Mercyvill

(Getty Images) Pleasure-inducing implants can induce orgasms at the push of a button, but as Frank Swain discovers, there’s a curious history behind this technology. Scientists have created a bionic hand which allows the amputee to feel lifelike sensations from their fingers This month, news outlets worldwide issued breathless reports of a wondrous implant that causes orgasms at the touch of a button. The Orgasmatron, patented by Dr Stuart Meloy, is a small box wired to the spine that can send out waves of pleasure signals whenever the user desires. Dig a little deeper though, and it turns out this technology has a strange and fascinating backstory.

(Getty Images) Fatherless pregnancies happen in nature more than we thought, says Frank Swain, so what’s stopping human beings from doing the same? Sleeping in a room with too much light has been linked to an increased risk of piling on the pounds Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman, as the singer Tammy Wynette famously said. As if doing the reproductive heavy lifting wasn’t bad enough, nature played a cosmic prank in making women need men to complete the task, and giving them a limited window in which to have children. Perhaps it would be simpler if women could go it alone. After all, not all animals are so hung up on sex. As New Scientist reported earlier this month, virgin births in nature are common . The females of several large and complex animals, such as lizards and sharks , can reproduce without males, a process called parthenogenesis – and now we’re realising it happens in the wild more often than we thought. So...

(Thinkstock) It’s almost impossible to get a laugh by self-tickling, says David Robson, and the reason why tells us surprising things about the brain and consciousness. Why do we laugh when we are being tickled and how can it be a relaxing experience? If you want to probe some of the great mysteries of the human mind, all you need is a duster and your feet. Sit back, take your shoes and socks off, and gently stroke its feathers against your sole. Now ask a friend, parent or child to do the same for you. If you are like most people, you will be left stony-faced by one, but convulsed in a pleasurable agony by the other. How come?

A journey to the village of Chibok, where insurgents hide in the bush as families mourn the loss of their daughters. On Monday morning, May 12, I sat in the backseat of a Toyota Corolla, headed to Chibok. With a satin abaya draping my body in a sheath of black, and my hair curled underneath a black chiffon hijab, my careful effort to blend into northeastern Nigeria’s conservative, predominately Muslim society appeared to be working. The soldiers who peered into the backseat gave me casual glances, waving us past checkpoint after checkpoint. “This is the heartland of Boko Haram,” said the governor of Borno State when I visited him in the state capital of Maiduguri along the way.

Allies of Robert Mugabe have labeled T.B. Joshua, the prominent televangelist, a "Satanist." HIV/AIDS patient Miss Mary Udoh receives "miraculous healing" from Prophet T.B. Joshua of the synagogue Church For All Nations during a service at Ikotun-Egbe district in Lagos, the commercial nerve centre of Nigeria.(Reuters). Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity are powerful forces in sub-Saharan politics. So, too, is the belief in prophecy and sorcery. In Zimbabwe, it is tense times, with uncertainty about President Robert Mugabe's health, the dates of the next election, and whether constitutional and other reforms will be achieved. Taken together, faith and politics are the context for the Zimbabwean partisan wrangling over a Nigerian Pentecostal preacher.

A generation after Fela Kuti invented a genre and challenged his oil-rich government, his youngest son Seun is carrying on the tradition. Nigerians file past the body of Afrobeat star Fela Anikulapo-Kuti at his funeral in 1997 / Reuters It was 1969 when Sandra Izsadore first heard Fela Kuti. The Nigerian musical icon, more commonly known as just Fela, was performing at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He sang in his native tongue, Yoruba. "I asked him what he had been singing about, and he told me, 'I was singing about soup,' so I started laughing," Izsadore said.

Oona Räisänen/Flickr The European Parliament complex in Brussels, where I happen to be sitting at the moment, is meant to be a monument to post-World War II continental ideals of peaceable integration, tolerance, free speech, and openness. All of these notions seem to be under attack at once, and what is striking to me, as a relatively frequent visitor to Europe over the past year, is that not many people—until a few hours ago, at least—seem to believe that their union, and their basic freedoms, are under threat.

Steven Gerrard says he would not be leaving Liverpool if the club had offered him a contract last summer. The Reds captain, 34, was offered a new deal in November but has opted to end his 25-year Anfield stay and is nearing a move to Los Angeles Galaxy. "If a contract had been put in front of me in pre-season I would have signed it," Gerrard told the Liverpool Echo.   The midfielder says a November chat with manager Brendan Rodgers about reducing his playing time was crucial.

(Thinkstock) Running a business without bosses, job titles and hierarchy might sound like a recipe for chaos. A number of companies, however, are testing out the idea with the aim of keeping employees happy, clients satisfied and boosting the bottom line. Richard Sheridan is typical of many managers who ditched the organizational chart, after being burned from his experience at a hierarchical organisation. By1999 Sheridan was vice president of research and development at a public company, where he had worked his way up the career ladder. Even though he was successful on paper, he hated going into work every day. “I was fed up with the stupid quarterly debt marches and stupid quarterly reviews,” Sheridan said. “When I see stupid I want to fix it.”

                              The World's First 1,000 Mph Supersonic Car The Bloodhound SuperSonic Car (SSC) has hit the world land speed record at 1,000 mph, it has emerged. It's said to be made of titanium, carbon fiber and, like superman, is designed to go faster than a speeding bullet. The Bloodhound SSC has been painstakingly put together and tested over the better part of six years. In 2016, the UK-based team plan to take the 42-foot (8.9m) vehicle to Hakskeen Pan, a dry lake bed in South Africa, for a crack at the record breaking attempt.

