Nepali Women Protest $600 'Marry-a-Widow' Incentive

Nervous systems shut down, making it harder to feel pain

(NEWSER) - Orgasms are nice—so nice that, for women at least, they kinda make you invincible. Neuroscientists studied women pleasuring themselves while in MRI body scanners, to see what happens inside the brain during orgasm. They found that 30 different parts of the brain light up with pleasure so strong that the nervous system begins to shut down—making it more difficult for a woman to feel pain, the Sun reports. More»

First of all, that bad mood isn't necessarily her fault

(NEWSER) - Looking to get a little insight into the female brain? LiveScience helps a guy out by offering 10 neat (and revealing) facts about what goes on inside a woman's head:

• It’s not just PMS: A woman’s menstrual cycle actually affects her every day of the month, with hormone levels changing her moods and energy. “It is not entirely an issue of free will,” one doctor says.
• Yep, she can read your mind: Kind of. Women are biologically programmed to be intuitive, because they need to be able to keep their children alive without any means of verbal communication.

Hubby's death just the start of pain

(NEWSER) - Newly widowed women in Kenya must have unprotected sex with a stranger to "purify" themselves, and in Bangladesh their only hope is to turn to their sons for economic support—if they're lucky enough to have any. In many parts of the world, the pain of losing a husband is only the beginning of a widow's plight. A new international widows' rights movement hopes to draw attention to problems like these: More»

They wanted to discuss security; she channeled 'The View'

(NEWSER) - Hillary Clinton was relaxed in her town hall-style address to professional Pakistani women today in Islamabad, discussing “habits of the heart,” like tolerance and compromise, and touting the female doctors sent on US aid missions to Pakistan. It was nice, she said with a chuckle, to not talk about security for once. But the women wanted to talk security, the Christian Science Monitor observes, and they left feeling frustrated. More»

They'll lose 1 inch and gain 2 pounds by 2409

(NEWSER) - Humans are still changing, and the female winners of the evolutionary crapshoot will be shorter and heavier down the line. A new study that tracked the motherly productivity of the slim-and-tall set alongside their squatter peers concludes that a lower center of gravity will win out in the end, and it offers a surprising prediction: By 2409, women will be on average almost an inch shorter and 2 pounds heavier. More»