Remember Those Urban Myths About Waking Up In a Tub of Ice, Sans Kidney?

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Well, here’s the 2009 version: Waking up with your head shaved, a chip implanted in your brain, and hornier than David Duchovny. With your guilty Significant Other leering at you. Yup, now there’s a ‘sex’ chip ready to be soldered into your brain. From the Daily Telegraph:

The chip works by sending tiny shocks from implanted electrodes in the brain.

The technology has been used in the United States to treat Parkinson’s disease.

In recent months scientists have been focusing on the area of the brain just behind the eyes known as the orbitofrontal cortex—this is associated with feelings of pleasure derived from eating and sex.

A research survey conducted by Morten Kringelbach, senior fellow at Oxford University’s department of psychiatry, found the orbitofrontal cortex could be a “new stimulation target” to help people suffering from anhedonia, an inability to experience pleasure from such activities. His findings are reported in the Nature Reviews Neuroscience journal.

Neurosurgery professor Tipu Aziz, said: “There is evidence that this chip will work. A few years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman. She didn’t like the sudden change, so the wiring in her head was removed.”

But oh what a wild coupla weeks that was.

Moral of the story: If your SO has been complaining about your low sex drive—sleep in a helmet.

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It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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