TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
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| Sluts and sweethearts Sexist language is on the rise, but now there is a new way to fight backWomen! Dare you approach the Pyramid of Egregiousness? This is the new chart that's been put together by women's groups in the US to classify the hate words used against us, from bad to worse to really quite stinkingly repulsive. Use your finger of defiance to log on and see it at NameItChangeIt.org. There, a reeking sewage system of sexist sideswipes has been organised into a colourful triangle. It's the latest project in contemporary feminism's use of the internet to network, campaign, critique and challenge, and it is spearheaded, among others, by renowned US feminist Gloria Steinem.Looking at the Pyramid I am impressed by men's creativity, tenacity, complexity, sincerity and commitment for the very first time. It's a bit like the Top 40 Smash Hits countdown – a few old faves peppered among the contemporary classics, novelty jingles and one-hit wonders. At the pinnacle are terms classed as Severe Misogyny – outright objectifying and dehumanising hate words such as bitch, whore, slut, cunt, feminazi, and new entries such as cougar and MILF. BTW, MILF means Mom I'd Like to Fuck. And FYI, the first time I heard it was in New York at an otherwise all-male meeting of advertising guys at a major women's magazine corporation. Oh, how those men laughed among themselves as I worked out the acronym. I couldn't protest, because I'd lose my job and be labelled – yep – a feminazi.Next down on the Pyramid are words classed as Really Damn Sexist. This is for all those backstabbing phrases, euphemisms and digs. Think ice queen, nag, shrill, difficult, cold. At the base of the Pyramid is Just Plain Sexist. This is your daily, standard, bread-and-butter misogyny. It includes commenting on a woman's appearance, calling her a girl, a babe, a sweetie or lightly saying she's bossy or flighty. The point of the pyramid, so to speak, is not to have every word filed in its rightful place. We are not 1950s librarians. All the terms are terms of hatred, originally invented (sometimes centuries ago) by men, now used by both sexes. The Pyramid is a symbol, a resource, a focal point, a concentration of their hate and our anger. You can add to it, and on the same site you can also testify about examples of media sexism.I'd like to add some words to the Pyramid myself. There's humourless, paranoid, selfish, prudish, unable to take a joke, hysterical, man-hating, aggressive, butch: these words essentially just mean "shut up, woman". They're for any woman who dares to get angry and, instead of letting the insults sink deep, asks the perpetrator just what the hell they think they're doing. Man-hater in particular makes me laugh. Women waste a lot of time submissively explaining to misogynists, like good schoolgirls, why they don't hate men, how feminism benefits both sexes and how misogyny must be recognised by all of society. I'll say this: I do indeed hate any man who hates women and expresses his hate in his language, his manner, his behaviour and his art.Then there are the so-called ironic seaside-postcard terms for women and our body parts. How about funbags? I think the Pyramid should proudly bear a rack of funbags. Or how about some casual infantilisation? In his last series Jamie Oliver made a meal for some inmates at a women's prison in Venice. He delivered it to them with a leer and the phrase: "Here you go, girlies."Like a square of shit-soaked toilet paper, the Pyramid is a repository for so much nasty matter. But much misogynist language is far subtler than one-word disses. There is the question of tone, which renders any word – even one as seemingly innocuous as "she" – totally malign. The cleverest, most belittling insult I ever heard against a woman was a posh man at the Tate Modern, talking about Rachel Whiteread's Turbine Hall installation: "Yeah," he said. "She's fun." Delivered with an infuriating, mocking grin.Then there was the radio network head I heard talking to a male producer about a globally famous pop star who came in and was professional, articulate and intelligent: "She's a funny one, isn't she?" "Yep," replied his flunky, "If you open her up you'll just find batteries and wires."Even seemingly nice words are often used against us, delivered with sizzling spite and patent enjoyment of the victim's discomfort. The hisses of "That's good, keep doing that" and "That's nice" whenever I go jogging. The homeless guy who said to a friend, "Got a light? No? Well, you're looking quite smoking to me, babe." One afternoon at a road crossing in Covent Garden a man turned around and began harassing the woman next to me: "Hello! How are you, darling? You are so pretty. You look like a supermodel. Where are you going?" She didn't reply, he didn't stop. All these arseholes would say they were "only" complimenting their victims.What are we going to do with our pyramid when it's all filled up, once we've exhausted ourselves typing our testimonies? Are we supposed to tote it, like a school art project, from pavilion to pavilion hoping to shame people into stopping? That won't work. Misogynists don't have any shame. They really enjoy attacking women. They are not afraid of us. They enjoy the sight of our anger and frustration.One of my qualms about online activism – particularly sites where we "out" harassers and other types of sex attacker, or anonymously post reports of the daily casual misogyny we all endure – is that, while we feel better afterwards, we have not changed anything in the outer world. We have just invented a coping mechanism, a way to squeeze out and siphon off our rage. We have set up an online sympathy group, a survivors' forum, a venting arena. But we have not fought the perpetrators.Much as I like and applaud it, I want to see the three-dimensional foldout version of the Pyramid of Egregiousness. I want a 3D glow-in-the-dark dodecahedron, a planet-sized Matrix of Misogyny, a Trillion-Faceted Dynamo of Jet Black Turbo Hate. Then I'd heave it aloft and hurl it into the sun, where it would set off a massive chain reaction and shoot out sky-scraping beams of feminist rage which kill anyone, male or female, who's ever used those words, wiping out (I'd say) 90% of human society, but leaving the non-woman-haters behind. Then we could all relax and be happy.• Which sexist terms and phrases do you find most annoying?WomenFeminismGenderInternetLanguageBidishaguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Lab Quits Research After Video of Animal Treatment It was alleged that workers cruelly treated dogs, cats and rabbits at a North Carolina research facility where animal care products were tested. feeds.nytimes.com |
