Everything you know about sex is true.

Hiromi Ozaki's alter-ego is Sputniko!, a Japanese pop star whose music, videos, performances and electronic devices explore themes of technology, gender and pop culture.

Hiromi is the author of devices such as the Pénis Cybernétique, a motorised penis which moves up and down based on her heartbeat and Crowbot Jenny, a dark-haired girl who goes around urban park carrying on her shoulder a crow-shaped robot that can communicate with crows and turn them into a bird army.

More than just a gadget, a video, a song, Sputniko! creates a whole character with its own manga-inspired aesthetics, attributes, super-powers and dynamics. Each of her projects has been produced in collaboration with scientists experts in Zoology, Medicine and Reproductive Science.

She received a lot of press fame recently thanks to her Menstruation Machine, Takashi's Take.

Fitted with a blood dispensing mechanism and lower-abdomen-stimulating electrodes (the same used by your uncle to muscle his abs while watching tv on the sofa, only that Hiromi maxed out the power of the contractions), the Menstruation Machine simulates the pain and bleeding of an average 5 day menstruation.

The machine could be worn by men who desire to feel closer to women and experience what they have to go through, but also by women when menstruation becomes obsolete in the future and the process becomes a mere ritual of gender and identity.

The artist made a music video to illustrate how and by whom the machine can be used.

The video 'Menstruation Machine - Takashi's Take' stars Takashi, a boy who builds the machine in an attempt to understand better what the girls he hang around with experience every month.

In her series, I'll Be A Beautiful Girl, photojournalist Ariel Zambelich follows 53 year old Rick as he becomes Elena, and undergoes Genital Reassignment surgery with the assistance of her/his ex-wife.

Via verve photo.

Via GayestEver.

A Selection from The Teen and Transgender Comparative Study, a windows solo exhibition by Charlie White, parallels two puberties: one biological, the other chemical/surgical. Over the course of a year, White worked to identify teen and male-to-female transsexual subjects who, when viewed together, would create a visual bridge between female adolescence and male-to-female sexual transformation.

The exhibition is on view in the Washington Square Windows 24 hours a day, 7 days a week until January 27, 2010.

Seen at the World Press Photo 2009 exhibition: Pep Bonet's portrait of transexual workers in Honduras:

Raul Coto is an occasional sex worker. He uses the name Gladis, and knows he is HIV positive. San Pedro Sula is the second largest city in Honduras and has one of the highest instances of HIV in the country. Transsexual sex workers are particularly vulnerable to infection. Conservative family and religious values mean that gays and transsexuals are often victims of rejection and violence.

A study claims the pairing of same sex couples is not only widespread but part of a necessary biological adaptation for the survival of the species. The researchers found that on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, almost a third of the Laysan albatross population is raised by pairs of two females because of the shortage of males. Through these 'lesbian' unions, Laysan albatross are flourishing. Their existence had been dwindling before the adaptation was noticed.

Other species form same-sex bonds for other reasons. Dolphins have been known engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding while male-male pairings in locusts killed off the weaker males.

A pair of "gay" penguins recently hatched an egg at a German zoo after being given the egg that had been rejected by its biological parents by keepers.

Dr Nathan Bailey, an evolutionary biologist at California University, said: "It's clear same-sex sexual behaviour extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature – for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies. Same-sex behaviours – courtship, mounting or parenting – are traits that may have been shaped by natural selection, a basic mechanism of evolution that occurs over successive generations," he said. But our review of studies also suggests that these same-sex behaviours might act as selective forces in and of themselves."