of parenting after having her first child. “If so many people have done it before you, and are doing it right now — if so many animals are doing it without books or apps or advice to heed — why is it the hardest thing you’ve ever done?” she writes. Perhaps by finding kinship in the animal world, Preston could learn something about her new role as a parent. Each chapter dissects the benefits and drawbacks of parenting, piecing together how it evolved in humans and other creatures. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30191 - Posted: 04.08.2026

By Catherine Offord For most people, Oktoberfest means guzzling liters of beer inside a giant tent. But for one research group in Denmark, it’s a chance to study how our bodies know when we’ve had enough. In a preprint posted on bioRxiv last week, researchers combined a small study of people at Germany’s fall beer festival with mouse experiments, genetic analyses, and blood tests from drunk medical students as well as people with alcohol dependence. Their findings, though preliminary, hint that a hormone commonly associated with morning sickness might also have a role in limiting humans’ alcohol consumption. “I found it fascinating,” says Marlena Fejzo, a women’s health scientist at the University of Southern California who has studied GDF15, the hormone involved. Though the study relies mostly on associations and can’t prove cause and effect, it “lends support” to the idea that GDF15 stops us from overconsuming harmful substances, she adds. GDF15 rises sharply during early pregnancy and is thought to contribute to vomiting and feelings of sickness. Some researchers think it evolved as a protective mechanism: Nausea may help an expectant parent avoid unfamiliar or spoiled food that could harm the fetus. But GDF15 is also present in people who aren’t pregnant and has been linked to appetite suppression. It has even attracted interest from the pharmaceutical industry as a potential antiobesity drug. Matthew Gillum, an endocrinologist at the University of Copenhagen, began to wonder about the hormone’s effect on alcohol intake after collaborating on a study of revelers at the Roskilde music festival. That research measured blood hormone levels in young men who’d spent a week binge drinking and eating junk food and found multiple changes—including a rise in GDF15. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30168 - Posted: 03.21.2026

By Viviane Callier The difference between a doting dad and a deadbeat one may come down to a molecular switch in the brain — at least in African striped mice. Boosting activity of a particular gene in part of the brain known for regulating maternal care turned nurturing males into standoffish ones and even, in some cases, into mouse pup killers, researchers report February 18 in Nature. The findings reveal how social context can alter gene activity in the brain and thereby shape male caregiving. Male caregiving is prevalent in fish and amphibians, suggesting that it is a very ancient behavior in vertebrates. Among mammals, however, fewer than 5 percent of species have fathers that stick around to raise their young. Male African striped mice (Rhabdomys pumilio) are one of the exceptions to the rule, though they vary a lot in their nurturing tendencies, making them an ideal species in which to study the factors that influence this behavior. Some look after the young and groom them; others ignore the pups or even attack them. The same male could become aggressive or doting. To understand that behavior, comparative neurobiologist Forrest Rogers and his colleagues observed the mice’s social environment. In laboratory settings, group-housed males tended to be aggressive toward mouse pups when introduced to them. But surprisingly, when these males were moved to be housed alone, they became very paternal. “I thought clearly something must be wrong, because all the work we know of in mice and rats is that if you socially isolate them, they become very anxious and often not the most caring of individuals,” says Rogers, of Princeton University. But the lone African striped male mice didn’t seem anxious at all. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 30159 - Posted: 03.14.2026

By Phie Jacobs Talk about an odd couple. At least 100,000 years ago, a female Atlantic molly (Poecilia mexicana) living in the fresh waters near what is now Tampico, Mexico, mated with a male sailfin molly (Poecilia latipinna). The offspring of this cross-species coupling ought to have been sterile, like a mule. But this particular hybrid went on to birth a brood of daughters—all of which were genetic clones of their mother. Scientists have long assumed this reproductive strategy of birthing clones to be an evolutionary dead end among vertebrate animals, with offspring inevitably succumbing to genomic degradation over time. But the Amazon molly (Poecilia formosa), named for the fierce female warriors of Greek mythology, has kept on defying the odds. According to research published today in Nature, it all comes down to a quirk of genetics that helps reverse harmful mutations. “This is a very cool story,” says University of Oklahoma biologist Ingo Schlupp, who provided the study authors with samples but otherwise wasn’t involved in the new work. Researchers who study asexual animals, he explains, have been “scratching our heads” trying to figure out how some species manage to avoid what evolutionary theory predicts to be certain doom. Although asexual reproduction is common in bacteria and plants, it only rarely occurs in vertebrate animals. Often, these “virgin births” involve a process called parthenogenesis, in which an embryo develops from an unfertilized egg cell—no contribution from the other sex required. The Amazon molly, however, is far from celibate. These fish still mate with males from closely related species because they need sperm to kick-start the development of their embryos. But none of the male’s genetic material gets passed on to the next generation. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30158 - Posted: 03.14.2026