Hypnosis reaches the parts brain scans and neurosurgery cannot No longer a mere vaudeville routine, hypnosis is being used in labs to cast light on the innermost workings of the brainVaughan Bell blogs at Mind HacksWhenever AR sees a face, her thoughts are bathed in colour and each identity triggers its own rich hue that shines across her mind's eye. This experience is a type of synaesthesia which, for about one in every 100 people, automatically blends the senses. Some people taste words, others see sounds, but AR experiences colour with every face she sees. But on this occasion, perhaps for the first time in her life, a face is just a face. No colours, no rich hues, no internal lights.If the experience is novel for AR, it is equally new to science because no one had suspected that synaesthesia could be reversed. Despite the originality of the discovery, the technique responsible for the switch is neither the hi-tech of brain stimulation nor the cutting-edge of neurosurgery, but the long-standing practice of hypnosis.The surprising reversal of AR's synaesthesia was reported in a recent study by psychologist Devine Terhune and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden. The researchers showed photos of colour-tinted faces to AR and asked her to identify the onscreen hue while electrical activity was measured from her brain using scalp electrodes. When the colour of the onscreen face clashed with the colour that appeared in her mind's eye, she reacted slowly, as if trying to read traffic lights through tinted glasses. Meanwhile, the electrical measurements showed her brain struggling to resolve the conflict. But after hypnotic reversal, she glided through the colour naming, reacting as quickly as people without synaesthesia, and showing none of the tell-tale neurological signs of trying to resolve competing mental demands. Hypnosis had not only altered her experience but had modified the workings of specific brain pathways in ways that we cannot usually manage through conscious will alone.In a growing number of labs around the world, hypnosis is being used as an experimental tool to allow researchers to temporarily unpick our normally integrated psychological responses to better understand the mind and brain.Synaesthesia is an automatic psychological association that occurs only in a very few people, but we are blessed (and, indeed, cursed) with minds that mostly operate on autopilot. Take words, for example. As you read the words in this text, you are not consciously identifying each letter, joining them together in your head, and matching the collection to a memory of what it means, it just seems to happen automatically when you see each one.In an analogy to AR's colour-clash face task, if I ask you to name the colour that the word green is highlighted in, I hope you would say red. It turns out that you are slightly slower at naming the highlight colour when it clashes with the word (like in red, green and blue) than when the colours and the words match (as in red, green and blue) because we can't decide not to read the words when we see them – it happens automatically – and this interferes with trying to name the ink colour. This interference is known as the Stroop effect and, along with the normal brain responses that accompany it, have also been reversed with hypnosis by "switching off" automatic word reading.If you're not familiar with hypnosis, I suspect you might be entertaining visions of a Victorian gentleman in a three-piece suit swinging a pocket watch in a brain scanner, but there is no magic to the procedure – it simply requires that someone concentrates on your voice. Even the relaxation part has been found to be optional after an innovative study managed to hypnotise people while on exercise bikes. Perhaps the most important thing to know about hypnosis is that not everyone is hypnotisable to the same extent: countless research studies have shown that we each differ in our susceptibility. Most people can experience their arm feeling light or heavy at someone else's suggestion, a few less can feel as if movement is being prevented on command, and only a minority – about 10% of the population – experience changes in the workings of perception, memory and thought. For those who are "low hypnotisable", being hypnotised is often like listening to one of those slightly dull relaxation tapes that go on for too long, but for high hypnotisables, known as "virtuosos" in the scientific literature, the effects are compelling.We don't know why we have this tendency, but we do know it is partly genetic, that it's influenced by specific genes, and has been linked to differences in the structure of the brain. The trait seems to be normally distributed throughout the population and no reliable methods have been found to alter how hypnotisable we are. Most likely, some people have it, while others do not. This trait is usually described as "suggestibility" but it is nothing to do with gullibility or being easily led. People susceptible to hypnosis are not more naive, trusting or credulous than anyone else, but they do have the capacity to allow seemingly involuntary changes