Paris, the dead of summer: a tumbleweed blows through the MyScienceWork offices.
August is a lonely time to be a journalist! Not only is the city clearing out around us, the sound of our typing echoing through the empty halls of the building, but we get the distinct impression that, all around the world, the summer hiatus is in full swing...
(Credit: Flickr / Ðeni [back..sort of])
Our calls go unanswered in labs populated only by incubators and centrifuges – possibly a depressed grad student or two – while our inboxes fill up with the dreaded out-of-office reply: “I will be on vacation with limited access to email for the next eternity…”
The perfect summer weather in Paris has done its best to distract us, the siren call of the ping-pong paddle becoming increasingly difficult to resist.
But, despite the cool cadence that currently reigns, science never truly stops, so neither do we! This week we talked about bringing together two domains that may seem very far apart: gender studies and climate change. David Edmunds explained why the role of women in different cultures has to be considered if we want to succeed at climate adaptation and mitigation efforts, as well as find solutions that haven’t even been thought of yet.
A Woman’s-Eye View of Climate Change
This approach reminds us of an interesting initiative at Stanford University to get researchers to put more “sex in science” – because men and women, males and females are not identical, and considering the differences can bring important improvements to science and industry.
Read about the project here:
Sex in Science Yields Gendered Innovations
Development projects, too, could see greater success by taking advantage of new technologies, yes, but also by focusing on women. Find out how in:
Empowerment through Women, technology and mobile phones
Have a great summer weekend. We’ll be back next week with some great summertime stories: Think sea, sun and sex!
The MyScienceWork Team