By Emma Gometz Caribou, large deer that are native to the northernmost parts of the world (and sometimes called reindeer), are the only deer whose females grow antlers. In a study published today, researchers observed behavior that might explain why: female caribou appear to gnaw on shed antlers as a kind of postbirthing supplement. Caribou migrate huge distances every year between the places where they graze during the winter and the grounds where they calve in the spring. They can walk thousands of miles per year and likely have the longest terrestrial migration of any animal. Caribou mothers complete these extremely long migrations with antlers on their head and a calf in their womb. The period is very nutritionally demanding for them but culminates with a reserve stock of supplements when they need it the most. The researchers behind the new study figured this out when they observed bite marks in more than 80 percent of the 1,500 caribou antlers that littered the part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska where the deer give birth. “[Caribou] are just really going after the antlers. They are highly selective,” says study co-author Joshua Miller, a paleoecologist at the University of Cincinnati. Female caribou shed their antlers just days before giving birth. Miller and co-author Madison Gaetano, a conservation paleobiologist, say that the findings suggest that female caribou are essentially banking nutrients in the form of antlers before they give birth and then gnawing on their freshly shed antlers to get a boost of protein, calcium and phosphorus they need to make up for having less time to graze as they nurse their calves. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30136 - Posted: 02.25.2026

By Natalia Mesa Most male mammals do not dote on their young and may even attack them, but some African striped mice actively feed, groom and nuzzle their own and even others’ pups. These profound behavioral differences come down to a single gene: agouti. This gene controls pigment production in the hair or skin of many animals. But in African striped mice, it also acts as a volume knob to silence caregiving circuits in the brain, according to a study published today in Nature. “It’s remarkable that this one gene is able to lead to a dramatic change in behavior,” says Robert Froemke, professor of genetics, neuroscience and otolaryngology at New York University, who was not involved in the work. Male African striped mice that live in isolation for roughly 2 months after weaning tend to nurture pups later in life, even those that are not their own, whereas their peers that live with other mice tend to be indifferent fathers or even infanticidal, the study found. The fatherly mice express lower levels of agouti in the brain compared with their more aggressive counterparts, the study shows. “Agouti, we think, is a molecular integrator of environmental experience,” says study author Ricardo Mallarino, associate professor of molecular biology at Princeton University. Despite the fact that only about 5 percent of mammalian species show fatherly behavior, parental care may be the default mode in striped mice, the research suggests. Both males and females use the same brain circuitry to care for their young, but enhanced agouti expression in the brain suppresses these instincts in the former. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Aggression
Link ID: 30133 - Posted: 02.21.2026

By Chris Simms Some sex differences in brain-connectivity patterns become more pronounced with age, according to new research. Researchers studying brain-imaging data from people aged between 8 and 100 found that sex differences in the brain’s connections are minimal in early life, but then increase drastically at puberty; some of these differences continue to grow throughout adult life. The study was published as a preprint on bioRxiv1, and has not yet been peer reviewed. The work could help us to understand why men and women have different likelihoods of developing some mental-health disorders — and perhaps give insight into treating them, say the researchers. For example, women are about twice as likely as men to develop anxiety or depression2, and boys are about four times more likely to be diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder than girls3. “We are very excited about this study, which to our knowledge is the first one to compare how sex differences in brain networks evolve over the lifespan,” says Amy Kuceyeski, a computational neuroimager at Weill Cornell Medicine in Ithaca, New York. However, some neuroscientists who spoke to Nature aren’t convinced that the differences found between male and female brains are due to sex, and say the study does not address differences in gender roles, which are known to be important factors when researching brain mechanisms of health and disease. Human brains do not belong in distinct ‘female’ and ‘male’ categories, says Daphna Joel, a neuroscientist at the University of Tel Aviv in Israel, referring to a 2015 study she co-authored, which suggests that each human brain is a mosaic of features, some of which are more common in men, others in women4. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30128 - Posted: 02.18.2026

