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A Danish IT company has given all its employees free subscriptions to internet pornography sites.

LL Media in Nordjylland introduced the idea to stop staff accessing adult material at work.

The company's director, Levi Nielsen, believes access to porn is a natural fringe benefit, like a free phone or a company car.

"We know that 80% of all hits on the Internet are on porn sites. And we can see that people also surf porn pages during work," Nielsen told Danish broadcaster DR Nordjylland.

Nielsen hopes the move will make his staff more relaxed and more efficient on the job.

Ananova.com

Chocolate bars that could help men and women orgasm are on the way.

Sex expert Dr Trudy Barber told the European Federation of Sexology Conference in Brighton the chocolates could be available in five years.

They will contain higher than normal levels of the chemical phenyl ethylamine, which the body releases during sex, reports The Sun.

Chocolate currently on sale have up to 660mg of phenyl ethylamine. It's related to dopamine and adrenalin - substances which heighten bodily sensations.

The new bars would contain far higher levels of the chemical after it was found to give an orgasm-like high without having sex.

Dr Barber, a specialist in internet sex, also claimed that robotic prostitutes are set to be developed - and predicted under-the-skin microchips which tell if someone has been unfaithful.

They could record bodily temperature changes, revealing whether partners had been steamy with someone else.

Dr Barber, of the University of Canterbury in Kent, said: "The way we interact sexually with technology is going to change drastically. Some of these ideas are very new and some are at the lab stage."

Ananova.com

A German couple who went to a fertility clinic after eight years of marriage have found out why they are still childless - they weren't having sex.

The University Clinic of Lubek said they had never heard of a case like it after examining the couple who went to see them last month for fertility tests.

Doctors subjected them to a series of examinations and found they were both apparently fertile, and should have had no trouble conceiving.

A clinic spokesman said: "When we asked them how often they had had sex, they looked blank, and said: "What do you mean?".

"We are not talking retarded people here, but a couple who were brought up in a religious environment who were simply unaware, after eight years of marriage, of the physical requirements necessary to procreate."

The 30-year-old wife and her 36-year-old husband are now being given sex therapy lessons while the university clinic undertakes a study to try to find out if there are more couples with a similar lack of sex education.

Ananova.com

Health officials in California have said the recent infection of two porn actors with the HIV virus means they may force performers to wear condoms.

Los Angeles County officials said they believed existing regulations gave them the authority to require condom use.

And the state Division of Occupational Health and Safety is also planning to carry out inspections of productions next week, the LA Times reported.

The California-based porn industry is worth billions of dollars a year.

Around 200 production companies in California make an estimated 4,000 films a year for public consumption, using around 1,200 performers, ABC News reported.

And analysts have warned that most porn producers and distributors would not switch to condom-only productions as consumers did not like to see them being used in films.

Shooting halted

However, several companies have now joined a two-month shutdown after the two performers tested positive for HIV, the virus that can cause Aids.

Around 12 production companies have stopped production until 8 June and two companies - Hustler Video and VCA Pictures - say they have halted work indefinitely.

"The main concern of both companies right now is for the health and well-being of the talent they work with," VCA publicist Mischa Allen told the Associated Press news agency.

The industry's largest studio, Vivid Entertainment Group, has also stopped shooting, AP said.

More than 1,000 performers are tested for HIV every three weeks by the Adult Industry Medical Healthcare Foundation (Aim).

The foundation ensures that performers are tested every 30 days for the disease.

But executive director Sharon Mitchell said she thought it unlikely that all companies would halt work.

"You've got to understand this is pornography," she told ABC News.

"It doesn't shut down for Christmas and I'm afraid it won't shut down for HIV. Not all of it anyway."

Quarantined

The veteran male performer who tested positive earlier this week is thought to be the first since 1999.

It is thought that he contracted the virus while filming in Brazil and later passed the virus to a porn actress, AP reports.

Dozens of other performers who had recently come into contact with him have been quarantined and will not be permitted to work until they test negative for HIV.

BBC arts correspondent Lawrence Pollard says the timing of the scare is unfortunate, as the US is currently in the midst of a debate over taste and decency in the media which could become an election issue.

The porn industry will not want to draw more attention from politicians keen to advocate greater regulation of their activities, our correspondent adds.

BBC News

Seedy text messaging has hit the headlines recently with claims about the private life of a world class footballer

But a craze called Toothing may soon make that look very tame.

