In their recent and widely publicized paper, Joel et al. (2015) made two main empirical claims. First, they claimed that the brains of individual males and females show very little internal consistency in their combination of " male-typical " and " female-typical " features, e.g.: " Our results demonstrate that even when analyses are restricted to a small number of brain regions (or connections...

Relative allocation to female and male function in hermaphroditic species often departs from strict equisexuality. Increased femaleness with plant size in animal-pollinated species has been proposed in theory and demonstrated in empirical studies. However, such size-dependent sex allocation (SDS) has not been observed in some insect-pollinated species, throwing doubt on the generalization of SD...

The W chromosome of the silkworm Bombyx mori has been known to determine femaleness for more than 80 years. However, the feminizing gene has not been molecularly identified, because the B. mori W chromosome is almost fully occupied by a large number of transposable elements. The W chromosome-derived feminizing factor of B. mori was recently shown to be a female-specific PIWI-interacting RNA (pi...

In their foundational work on the social construction of gender, Kessler and McKenna (1978) investigated the relationship between gender attribution and genital attribution. We used digital reproductions of the original stimuli to replicate their findings in the current social context. To further investigate the underlying decision processes we applied eye tracking. The stimuli shown varied in ...

While married female members of the Japanese aristocracy followed the ideal of bearing children, female Buddhist novices and ordained women, often belonging to the aristocracy themselves, had to abstain from sexual activity and reproduction in accordance with the ordination rules. Infertility was considered with disdain by the first group, whereas not bearing children was the utmost expression ...

Divergent steroid hormone profiles can shape the development of male versus female neural phenotypes, but whether they also determine differences in the short-term, neurophysiological patterning of behavior is unknown. We now show that steroid hormone-specific modulation of a vocal pattern generator (VPG) diverges between reproductive morphs in a teleost fish. Only type I male midshipman acoust...

Inter-species transmission is often incriminated in the epidemiology of Pestivirus diseases. The purpose of this study was to investigate the prevalence of Pestivirus in some mountain wild ungulates and to determine their role in Pestivirus transmission, as mountain pastures are a place where cohabitations between wild and domestic ungulates are particularly high. Between 2003 and 2007, a longi...

COSMETIC surgery is not a new phenomenon. Facelifts, nose jobs, breast reduction and breast implants have been common among women for decades, and the profession and practice of cosmetic surgery is well established in many countries, including many developing countries. However, in the past 10–15 years, there has been a seismic shift in what is considered possible and desirable to change as reg...

BACKGROUND A common feature of most genetic sex-determination systems studied so far is that sex is determined by nonrecombining genomic regions, which can be of various sizes depending on the species. These regions have evolved independently and repeatedly across diverse groups. A number of such sex-determining regions (SDRs) have been studied in animals, plants, and fungi, but very little is ...

Papaya is a semi-woody tree that produces fruit rich in vitamins and minerals. It is trioecious with male, female, and hermaphrodite plants. Though many theories have been suggested in the past, papaya sex is determined by a pair of nascent sex chromosomes; females have two X chromosomes, males have an X and a Y, and hermaphrodites have an X and a Y, which varies slightly from the male Y. Any c...