By Elizabeth Preston On the island of Golem Grad in North Macedonia, visitors may see a chain of tortoises mounting each other like a slow-moving, libidinous locomotive. It used to strike Dragan Arsovski, an ecologist at the Macedonian Ecological Society, as funny. Now that he knows what’s really going on, he isn’t laughing. This uninhabited island in a country that once was part of Yugoslavia is crawling with around 1,000 Hermann’s tortoises — especially males. They pursue mates aggressively, making life unhealthy and short for the island’s scarce females. Some of those females even die by walking off the island’s cliffs. In a paper published last month in the journal Ecology Letters, researchers have found that the relentless males are driving their population to extinction. The island, in Lake Prespa, has a forested plateau encircled by sheer cliffs. When Dr. Arsovski started studying the salad-plate-size tortoises in 2008, “it was quite a dense and seemingly prosperous population,” he said. But for some reason, there were far more adult males than females — 19 males for every female on the plateau, at the latest count. He and his colleagues documented how the males seemed to manage their carnal instincts by mounting each other. Then, after many years of study, Dr. Arsovski realized that the females were undersized and dying young. He also realized those once-comical copulatory trains were made up of many males pursuing just one female. When the female tired, the train would become a frenzied heap of reptiles. “She’s literally buried by males,” Dr. Arsovski said. He and his co-authors wrote that as part of the tortoises’ courtship, they “bump, bite (sometimes to the point of blood loss), mount and finally vigorously poke fleeing females” with a sharp tail tip. Three-quarters of the island’s females had genital injuries. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30125 - Posted: 02.18.2026

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen Everyone who menstruates and lives long enough experiences menopause in one form or another. Yet despite that, research into what happens during this natural cessation of menstruation and why is limited. Scientists know that menopause can cause a myriad of neurological symptoms, from hot flashes to poor sleep to depression. But what is going on in people’s brain during this period is still murky. Now new research offers clues to a link between menopause and changes in the brain’s gray matter, as well as anxiety and depression. Using brain scans from 10,873 people in the U.K., the researchers found that postmenopausal participants showed lower volumes of gray matter in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, which are involved in storing and retrieving memories, and in the anterior cingulate, which is involved in emotional regulation. The researchers also looked at whether hormone replacement therapy (HRT), a frontline but still rarely prescribed treatment for symptoms of menopause, might ameliorate some of these changes. Barbara Sahakian, a psychiatry professor at the University of Cambridge and an author of the study, explains that she and her colleagues theorized HRT might influence people’s experiences, tamping down their neurological symptoms, for instance. “That was the hypothesis,” she says, “but it didn’t seem to pan out completely that way.” They found that people who were treated with HRT for menopause showed lower volumes of gray matter in some areas of the brain than those who did not receive HRT. The HRT group also showed higher rates of anxiety and depression—importantly, Sahakian says their work doesn’t find that HRT treatment causes brain changes or menopause symptoms. Previous research suggests HRT prescribed during the run-up to menopause and early postmenopause can reduce anxiety, depending on the kind of HRT and dose, in at least some women. And a subsequent analysis found that participants who were prescribed HRT were more likely to have reported anxiety and depression before HRT treatment, the study explains. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30097 - Posted: 01.28.2026