The name comes from their use of Bluetooth - a short-range communication feature on some phones.

It is being used to find like-minds who want an anonymous intimate encounter.

"Toothers" beam phone numbers between handsets in places such as bars, restaurants and train stations.

From here, they use conventional text messaging to organise their meeting place and what they want from the encounter.

The practice of "Toothing" has spread around the internet like wildfire.

One practitioner is Jon, a "Toother" living near London.

"One morning I received an anonymous text message via bluetooth," he told BBC News.

"I didn't understand what had happened, but that evening I did some research and worked out how to send my own."

The pair started to exchange messages on a train station platform; messages which got gradually more flirty.

"Eventually she asked me if I fancied a quickie in the toilets at the station we were travelling to.

"It happened, but I never saw her again."

Since that day Jon - who claims to have had Toothing success five times - has set up a website dedicated to the practice but he admits it takes a degree of perseverance.

The forum on the website even goes as far as organising places to meet for Toothing encounters.

Psychologist Linda Blair, from the University of Bath. says the practice of Toothing is down to the human need to take risks.

"I think we protect ourselves too much in modern society, and risk is a human need. We need motivation," she said.

"In some ways this is a tame way of picking people up, it's almost a natural follow up from randomly picking people's names out of the phone book.

"It's voluntary at all stages, and has choice. As long as that's there and it's legal, then people should be able to do what they want."

Sue Peters from the Terrence Higgins Trust warned that anonymous sex can also carry a great deal of risk.

"Sexually transmitted diseases are on the increase in the UK. One in 10 people under the age of 25 have Chlamydia.

"Oral sex can also carry risk, especially through bacterial infection.

"I don't want to put a dampner on people's sexual practices, but we would advise them to be careful."

By Chris Kelly
BBC News Online, Bristol

BBC News

A widely held explanation of why we have frequent sex has been challenged by a report in Science. According to the Red Queen Hypothesis, sex exists to help organisms protect themselves against parasites.

Parasites are constantly developing new ways to take advantage, so animals need to evolve defences quickly - and sex, say some, allows them to do this.

But scientists have constructed a model, which suggests this "arms race" alone is not enough to account for sex.

Clone invasion

Evolutionary biologists are obsessed with sex and why we have it.

It is one of nature's great mysteries because there are not many obvious reasons why we should do it - but plenty why we should not .

Firstly, sex is a very inefficient way to make babies. Asexual organisms can produce twice the amount of young than their sexual counterparts.

"Clones have a tremendous advantage," explained Curt Lively, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Indiana, US.

"If you have a sexual population and you introduce a clone, that clone will have an advantage, because its intrinsic growth rate is higher. So the clones should take over."

Secondly, if being overrun by clones is not enough, sex is dangerous. You may catch a nasty disease while engaging in the messy act and, even if you don't, your offspring are likely to inherit shoddy genes from their father.

"It is a paradox why so many organisms have sex," said the paper's co-author Sarah Otto, from the University of British Colombia, Vancouver, Canada.

"If you are a parent who has survived to reproduce you probably have a good gene combination, so shuffling them about is not going to benefit you."

But sex does exist - in great abundance. Natural selection, for some reason, chose it. The clones have not taken over and the risk, big as it might be, is not big enough to make sex a bad idea.

Red Queen to the rescue?

The Red Queen Hypothesis takes its name from the character in Lewis Carroll's Through The Looking-Glass, who tells Alice she has to run as fast as she can to stay in the same place.

The idea is that organisms have to keep evolving - keep adopting new genetic combinations - to "outwit" pathogens.

"The theory states that parasites are selected to target the most common genotype, which is now this clone," Professor Lively told BBC News Online. "So if the parasites are successful, and very virulent, they can prevent that clone from taking over the sexual population.

"But for this theory to work, there have to be an awful lot of parasites about, and they have to have very dramatic effects."

And there is the rub. According a mathematical model developed by Sarah Otto and her colleague Scott Nuismer, there are not enough parasites about to explain why organisms have so much sex.

Too much sex

Having sex every now and again might be an advantage, Dr Otto believes. Doing it occasionally should fox the parasites. But doing it frequently probably just spoils winning genetic combinations.

According to her model, if evading parasites was the only objective, organisms should reproduce sexually sometimes, but asexually often.

"If you actually do the maths, the hosts that are common in the population at the current moment in time have been doing a pretty good job at evading their parasites. "A little sex makes enough of the combinations present, but having more sex breaks apart the combinations that are working to evade the parasites."

