Sex Gender

Caster Semenya started to run almost as soon as she could walk. She played soccer with the boys in her rural village. At school races, she'd lap the other girls -- sometimes twice or more. Even then, according to friends quoted by South African news reports, girls teased her about looking like a boy. Semenya shrugged it off and kept on running. But after she exploded onto the athletic stage Wednesday in the World Championships in Berlin, beating her nearest rival in the women's 800-meter race by a whopping 2.45 seconds, the question was back: Is she really a she?

For THOSE who have poured themselves a stiff cocktail at the end of an awful day -- or a spat, traffic ticket or office crisis -- it's official: You are likely trying to distract yourself from negative emotions. And if this is how you tend to respond, you're more likely to be a man than a woman. A Yale University study finds that under stress, women report more sadness and anxiety than men, but men report more craving for alcohol.

The notion that boys are better than girls at math simply doesn't add up, according to a study published today in the journal Science. An analysis of standardized test scores from more than 7.2 million students in grades 2 through 11 found no difference in math scores for girls and boys, contradicting the pervasive belief that most women aren't hard-wired for careers in science and technology.

Contrary to the long-standing image of female bonobos as the peaceful matriarchs of their species, scientists have observed the creatures capturing, killing and eating young monkeys in the lowland evergreen forests of Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The discovery undermines the conventional wisdom that hunting among primates is an outgrowth of male dominance and aggression, according to a study published Tuesday in the journal Current Biology.

Heart transplant patients are as much as 25% more likely to survive if the sex of the donor is the same as the patient's, researchers said Wednesday. The results surprised experts because, for most types of transplants, sex differences are irrelevant as long as a good immunocompatability is achieved.

Using growth hormone to make short kids taller isn't the first time medicine has sought to manipulate the height of healthy children. Estrogen treatment to halt female growth -- recently in the news because of a report about a Seattle family using medical interventions to stop the growth of their severely disabled daughter -- was used for decades beginning in the 1950s to slow the growth of healthy girls.

The boys, American-born offspring of immigrants, were healthy, growing normally and on track to be of average height. "There was no indication of anything abnormal," says Dr. Anna Haddal, pediatric endocrinologist at UCLA. "But the parents still wanted them to be on growth hormone because they wanted them taller. Sometimes parents obtain wealth and they want more for their children."

Contrary to the long-held belief that anorexia and bulimia are female afflictions, the first national survey on eating disorders has found that one-quarter of adults with the conditions are men. The study estimated that about 850,000 men had suffered from the disorders and, despite two decades of intense attention to the conditions, had gone largely undetected.

Aaron Frazier married his college sweetheart Danielle four years ago knowing that she out-earned him by $10,000 a year. Now, that gap is even bigger. But even though Aaron's accountant salary today is half the $90,000 his wife makes monitoring clinical drug trials, it still doesn't cause any friction. "I think both of us are pretty modern," said Danielle, 29, of Antioch, Tenn.

For women, apparently there's nothing like the smell of a man's sweat. Researchers at UC Berkeley said women who sniffed a chemical found in male sweat, called androstadienone, experienced elevated levels of an important hormone, along with higher sexual arousal, faster heart rate and other effects. The study -- published this week in the Journal of Neuroscience -- is the first direct evidence that people secrete a scent that influences the hormones of the opposite sex, the researchers said.