science
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What Is Essentialism? And How Does It Shape Attitudes to Transgender People and Sexual Diversity?
Recent debates around transgender people and sexual diversity have been marked by essentialism, a profoundly conservative mindset with deep links to religious and metaphysical dogmatism. It is a stance through which conservative thinkers seek certainty in a world of change and fluidity. Essentialism comprises three key ideas. First, there is the idea that nature is…
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Animal Clitorises Are More Varied Than Originally Thought, but Can Male Animals Find Them?
The sometimes astonishing sex lives of animals are well known, especially the huge range in penis structures, evolved to increase the number of offspring that males father. For example, ducks have corkscrew-shaped penises, and echidnas (also known as spiny anteaters) have a four-headed penis. But what about female genitalia? For hundreds of years, scientists assumed…
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Take Your Time: It Will Probably Benefit You in the Long Run
We often hear stories about ‘late bloomers’ in life and how age should not be an indicator of if or when you should try something new. You know, lines like, “Vera Wang didn’t design her first dress until 40”. And while it’s encouraging to hear stories like these, there’s more to the idea of taking…
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How to Test if We’re Living in a Computer Simulation
Physicists have long struggled to explain why the universe started out with conditions suitable for life to evolve. Why do the physical laws and constants take the very specific values that allow stars, planets and ultimately life to develop? The expansive force of the universe, dark energy, for example, is much weaker than theory suggests…