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Men who watch porn have less brain grey matter

Porn consumption has been linked to differences in the structure and function of male brains 

Image: PornHub

Men who watch porn have significantly less grey matter in their brains, a new study shows. MRI brain scans of 64 men between 21 and 45 years of age were taken while participants were shown images of porn and people exercising. 

The participants were later requested to provide information about weekly porn consumption via a phone interview. Every person in the study volunteered to answer these questions, even though they were not told that this information would be needed before commencing. The men had a wide range of porn consumption averaging 4 hours a week.

Men with higher porn consumption had lower grey matter volumes. Interestingly, when men were shown sexually explicit material during the MRI scan, the region of the brain associated with motivation showed reduced activity. 

"Our findings indicated that grey matter volume of the right caudate of the striatum is smaller with higher pornography use,"  researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany told ABC Science.

The study could not show that porn caused men's brains to lose grey matter. "Future studies should investigate the effects of pornography longitudinally or expose naive participants to pornography and investigate the causal effects over time", researchers told ABC Science.

This research was published this week in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.

Source: ABC Science

Dutch company launches new-generation urban wind turbines

Could a new generation of wind turbines on residential rooftops be on the way? Saying no might be easy when imagining blade noise, if nothing else. The idea of wind turbines for generating energy in households may draw several arguments against the idea. One may argue the yield from current-generation turbines would be too low, along with having to put up with the noisy blades. A group based in Rotterdam which describes itself as an "R&D" company "built on the re-invented formulas, drawings and principles of Archimedes" is out to change minds. On Tuesday, the company, also called The Archimedes, unveiled its Liam F1 Urban Wind Turbine. The Liam, according to the company, ushers in a "totally new generation of wind turbines for domestic use."

The company said that the turbine easily fits on the roof of a house just as would solar panels. The Liam F1 generates an average of 1,500 kilowatt-hour of energy at a wind-speed of 5m/s, which resembles half of the power consumption of a common household. In combination with solar-panels on the roof, a household could be totally self-supporting for its own energy needs. The Archimedes CEO Richard Ruijtenbeek said, "when there is wind you use the energy produced by the wind turbine; when the sun is shining you use the solar cells to produce the energy."

Because of its design, the Liam addresses limitations of efficiency and noise. The inventor, Marinus Mieremet, company CTO, created a type of turbine that is virtually soundless. The Liam is based on "the laws of nature and the theoretics of the Greek mathematician Archimedes." The form of the Liam is a Nautilus shell. The Liam automatically like a pennant goes for the optimal position of the wind, pointing into the wind for maximum yield.

According to Mieremet the yield is 80 percent of the maximum that is theoretically feasible.