Gay pheromones

Here’s some more evidence that sexuality is an innate characteristic: Gay men are more likely to respond to male sex pheromones than they are to female ones.

It’s not something that should be all that surprising, given what we already comprehend about sexuality in general. But more evidence never hurts. Chinese researchers studied the pheromones naturally given off by men and women in things such as semen, sweat, and urine. Scientists have been conscious of the reality of two clear pheromones—androstadienone (found in male semen and sweat) and estratetraenol (present in female urine)—for some moment, but it’s been unclear whether they’ve had much of an effect on the opposite gender. It turns out that they undertake , and how they do depends on a person’s sexuality.

To test their hypothesis, Wen Zhou of the Chinese Academy of Sciences set up an experiment in which participants looked at a video in which human figures rendered in a connect-the-dots style (shown above) were shown walking. Participants were then asked to guess whether the figures were masculine or feminine. When exposed to androstadienone, heterosexual women were more likely to suggest that the w