• Featured

    Pluto’s Apparent Planethood

    New stories about the former planet Pluto popped up in my news feed again this week. It has now been over a decade since the definition of what qualifies as a planet was voted over, but this is still a controversial issue to many. I too got a special place in my heart for Pluto, but should what astronomers classify…

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  • Activism

    Historic Win for Transgender People in Norway

    The lack of legal rights for transgender people in Norway was brought up in our parliament by the Socialist Party back in 2000. In May this year, after 16 years of lobbying and hard work by a lot of people, a new law finally passed that allows any people the right to define their own legal gender. The law came…

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  • Featured

    The Troubles with Gender

    There is, as some of you may have noticed, a debate going on in the skeptics community about the – how shall I put this – status of trans women. I’m very busy writing a book on the subject of gender diversity, so I spend little time on Facebook and Twitter these days, but from what I have seen there are a…

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  • FeaturedA close-up photo of the Lego model of the ATLAS detector at CERN.

    Playing with Legos at Work!

    Over the last few weeks we’ve been spending a lot of time here at the University of Oslo putting together a Lego model of the ATLAS detector. The ATLAS detector is one of the four main particle detectors sitting on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Geneva. The ATLAS experiment was one of the two main experiments involved…

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  • Featured

    When Curiosity Kills

    Science is a tool, and is inherently about understanding and knowledge. But science has also been used to destroy, a topic often explored in science fiction. Science is a double-edged sword, and science fiction sometimes becomes science reality. The history of science is riddled with brilliant scientists making discoveries that have changed the course of history, but learning how to manipulate…

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  • Featured

    Sexism, Transphobia and Arguments from Biology

    A lot of you have probably seen the comment by Sam Harris quoted in the Washington Post where he claims “there’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women.” I’m more inclined to think the lack of interest from women is caused by the experience many have with…

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  • Random Asides

    Modern Penguin Family!

    This cute story came across my Facebook feed this morning. I couldn’t resist sharing it! Bergen Aquarium in Norway reported yesterday on Facebook that a same-sex penguin couple had adopted an egg from another penguin couple. The other couple had three eggs, which is a little too many for them to handle. To improve the chances of it hatching the keepers gave…

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  • Science

    Science is Missing Out

    In a society where sexism is so deeply ingrained in our culture, a lot of it goes by undetected and unchecked. Today I watched the 8th episode of Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. The show is excellent, don’t get me wrong, and this episode titled “Sisters of the Sun” covers the discovery of the chemical composition of the sun and other…

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