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The remarkable tree lobster

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I can’t remember the first time I heard about the Lord Howe Island stick insect, and I can’t say my interest has been much more than in passing. They would pique my interest when I saw them in the news, only to fade back into the vast and ever growing pile of ‘oh, interesting’. Then, at the beginning of November, I actually got to come face to face with one of these creatures and it was so incredible I decided to find out more. This is what I’ve learned… Lord Howe Island stick insects are - I’m sure you’ll be surprised to learn - found on Lord Howe Island. This is a small crescent-shaped island in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. I didn’t realise until researching this piece that the island is actually inhabited. It has a population of 382 people according to the 2011 census . The Lord Howe Island stick insect ( Dryococelus australis ), or LHISI as it’s known to friends, was first described by Xavier Montrouzier in 1855 from specimens collected by the HMS Hera...
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Does Kelly Brook have ‘the perfect body’?

“ This is What the Ideal Woman’s Body Looks Like, According to Science ”  proclaimed the headline that popped up in my Facebook feed. I was intrigued. What was meant by ‘ideal’? Healthiest, most attractive to men, most attainable for women? Or some other metric? To satiate my curiosity I clicked on the link and found myself looking at photographs of Kelly Brook on the beach. After some scrolling past these photos I eventually found the text which declared that according to researchers at the University of Texas, “the perfect female body measures 1.68 meters in height [and] the bust/weight/hip measurements are 99-63-91” What is the source of these figures? And what is meant by ‘perfect’? Luckily the article links to their source. Surely the scientific paper, or at the very least a press release from the university about this earth-shattering research? Unfortunately not. Instead it’s a link to that august publication, the Curaçao Chronicle (no, I’ve never heard of it e...
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Sexism vs cultural imperialism

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As I was getting ready for bed last night a friend shared a tweet that immediately caught my attention. https://twitter.com/sbattrawden/status/1143465003409915905 The tweet was of a paper that has just been published online, titled "Does physician gender have a significant impact on first-pass success rate of emergency endotracheal intubation?" and showed the abstract which began, It is unknown whether female physicians can perform equivalently to male physicians with respect to emergency procedures. Understandably, this got the backs up of a lot of people, myself included. Who on earth thinks that's a valid question to be researching in this day and age? Are we really still having to battle assumptions of female inferiority when it comes to things like this? Who on earth gave this ethics approval, let alone got it though peer review? I then took a deep breath and asked myself why a respected journal, The American Journal of Emergency Medicine , would publish ...
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