Young women and girls’ time spent in unpaid household work contributes to the gender pay gap, according to new research from the Universities of East Anglia (UEA), Birmingham and Brunel. The research shows women’s later employment participation is affected by taking on the weight of this care burden in childhood, thus adding to existing inequality...
Estimates suggest that more than 160 million women and adolescents who wanted to avoid pregnancy were not using contraceptives in 2019, despite significant progress in the use of modern contraceptives globally over the previous 50 years. Major disparities in contraceptive use still exist between regions – with more than half the women with unmet need...
We often hear the phrase ‘growing pains’ used by the general public to describe muscle or joint pain in young people and the term is also used by health professionals. However researchers have found there is no consistent medical definition of the condition behind a diagnosis. A broad review of medical literature by University of...
A time traveller from the early 1990s would be baffled by the coffee marketplace of 2022. What’s latte art? Or grind uniformity? Or single-origin beans? And who cares anyway? That time traveller would discover that a lot of people care and care passionately. Just as the markets of once-mundane items like beer, beignets, chocolate or...
A new paper in Oxford Open Economics, explores “Potterian economics”—the economics of the world of J.K. Rawling’s Harry Potter series. Comparing such economics with professional economic models indicates that while some aspects of this economy are in line with economic models, many other aspects are distorted, contradicting professional economists’ views. Evidence suggests that the public’s economic...
Plants have directly contributed to the development of important drugs. The antimalarial treatment artemisinin, pain medication morphine, and cancer chemotherapy taxol are just three examples of drugs derived from plants. Africa is endowed with up to 45,000 plant species – about 25% of the world’s plant genetic resources. More than 5,000 plant species from this...
The global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the early months of 2020 shut down nearly all physical and social human activities. For musical practice this meant near death. Performing music is, after all, one of the oldest forms of social human engagement. In Nigeria, the shutdown of concerts and public music performances was swift....
The cover of The Routledge Handbook of Critical Studies in Whiteness carries a striking image courtesy of South African artist Norman Catherine. The image was created in 2015 as one of a set of digital prints and, typical of Catherine’s work, contrasts dark and light to present a cynical view of the world informed by...
Forget covid-19, monkeypox, and other viruses for the moment and consider another threat troubling infectious disease specialists: common urinary tract infections, or UTIs, that lead to emergency room visits and even hospitalizations because of the failure of oral antibiotics. There’s no Operation Warp Speed charging to rescue us from the germs that cause these infections,...
A new analysis of voting data for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)’s World’s Best Male Football Player Award suggests that cultural similarity between voters and players biases results. Michael Johnson and Ian McCarthy of Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, present these findings in PLOS ONE. Earlier studies have shown that industry-wide awards—such...
