Archive for the 'genetics' Category

Thursday, January 10th, 2008

Female Scientists In Movies: The Top 10

It’s political primary season and you know what that means, right? Right, it’s time to rent movies and think about something else.

But you wouldn’t be here if you could watch just any movies, you’d be a Huffington Post reader or Glenn Beck listener or whatever it is those people do that gets so much more attention than actual quality writing, like this site. You have more sense than that so you like movies with scientists; and especially scientists who could be hottie supermodels, mostly because they don’t know anything about science.

In compiling a list like this, I am torn and maybe you will be also. Great science movies and attractive women don’t always go together. Number of hot women in Pi for example? Well, okay, Lauren Fox, but she wasn’t a scientist.


Lauren Fox. Photo by Gino Domenico

You get my point. We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare. Actually, female scientists, great or not, in movies apparently aren’t all that common. Eva Flicker of the University of Vienna wrote in Between Brains and Breasts—Women Scientists in Fiction Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence that only 18% of movies containing scientists had the female kind. That means there must have been almost no female scientists in the early days of film because it is easy to find modern films with female scientists - a lot more than the 25% of the science work force in the real world. Scientists are in and female scientists even more so. If you’re going to have a female scientist you might as well make her a hot one.

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Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Extreme Transsexuals In The Bug World

Who knew that the sex lives of African bat bugs could be so interesting? Males with female genitalia, female bugs with ‘paragenitals’ on their abdomens that guide the males to the right spot by basically impaling them if they mess up, males trying to impregnate males.

It’s Extreme Transexualism, coming soon to a species near you.

Why is it necessary in these bugs? Males tend to get overanxious and just start stabbing away anywhere in the abdomen but they really need to go into a special warm place that some men on the internet know nothing about - though it’s still in their abdomen, in the case of female bat bugs. Yes, male bat bugs use blood insemination and then the sperm have to swim to the ovaries.

It’s gruesome and bizarre and therefore completely worthy of a science article that transcends zoology and gets right to the sexual politics.


Evolution has a sense of humor, it seems.

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Sunday, January 7th, 2007

A Population Crisis The Left And Right Can Agree On

Population science is more art than science so you can count on me to be a little skeptical. However, there are times when the numbers are just too alarming and we have to mobilize for action.

What is this looming population catastrophe? It’s Elvis impersonators. Even the Center for Disease Control has sounded the alarm about this issue.  If the CDC is worried about an issue, so am I.

When Elvis Presley died in 1977, there were an estimated 37 Elvis impersonators in the world. By 1993, there were 48,000 Elvis impersonators, an exponential increase. Extrapolating from this, by 2010 there will be 2.5 billion Elvis impersonators. The population of the world will be 7.5 billion by 2010. Every 3rd person will be an Elvis impersonator by 2010. - Source: Caen, H., San Francisco Chronicle; October 27, 1993

That’s right, people. 1 in 3. We don’t have a lot of time to act.

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