Nowadays, sex-positivity is mainstream: Amazon sells vibrators for as little as a few dollars, and the honest, open-minded sex-advice podcast Savage Love is consistently at the top of downloads charts.

It all started with a shipment of sweaty sex toys.

It was a hot and humid day in August 2003 and Jennifer Pritchett and her then business partner were days away from opening Minneapolis’s first feminist sex shop, Smitten Kitten. They had sunk all their money into their first shipment of products, but as they excitedly opened the boxes of toys, packing peanuts flying everywhere, they knew immediately that something was wrong. The toys were leaching an oily substance. It was coming off the products, out of the clamshell packaging, through Styrofoam packing peanuts, leaving big greasy spots on the cardboard box. What, they wondered, was wrong?

When 26-year-old Amber, a Las Vegas transplant, realized her dog ate her favorite vibrator, she headed to Las Vegas’s Adult Superstore. Amber grew up in a small Midwestern farming town of 6,000 people, a place where sex “was shunned” and sex toys were never discussed. If she wanted to find a sex-toy store back home, it would mean driving 40 miles to St. Louis. Now, at the Adult Superstore, a large sex-toy emporium — think clothing retailer H&M but for sex toys — she knows that she’ll not only have many options to choose from, but once there, she’ll be treated with respect by a knowledgeable staff. But it wasn't always this way.

You never forget your first vibrator. According to a 2009 study by Indiana University, almost 50 per cent of American women have played with the pulsating devices. That number has undoubtedly climbed thanks to pop-culture phenomena such as Fifty Shades of Grey and marked changes in the “adult industry”. Gone are the days when all sex shops were dives hawking crotchless polyester knickers and sticky men’s magazines, with a dodgy peep show in the back. The sex-toy business has boomed into a purportedly $15 billion (£11.5 billion) a year trade that is increasingly high-end, sophisticated in design and aggressively courting female consumers.

A professor led a group of American poets on a nine-day visit to Cuba this summer – the first trip by American poets since the country’s revolution nearly 60 years ago. Narlan Teixeira, a professor in the romance, German and Slavic language department, organized the trip, which included meetings with Cuban officials and days of poetry readings. Members of the delegation said the trip helped re-establish an important cultural link between Cuba and the United States after decades of political tension between the two countries.

An undocumented immigrant has a baby. If she’s eligible for protection from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, the chances her child will have mental health issues are cut by half. That’s the conclusion of a Stanford University study released Thursday, which examined the use of mental health services of children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents. Even though the children studied were natural-born citizens themselves, having an undocumented parent made it more likely they would eventually be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.

“More violent and frequent storms,” read the headline from Scientific American in 2011, which produced a three-part series dealing with climate change and extreme weather.

What does research suggesting we should focus on diet, not exercise to lose weight and the evolutionary reason we sleep less as we age have in common?

While voters and candidates have long lamented the high cost of campaigning at the state and federal levels, even running for a part-time local seat in the Las Vegas Valley is an expensive proposition. In elections for City Council seats earlier this year, turnout was sparse, making the cost per vote more expensive.

Much like the weather, some human stomachs change throughout the year. The gut microbes of the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer group in Tanzania, shift dramatically as their diet changes with the seasons, according to new research from Stanford University. When applied on a longer timescale, these trends could explain why industrialized populations have a less diverse set of gut microbes and more chronic disease relative to hunter-gatherer populations.

Cries of "Nazis go home!" and "Shame! Shame!" filled the air as Angela King and Tony McAleer stood with other counterprotesters at the "free speech" rally in Boston last weekend. They didn't join the shouting. Their sign spoke for them: "There is life after hate."

Senators — who needs them? Most presidents try not to feud with members of Congress from their own party. But President Donald Trump is known for shredding the rule book, so why would congressional etiquette be any different?