By Ellen Barry and Pam Belluck Emily Sliwinski got home from the hospital after giving birth to her first child three years ago, and almost immediately began spiraling. Her thoughts raced; she was unable to sleep; she began hallucinating that her dog was speaking to her. She became obsessed with solving the national shortage of infant formula, covering a corkboard with notes and ideas. About a week later, Ms. Sliwinski, of Greensboro, N.C., went to a hospital emergency room, thinking she would be given medication to help her sleep, she said. She had no history of mental health issues. When doctors decided to commit her for inpatient psychiatric treatment, she became so agitated and fearful that she slapped her mother and her husband. She spent 11 days in the psychiatric hospital, but it didn’t help. “Every day I was trying to figure out where I was and what was happening,” Ms. Sliwinski, 33, recalled. Doctors there did not connect her symptoms to childbirth, she said, and diagnosed her with schizophrenia. It was only when her family got her transferred to a specialized perinatal psychiatric unit at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that doctors zeroed in on the right diagnosis: postpartum psychosis. Ms. Sliwinski’s delayed diagnosis reflects an issue simmering in the highest echelons of American psychiatry. For more than five years, a group of women’s health specialists have been pushing for postpartum psychosis to be listed as a distinct diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the thousand-page guidebook that influences research funding, medical training and clinical care. But two committees at the apex of the D.S.M. have been split over whether to add it. “Psychiatry’s Bible,” as it is sometimes known, has raised the evidentiary bar for including new diagnoses — only one, prolonged grief syndrome, has been added since 2013. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30087 - Posted: 01.21.2026

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Same-sex sexual behaviour among non-human primates may arise as a way to reinforce bonds and keep societies together in the face of environmental or social challenges, researchers have suggested. Prof Vincent Savolainen, a co-author of the paper from Imperial College London, added that while the work focused on our living evolutionary cousins, early human species probably experienced similar challenges, raising the likelihood they, too, showed such behaviour. “There were many different species that unfortunately [are] all gone, that must have done this same thing as we see in apes, for example,” he said. Writing in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Savolainen and colleagues reported how they analysed accounts of same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates, finding it to be widespread in most major groups, with reports in 59 species including chimpanzees, Barbary macaques and mountain gorillas. That, they added, either suggested an evolutionary origin far back in the primate family tree, or the independent evolution of the behaviour multiple times. While some studies have previously highlighted the possibility such behaviour could help reduce tensions in groups or aid bonding, the new study looked across different species to explore its possible drivers. The results reveal it to be more likely in species living in drier environments, where resources are scarce, and where there is greater risk from predators. “Previous research has shown there is a heritable element to [same-sex sexual behaviour], however, there is also environmental influence which is often overlooked,” said Chloe Coxshall, the first author of the study. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30080 - Posted: 01.14.2026

By Susan Dominus After years of a marriage that had little sex in it, Greg Carter had largely accepted that his wife no longer had any interest. The last thing he expected was that right around the time that they both were nearing 50, his wife would have a complete change of heart. “She was pouncing on me,” he said. His wife had recently started taking testosterone to manage her menopausal symptoms — at a dose so high that it brought her testosterone levels higher than is typical even for women in their 20s. The difference in her desire was almost immediate. “I had the experience of feeling like a teenage boy,” she told me. The shift vastly improved Greg’s own happiness, so much so that he sometimes felt pangs of regret about the years they spent together without a sex life. “I realized, later in life, all that we had missed out on,” he says. Earlier this year, I published an article on how women are increasingly — with widely varying results — seeking out testosterone to help them with energy or their sex lives. Some women who take testosterone at relatively low doses approved by major medical societies feel little change in their bodies, while others see an increase in their desire. Women who take high doses — doses that exceed levels approved by major medical societies — often report sharp upticks in their interest in sex. Franny’s doctor prescribed her testosterone (along with estrogen and progesterone) in what’s known as a pellet, a small medical product the size of a grain of rice that is inserted beneath the skin. Often those pellets, which release hormones over the course of several months, provide doses of testosterone that bring their levels much higher than those that women would have naturally — which was true in Franny’s case. “I feel like I want it sometimes more than my husband,” Franny told me when I was reporting my original article. There was a hint of nervousness in her tone of voice — that dynamic was a shift from their norm and one that made me realize it wasn’t just Franny’s life that had changed, but also Greg’s. And that made me wonder what it would be like to be the partner of someone who was undergoing such a radical shift. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30060 - Posted: 12.31.2025

