After baffling biologists for decades, the female orgasm has resisted yet another attempt to explain its elusive evolutionary origins.

A survey of orgasmic function in thousands of twins found none of the statistical patterns expected if female orgasm is just a coincidental byproduct of natural selection on its male counterpart, as has been suggested.

“The evolutionary basis of human female orgasm has been subject to furious scientific debate, which has recently intensified,” wrote University of Queensland geneticist Brendan Zietsch and Pekka Santtila of Finland’s Abo Akedemi University in a...

A few years ago, people laughed at Amazon’s Kindle, especially its clunky hardware design and CEO Jeff Bezos’s breathless rhetoric about how it would change how customers bought and experienced media. Now that we’re getting closer to the unveiling of Amazon’s long-rumored, slickly designed multimedia tablet, nobody’s laughing any more.

Amazon has swiftly become the most disruptive company in the media and technology industries. Its potential in this space is simply off the charts: bigger than Apple’s, bigger than Google’s or Microsoft’s. It’s becoming a purer version of all three.

Amazon’s c...