Search Results for: label/legitimate rape

• The sperm don’t care how they got there, Rep. Akin

  so if a rape resulted in pregnancy, the woman must somehow have been having a good time. Ergo, ’twas not a rape. This Guardian piece expands on that history but doesn’t get into why such a concept lingers into the 21st century. A lot of that lingering has to do with a strong desire on the part of some in US political circles to make a rape-related pregnancy the woman’s fault so that she must suffer the consequences. Those conseq…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on August 20, 2012

• Biology Explainer: The big 4 building blocks of life–carbohydrates, fats, proteins, and nucleic acids

  …molecules themselves break down into a surprisingly small number of building blocks. The proteins that make up all of the living things on this planet and ensure their appropriate structure and smooth function consist of only 20 different kinds of building blocks. Nucleic acids, specifically DNA, are even more basic: only four different kinds of molecules provide the materials to build the countless different genetic codes that translate into all…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on June 8, 2012

• After Newtown missteps, journalists get guidelines

  …almost twice as likely to say that they don’t want to live or work near a person with mental illness if they read an article about a person with mental illness involved in a mass shooting, according to a study published March 20 in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Interestingly, this tendency is the same even if the article avoids any mention of mental illness. This may be because this link between violence and mental illness is deeply engrain…

  Authored by DXS Contributor on March 27, 2013

• DXS Op-Ed: How birth control can save the world

  …over the last 50 years, reaching 7 the billion mark in March of this year.  This is an astounding statistic since it took until 1804 – around 50,000 years – to reach our first billion.  World Population: 1800 – 2100 (Wikimedia Commons) What makes these numbers really scary is the concept of carrying capacity, which is an ecological term used to describe the maximum number of individual members of a species that a certain habita…

  Authored by Jeanne Garbarino on May 2, 2012

• Women know something you don’t

  Make no mistake about it. by Emily Willingham Three of my four grandparents were only children. Born early in the 20th century, in the period betwixt the great wars, coming of age in the Great Depression. Only children, in spite of having parents married for decades. Three of them. In all likelihood, their own parents, my great-grandparents–and I knew all of my great-grandmothers–consciously chose not to have more children because,…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on March 26, 2013

• Farting While Flying? Let Her Rip!

  …17;t exactly roll down the window as you would in a car either. Consider that the average person, male or female, young or old, releases somewhere between 0.7 to 1 liter of gas a day, usually spread out in 10 to 14 farts in a 24-hour period. And as MythBusters proved, even pretty girls fart. The sulfur-containing gases in that mix of mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide coming out your derriere can be some seriously noxious stuff, especially depend…

  Authored by Tara Haelle on March 21, 2013

• SCOTUS justices can’t find science on same-sex marriage

  …8217;s there. First, some numbers. According to the AAP statement, same-sex couples in the U.S. are raising a total of 115,000 children; if you roll in households with a single gay or lesbian parent, this country has at least 2 million children being raised by non-heterosexual parents. Two million children. And that doesn’t even count children being raised by parents in an outwardly heternormative relationship but whose gender identities an…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on March 27, 2013

• Science is For Everyone, Including (Gasp!) Moms

  Looking through magazines aimed specifically at women (including most parenting magazines), you might be forgiven for thinking that women have no interest in science or technology. I’m not the demographic these publications are aimed at, of course: I’m not even a parent, much less a woman. Of course there are plenty of magazines consumed by women and men alike, though I can also think of some that are far too guy-focused. That’s not what this…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on November 23, 2011

• Blog of the Week: Bug Girl’s Blog

  …d embrace the enormous diversity that is the world of “bugs,” or, more specifically, arthropods. The number of species of bugs may well account for the vast majority of all known animals species and easily exceeds 1 million. With 1 million+ species from which to choose, how can anyone “hate bugs”? So, it is with great delight that we highlight a blog today that’s about a woman and her love of bugs. The appropriately…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on November 28, 2011

• Autism and the DSM-5

  …ial social aspect of this change, and the one thing that might, when it comes to autism, elevate the DSM-5 above the level of doorstop. [Image credit: Dave Bullock, UK, via Wikimedia Commons under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 generic license.]…

  Authored by Emily Willingham on April 23, 2013