By Bethany Brookshir Women of reproductive age are more likely than other people to report gut problems like irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and can feel dismissed by doctors, as clinicians often put the pain down to diet, stress or hormones. It was never just “in their heads.” A complex interplay between an important hormone, chemical signals, rare populations of gut cells and the output of gut bacteria could explain why, researchers report December 18 in Science. While the findings are in mice, they suggest new opportunities for treatment. Gut pain is a visceral experience — literally, pain in the viscera, from nerves that spread throughout the torso and abdomen. “It can be bloating, it can be a sharp pain or it can be just sort of a constant, dull pain,” says David Julius, a neurophysiologist at University of California, San Francisco. About 10 percent of the global population — mostly women —suffers symptoms of IBS, which can occur with diarrhea, constipation or a mix between the two. “What makes this so bad is that these women are feeling this pain, they go into the physician … and they were just ignored,” says Holly Ingraham, a physiologist also at the University of California, San Francisco. Ingraham and Julius knew that the hormone estrogen played a role in this type of pain, which can fluctuate with the menstrual cycle and pregnancy. In a 2023 paper, they showed that female mice are more sensitive to this visceral pain than males. Without estrogen, that extra sensitivity disappeared. The researchers immediately went looking for cells that might sense estrogen in the gut. To affect a given organ, its cells must have proteins called receptors that recognize estrogen and set off signals in response. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30056 - Posted: 12.20.2025

By Angie Voyles Askham Rats, like people, jump at the chance to repeat a task that rewards them handsomely, but they are less eager when the reward is paltry: They learn from past experience and update their behavior accordingly. That learning is shaped by the hormone estradiol, according to a new study. And when estradiol levels peak during the estrus cycle, female rats adapt their behavior in response to reward size more quickly than they do during other phases—and faster than males overall. The female rats also have a larger release of dopamine in response to an unexpected reward, along with reduced expression of dopamine transporters in a reward center of their brain after the hormone peaks, the new work shows. “It’s giving mechanistic insight into how estrogen modulates reinforcement learning—all the way down to the molecular mechanism,” says Ilana Witten, professor of neuroscience at Princeton University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who was not involved in the study. The team behind the new work used a task that measures how much an animal values an anticipated reward: Thirsty rats poke their nose into a central port and then listen for a tone that indicates how much water one of two side ports will dispense. The animals choose to either hold out at the cued location for the reward or to abandon the trial and start a new one by poking their nose into the other side. Rats learn to initiate their next trial more quickly when the experiment is doling out large rewards and to hold off on initiating new trials when rewards are small, previous work from the group has shown. “It takes a lot of energy to initiate a trial, so if there are small rewards, it’s not as motivating,” says study investigator Carla Golden, a postdoctoral researcher in Christine Constantinople’s lab at New York University. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Attention
Link ID: 30028 - Posted: 11.26.2025

By Ali Watkins The act has been called many things: Centrifugal motion. Perpetual bliss. The thrill of the moment. Unstoppable. In technical terms, it is “non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Or, as her majesty Faith Hill might say, “This kiss.” And, it turns out, it’s also really old. British scientists say they’ve traced the age of the kiss, to anywhere from 16 million to 21 million years ago, and have found that it was far more common among other species than previously understood. Ants? They smooch. Fish? Kissers. Neanderthals? Yep, they puckered up, too — sometimes even with us. But kissing, the researchers said, has always been something of a so-called evolutionary mystery. It doesn’t present much benefit for survival, it has minimal reproductive benefits, and it’s mostly symbolic. “Kissing is a really interesting behavior,” said Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University who led the study. Dozens of societies and cultures use it, it’s common, and it has weighted symbolism. But, she said, “we’ve not really tested it from an evolutionary perspective.” In prehistoric kissing, it seems, could be the primitive origins of our search for intimate connection. The act inherently requires vulnerability, and trust. It’s not always sexual and is often used among and between genders simply to show affection, and often between parents and offspring. Though researchers found evidence of kissing in several species, they narrowed the focus of the study mostly to the behavior of large apes, like gorillas, orangutans and baboons. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30022 - Posted: 11.22.2025