to their mind and body. The key phrase here is that they "have the capacity to allow" because hypnosis cannot be used to force someone against their will. It's a bit like watching an emotional movie. If you want, you can turn away, ignore what's going on, or play sudoku in your head, but if you engage with the story you don't consciously decide to feel joy or sadness as the story progresses, you just react. Hypnosis works in a similar way – some people just seem to have the capacity to get more "caught up in the story".When a suggestion is successful, the experience of it seeming to "happen on its own" is key and this is exactly what neuroscientists have been working with – by suggesting temporary changes to the mind that we wouldn't necessarily be able to trigger on our own. In the case of the two experiments that managed to temporarily "switch off" the Stroop effect in highly hypnotisable people, the suggestion was that the words appeared as "meaningless symbols". This avoided a clash between the colour and the word because the text suddenly appeared to be gibberish. These studies have been useful because they have found that the brain's system for resolving conflicting demands, part of our system for managing attention, seemed to go offline. Hypnotic virtuosos apparently have the capacity to put this system on standby when they need to, something that low hypnotisables lack. Neuroscientists Amir Raz and Jason Buhle suggest hypnosis is really when we allow suggestions to take over from our normally self-directed control of attention that deals with mental self-management, allowing science an exciting tool to "get under the hood" of the conscious mind.As well as allowing us to better explore the nuts and bolts of the mind and brain, hypnosis is also being used to simulate experiences that normally cause people problems, such as hallucinations or loss of control over the body. Because the effects of suggestions are only temporary, hypnosis can be used to trigger these experiences without distress and for only a few minutes at a time. "Virtuosos" are now highly sought after for brain scanning experiments where researchers look at patterns of brain activity when, for example, they are asked to hear illusory music or feel as if they can't move their hand.Several research groups have shown that hypnosis seems to emulate these experiences very closely and that the effects on the brain are different from when participants are asked to fake or imagine the same thing – both important comparisons because we can't tell just from what someone says that they are genuinely experiencing the effects (as parents of school-shy youngsters with mysteriously timed stomach aches could attest).Our own research group is using hypnosis to simulate changes in control of the body, in part to examine whether similar brain processes are involved both in hypnosis and a condition called conversion disorder – where what seem to be neurological symptoms appear, like paralysis or blindness, despite there being no damage to the nervous system that could explain them. So far, there seems to be similarity between the disorder and the effects of hypnosis in that the frontal lobe attention systems seem to be taking other brain areas offline. What we're not sure of, is why this is only temporary in hypnosis but long-term in conversion disorder.But perhaps even more mysterious is why we have the capacity to be hypnotised at all. As a species, about 10% of the population can have their reality profoundly altered simply by tuning in to suggestions made by someone else – something that is deeply weird when you think about it. Virtuoso hypnotisability has never been reliably linked to any problems or difficulties and it has been suggested that, on the contrary, it actually reflects a more efficient control of the brain's attention systems. It could be a side-effect of other benefits, but we still don't have any good theories. If you have any suggestions, do let me know.Vaughan Bell blogs at Mind HacksNeurosciencePsychologyMedical researchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
James Tanner obituary Pioneer in auxology, the study of growth in the human bodyThe human body has been studied for millennia, but it is only relatively recently that scientists have understood how much information can be derived from the analysis of physical growth. Auxology, the study of such change, is largely the creation of James Tanner, who has died aged 90. As he wrote: "A child's growth rate reflects, better than any other single index, his state of health and nutrition, and often indeed his psychological situation."Tanner's research and writings influenced not only paediatrics but also anthropology, development economics, nutrition and economic history. His influence stemmed initially from his work, shortly after the second world war, on the Harpenden growth study, one of the earliest longitudinal studies, in which successive generations at a children's home in Hertfordshire were measured and assessed from childhood through to early adulthood.Tanner, with his collaborator Reginald Whitehouse, became proficient in statistics and the analysis of longitudinal data, richer in information than the more usual cross-sectional data. Crucially, they demonstrated that the analysis of human physical growth – and the assessment of the health and progress of individuals – could be illuminated by charts. The simplest of these charts, now used routinely throughout the world, plot the child's height and weight against an expected average growth pattern. If growth deviates significantly from that pattern, it may indicate deprivation or abuse.Tanner developed more complex charts which reflect the fact that there is not one "normal" pattern of growth in adolescence, but that there are early and late maturers. He supplemented the charts with the Tanner scale, a pictorial representation of change in genitalia, breasts and pubic hair. It is still widely used.Based at