A new Iranian public survey on sex and sexuality revealed some surprising stats about the deeply religious and culturally conservative Islamic Republic, TheEconomist reports:
An 82-page document recently issued by Iran’s parliamentary research department is stark in its findings. Not only are young adults sexually active, with 80% of unmarried females having boyfriends, but secondary-school pupils are, too. Illicit unions are not just between girls and boys; 17% of the 142,000 students who were surveyed said that they were homosexual. [...]
The report is also a rare official admission of the unspoken accord in Iran: people can do what they want so long as it takes place behind closed doors. Parliament’s researchers, on this occasion, were allowed to say the unsayable.
Addressing the premarital sex taking place between heterosexuals, Parliament's researchers suggest they should be allowed to publicly register their union using sigheh, an ancient practice in Shia Islam that allows people to temporarily marry.
Homosexuality in Iran, meanwhile, continues to be legally punishable with imprisonment, torture and execution.
We've been following NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program for awhile now, and finally have some HD video of it to share. The footage chronicles the LDSD's recent balloon-and-parachute-enabled test-flight and was captured with a...
French freediver David Helder has been diving for over 35 years, and somewhere along the way he discovered a strange ability. Like a dolphin, Helder can blow perfectly controlled bubble rings underwater. While many divers have playfully experimented with blowing these whirling vortexes, Helder has dedicated significant time to perfecting the technique which he uses to perform dozens of different tricks. Watch the video to see him in action, thing get really interesting around the 2:40 mark. (via Sploid)
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Switching as soon as I can get my AT&T iPhone unlocked.
T-Mobile keeps riding its UnCarrier plans to increased post-paid subscribers and added over a million in total for Q2 2014, including 579,000 phone subscribers. That compares to its much larger competitor Verizon, for example, which added only...
We've been following NASA's Low-Density Supersonic Decelerator (LDSD) program for awhile now, and finally have some HD video of it to share. The footage chronicles the LDSD's recent balloon-and-parachute-enabled test-flight and was captured with a...
These days, data centers, portable USB battery chargers and all sorts of transportation are going green thanks to fuel cell technology. Now you can add submersibles to that list: Japan is developing a 33-foot-long submarine that runs off...
The spinning top is one of the oldest and seemingly simplest toys devised in human history, but that doesn't mean we can't improve it. Disney Research has come up with a new algorithm that allows it to design a stable spinning toy out of almost any...
The movie industry has seen its share of struggles as we transition into a digital future, and likely no one has felt the pinch more than film company Kodak. The struggling outfit is getting a life-raft, though, in the form of several studios...
T-Mobile keeps riding its UnCarrier plans to increased post-paid subscribers and added over a million in total for Q2 2014, including 579,000 phone subscribers. That compares to its much larger competitor Verizon, for example, which added only...