HEX Issue 6: Cruffins, Christmas & Cervical Confusion
It’s 1pm. Do you know where your cervix is?
Welcome to December, dearest nerds, newts, and necromancers.
This week the HEX team discovered the cruffin – a truly enchanting combination of croissant and muffin. It even had jam on it.
And on the subject of delicious new things to enjoy, our top resolution for next year is to discover more amazing women making a difference to science (jam optional) – and we’d love your help.
If you know any fantastic women working in STEM, we invite you to direct them to our suspiciously welcoming gingerbread-covered house deep in the forest. Alternatively, find us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to tell us about your nerdiest passions, your sheroes, or the bad science you’d like us to toss headfirst into the gaping maw of the Kraken. We’re always hungry for that stuff.
HEX is now 6 issues deep and we hope you’re enjoying our eclectic mix of science, humour, feminism, and (occasionally obscure) pop culture. It may not be the most conventional choice of ingredients, but we think it works – much like a cruffin.
Let’s Jingle, Belles!
Fed up of Body Shop sets, generic Amazon vouchers and faux-Famous Five books on lame husbands? We hear you. Here are some quirky, nerdy, feminist and/or sciencey gift ideas – why not give them to someone you love and help them dodge the crushing depair that characterises the 2020 festive season? HAPPY CHRISTMAS.
TIT BITS
Keeping abreast of the latest news, views, and research
Won’t somebody think of the uteri?!
According to this recent article, contraceptive research desperately needs a reboot (we couldn’t agree more). Some women avoid contraception due to often unpleasant side effects (who doesn’t love breast tenderness and elevated blood pressure?) while plenty who do use it experience unintended pregnancy either due to contraceptive failure or incorrect use. But despite contraceptive R&D suffering from a “cycle of neglect,” the global market, and the science, is out there. It’s time to give our uteri the utopian high-tech future they deserve.
No money for honeys
Start-ups with women as founding CEOs attract less investment than ones with a man at the helm, a new study reports, especially when women attempt to launch businesses in male-dominated sectors (male-led companies entering female-dominated areas don’t face the same penalty – quelle surprise 🙄). The research dispels the tired idea that women CEOs attract less funding because they choose “female-friendly” industries (whatever that means), and pins the blame squarely on investor bias. Thankfully, investors don’t stay stupid and sexist forever – the study found that more experienced investors judged a business on its potential, rather than the gender of its CEO.
Starved of affection?
We’ve all been there… you miss lunch due to a hectic work/life or diet culture BS, and before you know it the food cravings strike and you’re inhaling a bag of Percy Pigs in one go. Now, research has shown that you can also crave social interaction after being alone. After study participants isolated for 10 hours (the introvert’s dream!), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed neural signatures of craving in response to social cues, similar to the response to food cues after a separate 10-hour period of fasting. Personally, we’d still prefer the Percy Pigs...
Witch trials
Poor Margaret Rutherford. An actress held back from leading lady status by the obvious bump on her nose, her looks helped her find fame as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. (To add injury to insult, she then suffered terrible burns because of an accident on set). This piece discusses her love of kids, how she became an icon among witches, and the long-term negative impact the film had on her career. Her testicle-shrivelling cackle gets a shout-out too.
TO THE KRAKEN 🦑
Hands, face, the sea awaits – anti-vax scaremongers can get deep-sixed
Professor K appreciates that not everyone has an extensive scientific understanding of how vaccines work, and that people should have as much information as possible when making health decisions. That said, she would like to make it known that the next cockwomble she catches comparing the COVID-19 vaccine to thalidomide on Twitter will get snapped in half like a wet twig. As a Twitter user rightly pointed out, thalidomide isn’t a vaccine, and was given to pregnant women at a time when we still thought smoking might be good for our health. Science evolves, guys. Unlike ageless Lovecraftian sea horrors.
HEX EDUCATION (Warning: NSFW)
It’s 1pm. Do you know where your cervix is?
A US poll reveals that many women have a blind spot when it comes to their own anatomy. Of 2,000 women, only half could identify a cervix on a diagram of the female reproductive system (given that a quarter couldn’t identify the vagina, we question the artistic merit of the diagram). There was also widespread confusion about periods and the menopause.
We were initially surprised by the results, but after going down a very NSFW rabbit hole of vulva diagrams, even this scientifically-savvy coven found it harder than expected to tell our frenulum from our fundus – and there were a few parts we never knew we had (the posterior commissure, anyone?).
Why not test your grasp of genital jargon by filling in the missing terms on the diagram below (answers can be found here)?
More things stuffin’ our cruffins this week:
A podcast talking about female druids in the ancient world | 7 food myths debunked – do one, calorie counting! | This post explaining the important diff between self-soothing and self-care | And this one saying why naps are good. Night night.
The HEX Science team
🧬Jean Splicer | ☢ Marie Fury | 🧠 Rorschach Tess | 🔬 Rosalind Frankly