Since we - and many other organisms - have more than a little sex, we might have to look beyond the Red Queen for the whole answer.

"What the Red Queen can't explain is why creatures have more than a minimal amount of sex," said Dr Otto. "If organisms only had sex very rarely, then it could be the case that the Red Queen could explain that."

By Julianna Kettlewell
BBC News Online science staff

BBC News

Students in Norway are trying to attract more under-graduates to their university by promising that they will find love as well as academic success.

The student organisation at Trondheim University, in the north of the country, claims it can guarantee that all those who enrol will find love, "at least once", during their student years.

"We dare to guarantee that you, too, will fall in love and find a sweetheart", it says on its website.

"Every fifth inhabitant here is a student, making Trondheim a young and pulsating town," said Studiebyen spokesman Tove Lill Karlsen.

"While the university tries to recruit students based on its excellent academic merits, we've decided to highlight the positive social aspects of coming to Trondheim to study."

But small-print on the guarantee says students can only expect to find love if they play their part and meet certain standards.

"For the sweetheart guarantee to be valid, you have to make an effort yourself," says the university's website.

"You must behave nicely, and at least most of the time, be fairly clean and pleasant."

BBC News

People looking for love are to set sail with the first speed dating event to be held on a cross channel ferry.

Fifty people, mostly from Kent, will be "dating" each other on the SeaFrance ferry from Dover to Calais.

Each "date" will last for five minutes before participants move on to the next prospective partner.

The event is to take place on a round trip sailing on Saturday and has been billed as the biggest speed date gathering in the Kent region.

Simon Proctor, event organiser, said: "The more interesting an experience of meeting somebody the better you will remember them. "Too many dates are held in bars and having a date somewhere interesting like a cross channel ferry or skiing as we have just done recently just adds to the whole element.

"It is bound to be more relaxed. "When you are looking to meet someone at one of these events it can come across that you are looking for a serious relationship.

"The more relaxed an event and the more relaxed an attitude you can have the more chance you have of success."

BBC News

A biscuit tin featuring a picture of an amorous couple making love in bushes behind a tea party has sold for £423 at an auction in Somerset.

The tin was made by Berkshire biscuit firm Huntley and Palmers in the 1970s for supermarket Tesco.

The initial design did not feature the couple, or a pair of passionate dogs in the background.

When the supermarket discovered the extra pictures an artist added, it declined the order of 5,000 tins.

Helen Carless, managing director of Lawrences Auction House, said: "Sex sells even in the world of biscuit tin collectors.

"The demand was there because you can't get anything like this now. It is totally individual and completely different from other biscuit tins."

The tin fetched three times the amount of similar pieces in the sale.

BBC News

Scientists have developed a test which can measure HIV levels in the blood much more quickly and cheaply.

The test could transform the treatment of millions with the disease, not least those in developing countries.

Doctors need to be able to test HIV levels to find out if patients are responding to drugs.

But the cost has proved prohibitive in many countries. Scientists hope the PLG CD4 test, which is 80% cheaper than other tests, can solve that problem.

Counting cells

Doctors around the world find out how patients are faring against HIV/Aids by counting their infected CD4 cells, a type of white blood cell.

However, tests are generally expensive and burdensome.

This new test reduces the number of steps doctors need to take to count infected CD4 cells. It also enables them to analyse samples up to five days after they have been collected, which means it can be used in rural and remote areas. It is as accurate as other tests.

"Essentially, we have taken a test that is already available - known as CD4 - and have made it considerably more affordable and easier to use, without compromise of quality or reproducibility," said Dr Debbie Glencross, a scientist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa.

"At the same time, we have made a service that is accessible to rural and remote areas."

Former US President Bill Clinton has given his backing to the new test.

His presidential foundation is helping to set up Aids treatment programmes in a number of developing countries. They will use the new test.

The PLG CD4 test was developed with financial support from the pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb.

John McGoldrick, its executive vice-president, said the test will help millions of people.

"The new approach to CD4 testing created by Dr Glencross is a major advance and could provide cost savings of 70% to 80% over traditional testing methods," he said.

"Because CD4 cell counts help physicians and patients monitor HIV/Aids disease progression and immune system health, the impact of an easier, more cost effective system is expected to be considerable."

Californian company Beckman Coulter will produce the PLG CD4 test.

BBC News