julia wallace

Nikon’s annual Small World Competition has been awarding prizes to the country’s best microscope-aided photography since 1977. The contest winners always present a reliably fascinating and freakish slice of life at a Lilliputian level. Last week, this year’s 115 winners were announced.

The cute and cuddly prairie vole, one of only a few mammals that remain monogamous for most of their lives, has long been a favorite “lab rat” for scientists studying love and attachment. Now researchers at Emory University and the University of Regensburg have found that prairie voles actually show signs of grieving—the opposite of attachment—when they’re taken away from their romantic partners.

It's been a hot week in the science of sex.

First of all, for all of you Intactivists out there (and I know there are a lot of you round these parts), a major finding might bolster your claim that routine circumcision isn't worth the risk.

It was only a matter of time before pop-news outlets pounced on a biological explanation for the tidal wave of bad credit and risky decisions that has engulfed the U.S. this month: it was those dang men and their raging hormones!

Welcome to the inaugural post of The Sex Files. Almost every publication worth its druthers has a sex column these days, full of Carrie Bradshawish musings about life and love, men and women, this and that. Here's our take on the genre. Instead of faux-sociology, we'll give you a broad view of new research and ideas in the sexiest of the hard sciences: reproductive biology, evolutionary anthropology, and genetics. This is sex from the inside out. Keep track of the column at popsci.com/sexfiles, where you can also sign up for an rss feed.

Disassortative mating alert! A group of European scientists led by Oxford biostatistician Raphaelle Chaix has provided some of the most compelling evidence yet that we humans pick our partners based on how different their immune systems—or officially, their Major Histocompatibility Complexes—are from our own.