The presidential candidate of APC,Gen Buhari and other executive members of the party this morning  visited some members of APC who were shot during his presidential campaign in Port Harcourt yesterday .

The Department of State Services (DSS) has said that its investigations indicated that the All Progressives Congress had plans to hack into the database of the Independent National Electoral Commission. The service explained that the confessions from the staff arrested at the APC office at 10,Bola Ajibola Street, Ikeja, and the items retrieved from the building showed that the party had an elaborate plan to hack into the commission’s database and inflate the number of its membership. The Deputy Director, Public Relations, DSS, Marilyn Ogar said this at a news conference on Wednesday in Abuja. More details later…

Dr Jonathan. Part 1: Here I am not saying GEJ is a saint or the best man for the job but his current political gladiator is not better. GEJ has performed well in some areas, Fair in some areas, and very poorly in some areas. The depth Nigeria has sunk into especially in corruption did not start from GEJ. Nigeria was named the 2nd most corrupt country in the world in 1996 by Transparency International; the most corrupt country in 1997 and 3rd most country in 1998; GEJ was not the President at the time.

Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo state gives Gen. Buhari a hand- shake. Buhari remains the single most popular man in northern Nigeria. Despite lacking real party structure, Buhari, with CPC in 2011, defeated Jonathan in Yobe, Borno, Zamfara, Sokoto, Niger, Kebbi, Katsina, Kano, Kaduna, Gombe and Jigawa. He single-handedly polled a total of 12,214,853 votes, which amounted to 54.3 percent of Jonathan's tally. Riding on the back of APC's nationwide structure backed by 14 governors and their war chest, a Buhari victory in 2015 is quite possible.

Masterpieces, translated into tintype photos. Left: “Petite Maraudeuse,” 1900, by William Adolphe Bouguereau. Tintype by Pollard & Santoli Masters Gallery. 5 inches by 7 inches. Right: A tintype portrait of Eric Alexander Santoli by Charles Edward Harrigan. (Courtesy of Eric Santoli) When it comes to fine art reproductions, you have photos of paintings turned into posters, and Giclée prints on canvas with hand-painted brushstrokes for texture. Painter Eric Alexander Santoli and wet-plate photographer Christopher-Calvin Pollard are adding a new (albeit old) medium to the options: tintypes. The two share a love of the medium and both make the reproductions by hand, a labor-intensive and calculated process. Their gallery in Los Angeles, which shares space with an old bookstore, sells 5 by 7 inch or 8 by 10 inch tintypes of contemporary and old master paintings—so far, all realistic.

The US and Arab allies are hitting targets in Syria, but some Western European states refused to take part Planes, bombs and crack commandos are at the forefront of the battle against Islamic State, but in the background a crucial battle of ideas is tackling one of the biggest questions in international life: what exactly is a state? Almost every politician, expert and commentator have been clear on one thing: Islamic State is not a state. Islamic State, they say, is a terrorist organisation. It seems clear enough. IS militants have beheaded people on video. They have ransacked towns and villages. They have killed or threatened to kill anyone who dissents from their view of Islam. They have stolen territory from Iraq and Syria. There is no question of them gaining UN membership, or being accepted by any other international organisation.

A man with two penises has been speaking to Newsbeat about living with the condition. Known only as Triple D, the 25-year-old from the east coast of America claims to have had 1,000 sexual partners. He suffers from diphallia which is a rare condition where a male is born with two penises. According to a report by the BMJ - the global healthcare knowledge provider - one-in-five million males in the world are born this way. "My life would never ever be the same again if I allowed my identity to be revealed," he told Newsbeat. We agreed to keep his identity anonymous. He said he doesn't want to become "a butt of a joke" and a "novelty". "If I wasn't going to have sex with you then you wouldn't know I had two [penises]. It's rare that anyone does know."

Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart was a one-eyed, one-handed war hero who fought in three major conflicts across six decades, surviving plane crashes and PoW camps. His story is like something out of a Boy's Own comic. Carton de Wiart served in the Boer War, World War One and World War Two. In the process he was shot in the face, losing his left eye, and was also shot through the skull, hip, leg, ankle and ear. In WW1 he was severely wounded on eight occasions and mentioned in despatches six times. Having previously lost an eye and a hand in battle, Carton de Wiart, as commanding officer, was seen by his men pulling the pins of grenades out with his teeth and hurling them with his one good arm during the Battle of the Somme, winning the Victoria Cross.

The construction of a huge dam in Ethiopia and the introduction of large-scale agricultural businesses has been controversial - finding out what local people think can be hard, but with the help of a bottle of rum nothing is impossible. After waiting several weeks for letters of permission from various Ethiopian ministries, I begin my road trip into the country's southern lowlands. I want to investigate the government's controversial plan to take over vast swathes of ancestral land, home to around 100,000 indigenous pastoralists, and turn it into a major centre for commercial agriculture, where foreign agribusinesses and government plantations would raise cash crops such as sugar and palm oil. After driving 800km (497 miles) over two days through Ethiopia's lush highlands I begin my descent into the lower Omo valley. Here, where palaeontologists have discovered some of the oldest human remains on earth, some anci...