By Roni Caryn Rabin The most stressful part of the trip for Sunny Brous came when she had to part with her wheelchair so that the flight crew could put it in the luggage hold. You just never know what shape it will be in when you get it back, she said. “I tell them, ‘Take the best care of it you can,’” she said. “Those wheels are my legs! Those wheels are my life.” Ms. Brous, 38, who lives in Hico, Texas, was one of dozens of women who converged on the Sea Crest Beach Resort on Cape Cod toward the end of summer for the gathering of a club no one really wanted to be a member of: women diagnosed in their 20s and early 30s with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S. The terminal neurodegenerative disorder robs them of the ability to talk, walk, use their hands or even breathe. It has long been seen as a disease of older men, who make up a majority of patients. There is no cure. The women traveled with husbands, mothers, sisters and aides, and they did not travel light. Their packing lists included heavy BiPAP machines to help them breathe, formula for their feeding tubes, commodes, portable bidets, myriad chargers, leg braces and canes, pills and pill crushers and bottles of a medication with gold nanoparticles that was still being tested in clinical trials. Half of Ms. Brous’s suitcase was filled with party gifts for the friends she texts with throughout the year on an endless WhatsApp chat, including bags of popcorn with Texan flavors like Locked and Loaded, a Cheddar, bacon, sour cream and chives combo that you can only get in Hico. Desiree Galvez Kessler’s sister drove her, her mother and an aide up from Long Island in a van with a clunky Hoyer transfer lift in the back. Ms. Kessler — Desi to her friends — was diagnosed at 29, and has not been able to walk or speak for 10 years; the large computer tablet that she communicates with using eye-gaze technology is mounted on her wheelchair. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: ALS-Lou Gehrig's Disease ; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30009 - Posted: 11.12.2025

By Daniel Bergner Marie began taking fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac, when she was 15. The drug — an S.S.R.I., a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor — was part of her treatment in an outpatient program for an eating disorder. It took its toll on her sexuality. “I was in touch with initial sparks of sexual energy relatively young,” she said, remembering crushes as far back as the age of 6 or 7. Shortly before starting on the drug, she was dazzled, from a distance, by a blue-eyed hockey player at school, tall and funny and charismatic. She recalled the fluster and fantasies he stirred. But on the medication, she felt the infatuation vanish swiftly. Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason Martin “And then,” Marie said, “I realized, Oh, I’m not developing new crushes.” She had no clue that the drug might be the cause: “I wasn’t informed about sexual side effects.” Even as the worst of the eating disorder abated, psychiatrists and family doctors told Marie and her parents that she should stay on an antidepressant. She complied, while trying and failing to escape the sexual side effects. She traded fluoxetine for other antidepressants, including Wellbutrin, a different class of antidepressant, which is sometimes prescribed to combat low libido. She’s 38 now and has been off psychiatric medication for six years. But sexual desire remains absent. “For me it’s just an empty dark space,” she said. “There’s nothing there.” Marie told me she has PSSD, post-S.S.R.I. sexual dysfunction, a loss of sexuality that persists after the drug is no longer being taken. It’s a controversial designation, because while the sexual side effects of S.S.R.I.s are well established — depleted or deadened desire, erectile dysfunction for men, elusive arousal for women, delayed and dulled orgasms or the inability to reach orgasm at all — the general assumption is that they subside completely when the drug is no longer in your system. Some psychiatrists suspect that PSSD is actually a result not of repercussions from the drugs but of the problem that led the patient to be medicated in the first place. Depression itself can stymie sexuality. So can anxiety, the other leading reason patients are prescribed S.S.R.I.s. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30006 - Posted: 11.12.2025

