I don’t know how I can follow Elyse’s penis post but the Quickies must go on.
- Stem cells in menstrual blood?– “While collecting menstrual blood stromal cells (MenSCs) directly from tissue would be invasive, retrieving them during the menstrual cycle would not be.” MenSCs?! You have got to be joking. (Thanks, Steve!)
- Saudis slow to accept working women– Good coverage of this on NPR’s Marketplace. One woman, “… says she has no interest in working with men, because if she was sexually harassed, she says through an interpreter, she’d have no legal recourse.”
- Robotic jellyfish that move autonomously– My expert opinion is that these are wicked cool.
- Open source choadery-Â You’ve likely seen the blogsplosion about the Open Source Boob Project, so here’s a nice little bit of mockery of the project from Pandagon.
- Women in medicine– Harriet Hall addresses the age old questions of, “Why aren’t there more women in science and medicine? Just because we lack certain anatomical dangly bits, does that mean we’re less capable?”
The Saudi story is interesting. It shows progress. I recently had a conversation with a guy who spent a lot of time there, and he pointed out that the West is very quick to condemn other countries for being slow to adopt our ‘enlightened’ attitudes, but it took us hundreds of years to get there. We should cut less developed countries a little slack. Saudi has only had 60 years of economic prosperity, and it’s very easy to be horrified that mass social change hasn’t occurred there overnight. But it didn’t occur here overnight, and that’s something I’ve only just started to appreciate. We can’t expect another country to do immediately what we took hundreds of years to achieve.
Regarding the ballistic re-entry by the Soyuz spacecraft the other day:
“One Russian space official cited an old naval superstition that having women on board the flight was a “bad omen” and that planners would reconsider having a female-dominant crew in the future. These remarks understandably caused a stir.”
http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/21/new-facts-emerge-from-soyuz-emergency-landing/
How much slack should the Russians be cut?
I want an Air Jelly of my very own!
Medical and Science students back in my school was actually over 50%. Biology major was actually 70% female!
I agree with the article. Women now do have the opportunity, it’s just that many might not prefer it.
My female friends who originally wanted to be doctors eventually realized that that they don’t like the lifestyle such as long hours, licensing and regulations. All of my medical school friends became research scientists in the end. It gives them more free time and creativity. Or as one friend pulls it, “you can leave the bacteria in the dish for the weekend, but it is hard to ignore a patient.”