Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

One of the issues that cropped up during this week’s insane event schedule is the issue of brain sex and the idea that being trans has been proved to be “real” because trans women have been found to have “female brains”. I do a lot of trans awareness training these days, and ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

One of the things that came up on the show today was this news story involving Prof. Mike Benton, a palaeontologist from the University of Bristol. Up until now it was thought that all dinosaurs laid eggs, but a new discovery in China has turned all that on its head. A ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Further to last week’s academic conference on fiction in archaeology, my new pal Anna has sent me a link to the website for the project she is working on. Here’s the headline blurb:

In recent decades, fiction writers have been creating new kinds of stories about science. ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.


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Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Because I need to get it out of my system, I’m going to do a post about all of the other things that were wrong with the talk I walked out of at the trans history conference. Think of this as a follow-up to this post.

So what else was wrong? History, for a start. Modern ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Now here’s a heartwarming story for International Women’s Day. Back in the 1960s, three brilliant African-American mathematicians - Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson - were the brains behind NASA’s Friendship 7 program that launched John Glenn into space. ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

To cap a week of wild science stories, here’s a claim from CERN that they have measured neutrinos traveling at faster than the speed of light.

That one I’m taking with a pinch of salt for now, but if it can be reproduced that’s all sorts of excitement for theoretical physics ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Yesterday I posted a a story about one of the classic themes of biological SF - regenerative medicine. However, there is one area of SF that sees quite a different aspect of biology as more important. Feminist SF has for some time been very keen on the idea of ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

Here’s something I have been meaning to post about for a while. Earlier this week Bristol University issued a press release about a remarkable piece of work in bioinformatics. A big problem with regenerative medicine is that up until now if you wanted to grow new bits for a ( Read more... )

Originally published at Cheryl's Mewsings. Please leave any comments there.

There are many ways in which life is easier for trans kids these days. Of course there are ways it is harder too. I don’t know if I would have survived going through school as trans. But I could have avoided male puberty that way, which is an enormous incentive. It’s all ( Read more... )