There are some stories that stay with you forever, the big scientific moments that change the course of history. These are not those moments – but we can’t stop thinking about them anyway. Surgeon Stuart Meloy was performing a pain-relief operation on a woman’s spine when she started exclaiming emphatically.
This inspired Meloy to invent an implant to help women who are unable to achieve orgasms in the usual way. _New Scientist_broke the news in 2001, sparking a frenzy of worldwide media excitement. But 13 years later, Meloy was still struggling to raise funds for a full clinical trial, and the “orgasmatron” never reached a climax. We aren’t the only primates capable of coming up with creative ways to pleasure ourselves.
In a study of long-tailed macaques (_Macaca fascicularis_) in Bali, Indonesia, Camilla Cenni at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, and her colleagues filmed hundreds of examples of male and female monkeys using stone tools as sex toys, rubbing or tapping them on their genitals. According to Cyril Grueter at the University of Western Australia, the Balinese monkeys get plenty of food handouts from humans, and this frees up time for sexual experimentation. But some monkeys in other places have unusual kinks, too: another study reported a wild macaque in Japan rubbing its genitals on the back of a sika deer.
In 2015, surgeon Sergio Canavero announced plans to carry out the first human head transplant, intended to extend the lives of people with muscle and nerve degeneration or widespread cancer. He claimed his technique could overcome technical hurdles, including how to fuse the spinal cord and prevent the body’s immune system from rejecting the head. In the following two years, Canavero published animal experiments supposedly backing up his methods, but other surgeons remained highly sceptical.
A human head transplant never did happen, but Canavero has reportedly moved on to an even bolder ambition: transplanting a brain into a non-sentient clone. Have you ever wondered if a rat can drive a car? Kelly Lambert at the University of Richmond in Virginia has.
She and her colleagues built a tiny car with three copper bars that would steer it left, forward or right. Sure enough, 18 rats learned to drive towards food rewards. They even found it relaxing, as measurements of their stress hormones indicated.
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