SEX

When I watch the Carl's Jr. commercial featuring "Top Chef" host and mega-model Padma Lakshmi make hot sweet love to a Western Bacon Cheeseburger, I have many thoughts, some of which, I confess, are not entirely to my credit. The spot features the former Mrs. Salman Rushdie sitting on a brownstone stoop in a clingy sundress hiked up mid-thigh, cramming the giant burger into her educated maw and sucking barbecue sauce from her fingers and wrists.

Whether it's seen as a clever little gadget to help a woman keep a secret or a devilish deception that threatens Islam, the Artificial Virginity Hymen Kit is not welcome in Egypt. The kit allows a bride who is not a virgin to pretend that she is. A pouch inserted into the vagina on her wedding night ruptures and leaks a blood-like liquid designed to trick a new husband into believing that his wife is chaste. It's a wink of ingenuity to soothe a man's ego and keep the dowry intact.

How well should people know each other before they have sex? In the biggest classroom at UC Santa Barbara, sociology professors John and Janice Baldwin are reeling off survey results showing that male and female students are almost equally willing to sleep with someone they love. But the hall erupts in knowing laughter as a gender gap emerges: Men, the long-married couple reports, remain eager for sex through descending categories of friendship and casual acquaintance. Women don't.

As many as 13% of children receive sexual solicitations online, but very few are from adults over age 21, according to a report released Tuesday by a Harvard University task force. The findings led the task force to conclude that parents may worry too much about their children's exposure to adult sexual predators, and too little about how to teach kids to resist advances from other kids or the type of seductions that could lead to statutory rape.

As they seek to document and demystify one of life's great thrills, scientists have run across some real head-scratchers. How, for example, can they explain the fact that some men and women who are paralyzed and numb below the waist are able to have orgasms? How to explain the "orgasmic auras" that can descend at the onset of epileptic seizures -- sensations so pleasurable they prompt some patients to refuse antiseizure medication?

Dr. Stuart Meloy never set out to study orgasms. It was an accident. He was in the operating room one day in 1998, implanting electrodes into a patient's spine to treat her chronic leg pain. (The electrodes are connected to a device that fires impulses to the brain to block pain signals.) But when he turned on the power, "the patient suddenly let out something between a shriek and moan," says Meloy, an anesthesiologist and pain specialist in North Carolina.

Thanks to Viagra, Cialis and Levitra, men with erectile dysfunction can get on board the Food and Drug Administration-approved love train. But women who experience a different sexual problem -- sagging libido -- have been left at the station. That may be changing. BioSante Pharmaceuticals Inc. is testing the safety and effectiveness of LibiGel, a testosterone gel for women designed to combat declines in sexual arousal associated with menopause. There are currently no drugs available in the U.S.

2Amid the tumult of the delivery room, Rohit and Geeta Jain were calm about one thing: Their new baby was sure to be a boy. Six months earlier, the Jains had spent more than $300 for a test that screened a minute quantity of Geeta's blood for traces of male DNA. The testing company said it was 95% accurate in determining the sex of a baby, even as early as the eighth week of pregnancy. After six hours in the delivery room, Rohit gaped as his wife gave birth to a daughter.

Legislators excoriated top Interior Department officials Thursday at a hearing on the sex, drugs and gifts scandal in the oil royalties program, saying the scandal could have dire ramifications for the anticipated expansion of offshore drilling along U.S. coasts. The hearing before the House Committee on Natural Resources came a week after the department's inspector general, Earl E.

Far be it from us to pick nits with billionaire Warren Buffett in these bleak economic times, but perhaps he knows more about finance than he does about sex. "It's nice to have a lot of money, but you know, you don't want to keep it around forever," Buffett, worth $62 billion at age 78, told Bloomberg News recently. "Otherwise it's a little like saving sex for your old age." His compatriots might disagree.