Month: January 2019

Switzerland (Tasnim) – Researchers were able to coax human breast cancer cells to turn into fat cells in a new proof-of-concept study in mice. To achieve this feat, the team exploited a weird pathway that metastasizing cancer cells have; their results are just a first step, but it’s a truly promising approach. When you cut your finger, or when a fetus grows organs, the epithelium cells begin to look less like themselves, and more ‘fluid’ – changing into a type of stem cell called a mesenchyme and then reforming into whatever…

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United States (MPN) – Soon after the social media “purge” of independent media sites and pages this past October, a top neoconservative insider — Jamie Fly — was caught stating that the mass deletion of anti-establishment and anti-war pages on Facebook and Twitter was “just the beginning” of a concerted effort by the U.S. government and powerful corporations to silence online dissent within the United States and beyond. While a few, relatively uneventful months in the online news sphere have come and gone since Fly made this ominous warning, it appears that the…

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United States (Conversation) – Falling U.S. fertility rates have been making headlines. These reports tend to focus on a single measure: the average number of children that women have, nationally. However, this one number masks large and interesting variation in people’s childbearing behavior. The National Survey of Family Growth – one of the best sources of information on this topic – released a report in July that points to some of this variation. It shows that the number of children and the timing of childbearing differ meaningfully across women and across…

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United Kingdom (OpenDemocracy) – In October 1909, the aristocratic suffragette Lady Constance Lytton was arrested and sent to Newcastle prison. When the police discovered that she was the daughter of Lord Lytton, former Viceroy of India, they ordered her release after two days. Along with her fellow militant suffragettes, Lytton had gone on hunger strike in protest at her arrest and the continued denial of the vote to women. But she was already in poor health and authorities feared she would die and become a martyr to the suffrage cause. This was one…

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World Wide (Conversation) – Reproductive coercive control is where a woman’s decisions about contraception and pregnancy are interfered with. The concept was first described in 2010. We wanted to update the evidence to 2017 and widen the range of control activities to include family pressure and criminal behaviour, such as sex trafficking. We found that up to one in four women at sexual health clinics report coercion over their reproductive lives. For our narrative review, we searched relevant databases of medical and social sciences research, looking at women’s experiences of…

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Germany (Sputnik) – While European archaeological records provide almost no evidence of women scribing books in the Middle Ages, a recent study has shed light on the “gendered production” of illuminated manuscripts. Blue-coloured particles discovered in the teeth of an ancient skeleton buried at a German monastery have given scientists insight into who produced books in medieval Europe. According to an international team of researchers, who published their findings in Science Magazine, the remains belonged to a religious middle-aged woman, a nun, most likely. Scientists from a Germany-based laboratory identified the mysterious particles as lapis lazuli, a semi-precious stone mined only in Afghanistan…

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Russia (GV) – New Year’s Eve celebrations in Russia, a few post-Soviet countries and the diaspora abroad have a number of defining characteristics. One is the annual telethon of Soviet film classics such as Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, a 1980 Mosfilm production which won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language Film and a few other accolades. The other absolute classic is The Irony of Fate (1976), traditionally broadcast on December 31 by a major national channel while millions of Russian families busily chop bucketloads of Olivier…

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United States (Conversation) – The Trump administration has sought to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency in a number of ways, from staff and proposed budget cuts to attempts to undermine the use of science in policymaking. Now, our new research finds that one of the EPA’s most important functions – enforcement – has also fallen off dramatically. Since its founding, the EPA has been the nation’s environmental enforcer of last resort. Enforcing environmental laws is a fundamental role of the EPA. William Ruckelshaus, the agency’s first administrator, famously described its…

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(Conversation) – In 1913, at the age of 23, Elsie Masson was travelling on a steamer near Port Essington, 150 miles from Darwin, when it was approached by a small lugger. The boat was manned by one white man and two black men. As she later recounted, The white man raised a sunburnt face, fierce with grief and excitement, and shouted hoarsely, ‘My mate – Jim Campbell – speared by blacks at Junction Bay’. It was curious what a thrill of rage the words brought to the hearers – a…

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World Wide (Conversation) – Recently, a bag thought to contain a bomb was left outside the National Secretariat for Gender Research in Gothenburg, Sweden. The dynamite-shaped device inside turned out to be a fake, but the intent to threaten and scare was clear. Eva Wiberg, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Gothenburg, expressed her grave concerns, saying some scholars are more exposed to hatred and violence than others. Lately, we have witnessed global story after story of government rollbacks on abortion provision, LGBTQ rights and now the closure of entire programs…

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