Month: August 2016

How Many People Share Sexts?

Texting (Salon)

Texting (Salon)

You know you’ve thought about it. You get a sext from someone, and you want to get feedback from your friends, either on how hot this person is, or how to respond (or both). But do you take the plunge and share it?

Almost 1 in 4 people would choose to share it. A recent Indiana University (home of the famed Kinsey Institute) study, published in the online journal “Sexual Health,” surveyed 5K+ single people ages 21-75. For the purposes of this study, “sexting was defined as the transmission of sexual images and messages via cell phone or other electronic device.”

Of the respondents, despite 73% uncomfortable over sexts shared non-consensually, 23% reported that they shared said sexts. Clearly, there’s a breakdown of the sexting social contract: You may expect that the other person would not choose to share your sext, but that person might not be on the same wavelength. Good to keep in mind when sexting, everyone.

The study also highlighted a few other things that may be seen as common knowledge. Women are more likely to be upset if their sext gets shared than men are. Men are nearly 2X more likely to share sexts than women. Also, age correlated with perceived risk with regards to sexting. (Interestingly, the study doesn’t mention what age this thought process begins to take place.) Concerns over if and/or how sexting affected this group by 60-74%.

 

Tinder Usage Up 129% Among Athletes at the Rio Summer Olympics

Rio Olympics 2016 (Indian Express)

Rio Olympics 2016 (Indian Express)

By now, it’s common knowledge that Olympic athletes hook up during their time in the Olympic Village. And naturally, one way to facilitate this is via dating apps. Specifically, Tinder has proved to be the number one choice for Olympic athletes looking to get laid.

Over the first weekend of this year’s Olympics, Tinder usage spiked a whopping 129% amongst the athletes. Impressive, right? But the data is incomplete.

This is the second Olympics where Tinder has made a splash. During the Sochi Olympics in 2014, it was reported that mobile dating usage surged, and that Tinder was the app of choice. However, since this is solely anecdotal evidence, no numbers have been reported so that we can’t gauge the size of said surge. And we cannot make any year-over-year comparisons of the growth.

Another issue is that, yes, Tinder usage is up 129% among athletes, but to what are we comparing the activity? Are we comparing to the usage data to the previous Summer Olympics (which would be London in 2012) or the most recent Olympics (the aforementioned Sochi)?

Though the number raises a few questions, it’s pretty entertaining to realize that elite athletes are just like the rest of us.

Link Between Tonsils and Appendix and Fertility Discovered

Tonsils (Daily Mail UK)

Today in “Things You (Probably) Wouldn’t Guess:” Scientists have discovered that the presence of tonsils or an appendix affects fertility.

A study conducted by University of Dundee and University College London found that if woman had either organ removed, they were more likely to both to become pregnant, but also to get pregnant earlier in life. (If you remember from middle school math class, this is what’s called an inverse relationship.) The study followed 530K+ women in the UK over a 15-year period. Over 54K women had their appendix removed, 112K+ women had their tonsils removed, and 10K+ women had both appendices and tonsils removed.

Women who’d had their appendix removed got pregnant at a 34% higher rate than women who still had their appendix. Women who’d had their tonsils removed got pregnant at a 49% (!) higher rate than women who still had their tonsils. And women who’d had both procedures got pregnant at a 43% higher rate than women who had not undergone both procedures.

It’s not clear yet why these things are linked together. But it flies in the face of long-time conventional medical wisdom, which had previously declared that removing a woman’s appendix affected her future fertility due to scarring around her fallopian tubes (a crucial passage for her eggs).