Science & Society
Female American athletes get less coverage in the media due to gender bias and instead what attention they get focuses more on attire, or how attractive, sexy or ladylike they are, write Emily Kaskan and Ivy Ho of the University of Massachusetts Lowell in Sex Roles, an interdisciplinary behavioral science journal offering a feminist perspective.
Kaskan and Ho looked at how pervasive small subtle biases and stereotyping of American female athletes are and what types of "microaggression" exist, examining how they put pressure on athletes and other women, as well. They reviewed popular…
America talks a lot about body image, but only as it relates to girls. The war on thin women is in full swing, obesity is all the rage. Even lingerie companies have plus-sized models and when a European engineer wore a shirt that a female artist friend made for his birthday, America was outraged - because it had thin women on it.
Yet these movements are one-sided, to a point they might be considered sexist. Young males are the forgotten demographic, even though a new study finds that up to 25% of boys are on diets, whether they need them or not. Almost one third of male adolescents…
Dr. Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) and Andrew (Miles Teller) in Whiplash
By Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne
A decade of piano lessons with a woman who never allowed my lack of passion, prowess or practice ruin a good thing, exists as a mere red herring.
A good woman, a sane woman, but even ten years with her wasn’t enough to ameliorate the (mis)education I got from music classes in primary school.
Mr. M. for example, let the class’s ratbaggery unhinge him to such an extent that he picked up a table and hurled it at a student. (Sure, the kid ached to be punched but the sane and civil of us…
A new America? Warner Bros. Pictures
By Peter Bloom, The Open University
"Interstellar" has been praised for its attempt to make the “hard science” of astrophysics both accessible and exciting to a popular audience.
Through cutting-edge special effects, it takes audiences on a journey through space and time. It does so by drawing on groundbreaking scientific theories involving relativity, wormholes, black holes and the power of gravity.
These cinematic efforts are especially timely in light of the recent Rosetta mission. In the depths of a news cycle filled with economic insecurity and the…
You're twice as likely to chat about vaping than you were in 2013. Tibanna79
By Robbie Love, Lancaster University
Selfies were so 2013. But vaping’s in: Oxford Dictionaries have announced vape as its international Word of the Year 2014.
The runners up are bae, budtender, contactless, indyref, normcore and slacktivism.
Vape, which refers to an electronic cigarette or similar device (or the act of inhaling/exhaling from such devices), certainly seems to reflect technological advancements much in the way that 2013’s Word of the Year selfie did.
But what evidence has been used to make this…
Jimi Hendrix is a member of the so-called 27 Club. A very exclusive club, as it turns out. EPA/Eduardo Miranda
By Dianna Kenny, University of Sydney
I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. – Groucho Marx
Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to … – Kurt Cobain’s mother upon hearing of the death of her son
What do Otis Redding, Gram Parsons, Nick Drake, Jimmy McCulloch, James Ramey (aka Baby Huey), Bryan Osper, and Jon Guthrie have in common?
What about Tim Buckley, Gregory Herbert, Zenon de Fleur, Nick Babeu, Shannon Hoon, Beverly Kenney, and Bobby Bloom…
Vehicle fatalities are the most common cause of accidental death around the world. In the US alone, there are 30,000 deaths in car crashes each year.
Are there inequalities in those figures? There are, and an epidemiology paper has found them. Seatbelts matter, as does having an airbag, but those are in almost all cars, but there is no explanation for why women die more. Or why young people die less. To most people, it's just data, it doesn't all have meaning. If you are in a car, you are 17 times more likely to die in a crash compared to a driver of a light truck. That will…
It is a weekly event in epidemiology - some medical or health outcome is linked to socioeconomic inequality, as if more spending makes people healthy.
With the Ebola crisis in Africa, there had been lots of spending prior ti that, people were just getting nothing from it due to graft and corruption. In the United States, there is a lots of spending but it goes toward defensive medicine and malpractice insurance and now federal employees also. The National Institutes of Health has spent $330 billion since 2001 but said they didn't have enough spending to fund an Ebola vaccine, so Congress gave…
In America, and to a much less extent in Europe, there can be a lot of angst when an aerospace engineer wears the wrong shirt on television. Women have a great deal of power in western nations, so much so that they can overwhelm science breakthroughs with cultural Gerrymandering.
In rural India it is much different, community attitudes about masculinity and femininity have translated into deep-rooted discriminatory practices against girls and women. Women often lead very restricted lives and men are the decision makers yet family planning programs overwhelmingly focus on women. If women…
What's in a name? Apparently a lot. So much so that social mobility in England hasn't changed much since pre-Industrial times.
After William the Conqueror defeated King Harold II at the Battle of Hastings in 1066, making England a French country rather than an Anglo-Saxon one, he rewarded his supporters with lands taken from those who had been loyal to his opponent. He was very good to them - but he wanted his levies. So if your name appeared in the original Domesday Book, you were going to get a tax bill, but the benefits were so substantial you are more likely to be upper class even…