By Susan Dominus Spend enough time speaking to women who are taking testosterone — specifically, in very high doses — and you start to notice that they sound messianic. They’re often talking fast and intensely; they’re amped up; they’re describing what they clearly consider a miracle drug; and they have no intention of lowering their dose, despite the unknown risks or some problems with facial hair. After all, how can they worry about facial hair when they feel so alive? It’s nothing they can’t take care of with a quick waxing, which they now have the energy to do at the end of the day — right after they prepare a high-protein dinner for their family and before they put the finishing touches on their spreadsheets, close their laptops and light a few mood candles for the sex that they know will be great, maybe even better than the sex they had last night, even though they’re a day older. “It’s changed my marriage,” Jessica Medina, a 41-year-old marketing consultant in Orange County, Calif., told me. With four kids in the house, and sex happening six times a week (up from “How about never?” pre-testosterone), she had to put a lock on the bedroom door. She and her husband had attended a “marriage growth” group at church for years, but it took testosterone for their relationship to be, as she put it, “100 times closer.” She was a little less emotional, a little less sentimental than she used to be, but she didn’t have time for that kind of thing, anyway. “It’s more like: Get stuff done, handle business, work out,” she said. “In order to do all that and still have time for our kids and their sports, there’s no time to whine about how hard it is.” Catherine Lin, a single mother who ran a bicoastal fashion media company, went on testosterone in her early 40s to raise her energy. She got the boost she wanted, started lifting heavier weights, decided to pursue a degree in holistic nutrition and enjoyed an unexpected side effect: She started having orgasms for the first time in years. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Hormones & Behavior; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 29978 - Posted: 10.22.2025

By Giorgia Guglielmi Male and female human fetuses show distinct patterns of gene activity and DNA regulation in the cerebral cortex, according to a new analysis of thousands of individual brain cells. The study offers one of the most detailed maps to date of how such activity differs between boys and girls’ brains during the second trimester. It also compares sex differences in gene activity in fetuses with spontaneous genetic changes in autistic people, revealing clues as to how these de novo changes affect boys and girls. “As the field evolves, this [work] will be a helpful reference” for exploring sex-related molecular differences in early brain development, says Matthew Oetjens, assistant professor of human genetics at Geisinger Medical Center, who was not involved in the study. Understanding these differences may help explain why certain neurodevelopmental conditions are more common in one sex than the other, he says. Autism, for example, is diagnosed about four times more often in boys than in girls, but scientists are still trying to understand why. Theories include the possibility that boys are more vulnerable, girls are sometimes protected, or a combination of both. “We know that autism … has a very strong genetic component. What is not known is how the genetic risk architecture intersects with any differences at the molecular level that might exist between male and female human brains,” says study investigator Tomasz Nowakowski, associate professor of neurological surgery, anatomy and psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. More than 940 genes are expressed differently between the sexes, according to the new analysis of more than 38,000 brain cells from 21 female and 27 male mid-gestation fetuses. Most of these differentially expressed genes are more active in females. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Autism; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29977 - Posted: 10.22.2025

By Michele Cohen Marill Like many first-time mothers, Lisette Lopez-Rose thought childbirth would usher in a time of joy. Instead, she had panic attacks as she imagined that something bad was going to happen to her baby, and she felt weighed down by a sadness that wouldn’t lift. The San Francisco Bay Area mother knew her extreme emotions weren’t normal, but she was afraid to tell her obstetrician. What if they took her baby away? At about six months postpartum, she discovered an online network of women with similar experiences and ultimately opened up to her primary care doctor. “About two months after I started medication, I started to feel like I was coming out of a deep hole and seeing light again,” she says. Today, Lopez-Rose works at Postpartum Support International, coordinating volunteers to help new mothers form online connections. About one in eight US women go through a period of postpartum depression, making it among the most common complications of childbirth. It typically occurs in the first few weeks after delivery, when there’s a sudden drop in the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone. As scientists unravel chemical and genetic changes caused by those shifting hormones, they are discovering new ways to diagnose and treat postpartum depression, and even ways to identify who is at risk for it. Graph showing a steady rise in levels of estradiol and progesterone after conception and then a very steep drop-off right after birth. The hormones estradiol (the main form of estrogen) and progesterone rise during pregnancy. In some women, their sudden drop after childbirth triggers the onset of postpartum depression. The first-ever drug for postpartum depression, containing a derivative of progesterone, received US Food and Drug Administration approval in 2019. That marked a new approach to the disorder. This winter, in another major advance, a San Diego-based startup company will launch a blood test that predicts a pregnant woman’s risk of postpartum depression with more than 80 percent accuracy. © 2025 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 29972 - Posted: 10.18.2025