Great Ormond Street hospital in London, Tanner became concerned, in the 1950s, with the very small group of children who show a significant delay in growth. He pioneered the use of human growth hormone (HGH) to treat such a delay. The hormone was initially extracted from donors post-mortem. When it was suggested, in the 1980s, that this risked the development of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, he suspended the treatment. It was resumed when genetically engineered HGH became available in the 1990s.With Phyllis Eveleth, Tanner published the book Worldwide Variation in Human Growth (1976), demonstrating the overwhelming importance of the environment in determining children's growth and development. He showed, for example, that although 90% of the adult height of an individual is inherited, changes in the average height of large groups of people are almost entirely caused by their environment. Immigrant communities, for example the Italian or Japanese in the US, rapidly acquire some of the physical proportions of the host population. The data shows the extent of differences in height by social class within many different cultures and the fact that height rises with per capita gross domestic product. The success of economic aid and food supplements in developing countries can be assessed by measuring changing heights. According to Tanner: "A well-designed growth study is a powerful tool with which to monitor the health of a population or to pinpoint subgroups of a population whose share in economic or social benefits is less than it might be."His work inspired research into the long-term consequences of changes in nutritional status – measured by height and weight – on life-chances of all kinds. It has been found that taller people, even within a social class, tend to earn more; that the very young children of unemployed parents are shorter than those of parents with jobs; that tall women tend to marry into a higher social class; that mortality from most diseases falls as height rises, even into old age; that the burden of chronic disease has lifted as nutrition has improved. The policy implications of such findings are profound. Early intervention through good maternal care and childcare can bring benefits decades later.Tanner was a great communicator. His most successful popular work, Foetus Into Man (1990), remains one of the best introductions to human biology and growth studies. He also helped to create a new field of historical study, that of anthropometric history, the study of the history of human height and weight. Always interested in the history of his own subject, in 1981 he published A History of the Study of Human Growth.He advised, over several decades, a growing group of historians, economists and statisticians. My book (with Kenneth Wachter and Annabel Gregory), Height, Health and History: Nutritional Status in the United Kingdom, 1750-1980, published in 1990, could not have been written without his help.Tanner was born in Camberley, Surrey, into a military family. His brother was killed in the second world war. James was a champion hurdler and might well have represented Britain at the cancelled Olympics of 1940. He attended Marlborough college and the University College of the South West of England (now Exeter University). He decided on a medical career, starting at the medical school of St Mary's hospital in Paddington, central London, before taking up a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania and working at Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. It was there that he met his first wife, Bernice Alture, with whom he had two children.He spent most of his career at Great Ormond Street and the Institute of Child Health in London. Bernice died in 1991. Tanner later found further happiness in his retirement in Devon with his second wife, Gunilla Lindgren, also an expert on auxology. She survives him, together with his daughter, a stepdaughter and stepson, and three granddaughters. His son predeceased him.• James Mourilyan Tanner, paediatrician, born 1 August 1920; died 11 August 2010Medical researchguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
The International Space Station: a giant science laboratory The experiments that can only be conducted in spaceThe International Space Station arose when the US, Russia and other countries merged plans for independent space projects in 1993. The Russian Zarya (Star) module was the first to be lofted into orbit in November 1998.The station was designed as an orbiting science laboratory and researchers have already carried out more than 400 experiments on board.Science on the space station follows broad themes, including human research, biology, physics and materials science, technology, earth and space research and education.Humans are affected by weightlessness and cosmic radiation in space, so many projects look at bone and muscle wastage, heart function, the behaviour of genes, and how the nervous and immune systems react to life in orbit.The outside of the European Columbus module is used to expose organisms to the harsh environment of space. Experiments with lichen have found they survive well, despite the vacuum and constant bombardment of cosmic rays and UV light from the sun. Other experiments are investigating how plants and other organisms use gravity to decide which direction to lay down roots.The space station is a major base for Earth observation. Cameras on board monitor crop growth, atmospheric greenhouse gases and lightning strikes.In February next year, the space shuttle is set to deliver a piece of equipment called the alpha magnetic spectrometer. The giant drum-shaped device will survey the skies to answer questions such as: where do cosmic rays come from? Are there far away galaxies made of antimatter? And what is dark matter made of?International space stationSpaceNasaEuropean Space AgencySpace technologyIan Sampleguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |