I Want Your Antibodies
Welcome to the inaugural post of The Sex Files. Almost every publication worth its druthers has a sex column these days, full of Carrie Bradshawish musings about life and love, men and women, this and that. Here's our take on the genre. Instead of faux-sociology, we'll give you a broad view of new research and ideas in the sexiest of the hard sciences: reproductive biology, evolutionary anthropology, and genetics. This is sex from the inside out. Keep track of the column at popsci.com/sexfiles, where you can also sign up for an rss feed. Disassortative mating alert! A group of European scientists led by Oxford biostatistician Raphaelle Chaix has provided some of the most compelling evidence yet that we humans pick our partners based on how different their immune systems—or officially, their Major Histocompatibility Complexes—are from our own. read more