Google Billionaire to Wed

Larry Page, 34, the co-founder of Google Inc. announced plans to marry on the weekend of Dec. 8th. The lucky lady is Lucy Southworth. The wedding location has not been disclosed. The two have been dating for over a year.

Lucy Southworth was a biomedical informatics doctoral student at Stanford University. She will be marrying a multi-billionaire. Larry Page is said to be worth $20 billion. The invitation list to Page's wedding is expected to include many of Google's current and former employees, as well San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and billionaire Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group.

Former Vice President Al Gore, a senior adviser at Google, has been invited to the wedding but won't be able to make it because he will be picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in Oslo, Norway. He said he still hopes to make an appearance through video conferencing.

Is Love a Mental Illness?

The problem with the word love is that it has so many different meanings, usually requiring a descriptive adjective to clarify its context; passionate, romantic and committed usually refer to various stages of sexual attraction, while familial, religious, platonic, narcissistic, altruistic etc. refer to relational or situational bonds from which a sense of security, pleasure or satisfaction is derived. I love: my wife, my brother, my new car, baseball, chocolate, my job and God; all have different meanings.

The "sexual attraction" form of love has been the subject of much scientific inquiry. It has long been known that there is a strong chemical component involved in falling in love, and new brain scanning studies have shown that love is not an emotion but a motivation or drive:

The early stages of a romantic relationship spark activity in dopamine-rich brain regions associated with motivation and reward. The more intense the relationship is, the greater the activity.

The regions associated with emotion, such as the insular cortex and parts of the anterior cingulate cortex, are not activated until the more mature phases of a relationship, says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist from Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Early on in a relationship, the images showed that the brain seems to be very focused on planning and pursuit of pleasurable reward, says Fisher, mediated by regions called the right caudate nucleus and right ventral tegmentum. The same regions become active when a person enjoys the pleasure of eating chocolate

There are also patterns that resemble aspects of obsessive compulsive disorder.

"Activity in one particular area of the anterior cingulate cortex is in common," says Lucy Brown, a neuroscientist from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. "The activity is correlated with the length of a relationship, lasting just into the emotional stage."

In a study by Serge Brand of the Psychiatric University Clinics in Basel, Switzerland, and his colleagues, 113 teenagers were asked about their conduct and mood and were asked to keep a log of their sleep patterns. Of those, 65 indicated they had recently fallen in love and experienced intense romantic emotions. The study concluded that the term "madly in love" had some validity to it. The lovestruck teenagers exhibited signs of hypomania, a mild form of mania.

Lovestruck Teenagers:

• Required about an hour less sleep each night


• More likely to report acting compulsively


• More than twice as likely to say they had lots of ideas and creative energy


• More likely to say they drove fast and took risks on the road.

"We were able to demonstrate that adolescents in early-stage intense romantic love did not differ from patients during a hypomanic stage," say the researchers. This leads them to conclude that intense romantic love in teenagers is a "psychopathologically prominent stage".

Sex on the Net

Sex has a never ending fascination for most of us. Here are some sex-related stories found on the Internet that are not your ordinary run of the mill features.

• Russian surgeons 'grow' penis on man's forearm
  
  
  
  • Sergei, 28, who lives in a village in Siberia was born with genitals so small that he was unable to have sex. He has now been given a chance at having a normal love life by his surgeon Professor Mikhail Sokolshchik. The operation involved removing the penis, stitching it unto the patient's forearm, grafting addtional flesh and tissue and re-attaching it to his groin.
    
    The 11 hour operation was an apparent success. Sergei should soon be able to have sex for the first time. He will not be able to achieve an erection, but will be in a permanent state of semi-arousal. "He has never had a partner or sex because of his micropenis," Prof Sokolshchik said.
    
    
    
    • Prof Sokolshchik, who has specialised in microsurgery and phalloplasty - plastic surgery for male sexual organs - for 13 years, said: "We've carried out thousands of operations on patients, ranging from female-to-male transsexuals to the treatment of victims of horrific accidents, and have a wealth of experience in amputation, reconstruction and surgical implants. "But this operation was highly risky because it was an amputation, reconstruction and reattachment in one go. If it had gone wrong, the patient would have ended up with no genitalia at all."
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

• Anti-rape device to hit market - and rapists
  
  
  
  • The device, known as Rapex, has stirred controversy around the world but its inventor, Sonnet Ehlers, is preparing the final pre-production phase after seven years of waiting. The controversy has raged over whether the device, which has fish-like teeth that attach to the head and shaft of the penis, is a medieval device built on a hatred of men or whether it is an easy-to-use invention that could free millions of South African women from fear of rape.
  
  
  
  




• Judge Rules in Transvestite Case
  
  
  
  • Ferris Griggs of Kansas City, Kan., sued Josie Garcia of Kansas City, claiming that Garcia had defrauded him by pretending to be a woman. Griggs wanted the judge to remove Garcia's name from a deed to a $20,000 house they co-own. Griggs also gave Garcia a $2,500 engagement ring, but didn't ask for that back. The judge eventually ruled that the house should be sold and the proceeds be split between the couple.
  
  
  
  




• Former Judge Collapses as He's Sentenced for Child Porn
  
  
  
  • Ronald Kline, 66, fell into his attorney's arms as Judge Consuelo B. Marshall was announcing his sentence shortly after noon. Court proceedings were temporarily halted and paramedics summoned.
    He was arrested in November 2001 after a Canadian hacker used a computer program to download diary entries and other images from the former judge's computers. The hacked information was turned over to Pedowatch, a Colorado watchdog group, which notified Irvine, Calif., authorities. Police searched Kline's Irvine home and seized his computer. Kline pleaded guilty and acknowledged he had more than 100 sexually explicit images of young boys stored on disks and his computer. Kline served a six-year term as a judge before bowing out of the November 2002 election. Upon his release from prison, he must register as a sex offender.
  
  
  
  

Sex in a Cage

Humans do it. The birds and the bees do it. Wild animals do it. Even our captive friends in zoos do it. In fact Valentine's Day is the time of year when zoo operators organize special adult-oriented tours of love in the animal kingdom. Some tours are so successful that additional days are scheduled for the overflow.

With names like "Woo at the Zoo" "Jungle Love" and "Wild Love at the Zoo" operators of many of the nation's zoos plan special fund raising events with an amorous edge aimed at attracting new adult audiences. A typical tour couples champagne, chocolate-covered strawberries and candlelight dining with impressive facts about how animals do the wild thing. Priced at around $50 per person these Valentine's Day functions can be an important fund raising tool for many zoos.

So what can you learn on one of these special Valentine's Day tours? For the most part it is all talk and very little action. Here are some interesting facts:

• Male pigs have a unique corkscrew endowment and impressive, um, output


• Manatees have orgies and don't really care if their partners are male or female


• A male porcupine has only one four-hour window a year to mate


• Whales have like 10-foot-long whatevers.


• Bonobos and Dolphins like humans also have non-reproductive sex


• Bonobos are the only non-human apes to have been observed engaging in
  
  
  
  • Face-to-face genital sex
  
  
  • Tongue kissing
  
  
  • Oral sex
  
  
  
  


• Roy and Silo are two gay penguins living at Central Park Zoo in Manhattan

The concept of Valentine's Day at the zoo was the brainchild of Jane Tollini a former penguin keeper who, more than 20 years ago described penguin mating rituals as "bowling pins making love".

"Sex sells. No matter what," Tollini said. "I wish I had a nickel for everybody that has copied me."