Motherboard: Let's Talk About Sex in Space

There have, for the record, been no official, confirmed reports of inappropriate behavior, consensual or otherwise, among Shuttle, Soyuz, Shenzhou, or ISS crew members. Yet these official denials haven’t stopped minds on Earth from speculating about how those in orbit might be passing some of their most private time.

Imaginations were set aflame in 1992 when it was reported that Jan Davis and Mark Lee, two astronauts who went to orbit aboard Space Shuttle Endeavor, had secretly married nine months prior to their mission. The deployment of husband and wife on the same mission was a first for NASA—the space agency subsequently forbade such pairings—and immediately prompted speculation that they may have been the first couple in history to consummate their marriage free from the surly bonds of Earth. [...]

Aside from the lack of urgent scientific reasons to really test human libido and sexual behavior in orbit, the simple fact of the matter is that body-to-body docking in microgravity is probably not as orgasmic as we might imagine it to be. In the first place, there are significant logistical difficulties in orchestrating the deed, and this alone, Wolpe suggested, might be reason enough to dissuade astronauts from unofficial experimentation. [...]

Astronauts tend to sweat more in space, and decreased blood pressure could make it more difficult for males to hold up their end of the mission. As for the female side of things, the jury is still out on whether microgravity is a bane or a boon to boobs. While one astronaut trainer has confirmed that bras are in fact worn in space, this is usually during the intense exercise regimens that astronauts are submitted to. Beyond that, it’s a matter of personal preference. [...]

Understanding how sex impacts small-group dynamics in isolation is a crucial component to its successful integration as a variable into missions to space. When small crews are forced to spend months or years in close confinement, figuring out ways to tolerate one another’s presence and cooperate can prove to be very taxing. Having two love birds along for a ride might only complicate things further.

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Political Critique: Gender as symbolic glue: how ‘gender’ became an umbrella term for the rejection of the (neo)liberal order

It is simplistic to believe that Kaczynski, Orbán and Trump have risen to power simply by tapping into a ubiquitous and deeply engrained hatred of women and homosexuals. Rather, for many voters, equality politics, both in the narrow sense of policies aimed at eradicating various forms of inequality, and as a symbol of a positive, progressive vision of the future, have come to signify everything that is wrong with the current state of politics.

In recent years numerous countries across the globe have witnessed the emergence of powerful, transnational social movements mobilizing against an enemy known as ‘gender ideology’, and ‘cultural Marxism’, in much of the Western world, ‘Gayropa’ in post-Soviet countries or ‘political correctness’ in the American context. These movements have successfully mobilized people against various human rights and equality issues such as women’s reproductive rights, LGBT issues, gender equality policies and gender mainstreaming, sexual education, gender studies as an academic field and political correctness. At the peak of those campaigns it was not uncommon for ‘gender ideology’ or political correctness to be portrayed as the new incarnation of Nazism and Leninism (Polish MP Beata Kempa), bemoaned for enslaving the people (Ukrainian Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk), presented as a threat to children comparable to paedophilia (Slovak MP Pavol Gorisak), or blamed for turning American campuses into ‘ivy-covered North Koreas’ (American public intellectual William Lind). [...]

In order to understand this phenomenon, and to highlight the crucial role played by gender politics in the current paradigm change, we have introduced the notion of gender as ‘symbolic glue’.

Firstly, in constructing a dynamic within which the notion of ‘gender’ is perceived as a threatening concept the right has united separate contested issues attributed to the progressive agenda under one umbrella term. ‘Gender ideology’ has come to signify the failure of democratic representation, and opposition to this ideology has become a means of rejecting different facets of the current socioeconomic order, from the prioritization of identity politics over material issues, and the weakening of people’s social, cultural and political security, to the detachment of social and political elites and the influence of transnational institutions and the global economy on nation states. [...]

Thirdly, opposition to ‘gender politics’ and ‘cultural Marxism’ has also allowed the Right to create broad alliances and unite various actors that have not, necessarily, been eager to cooperate in the past: different Christian Churches, orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Muslims, mainstream conservatives, far right parties, fundamentalist groups and in some countries even football hooligans.

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Jacobin Magazine: The Privatization of Childhood

Today, nearly half of American children born to parents with low incomes grow into adults with low incomes, and 40 percent of children born to wealthy parents become high-income adults. In the United States, which has based much of its social safety net on educational mobility, the ability to do better than one’s parents by completing more years of schooling did indeed rise between 1947 and 1977, but it has decreased sharply since. [...]

Upward mobility has always been the exception to the rule — children born to families in the bottom income quintile have about a 6 percent chance of making it to the top income quintile in their lifetimes — but unfortunately it is a fantasy on which United States welfare programs are now based. Never has pulling oneself up by one ’s bootstraps been more plainly a cruel action than when prescribed as a policy regime for large swaths of the population. [...]

Using data from tax records, economist Thomas Piketty shows that both capital income and earned income have grown for the richest families to the extent that in the America of 2010, like the Gilded Age Europe of 1910, the top 1 percent owns the same share of income as the bottom 50 percent, and the top 10 percent own the same share as the bottom 90 percent. [...]

The difference between Dickensian England and the present-day United States is that few rich people recognize that they have won the birth lottery. Instead, as political scientist John Gerring has noted, “poverty” is ascertained as a national crisis, a disease. [...]

Wealthy parents have the luxury of time to impart knowledge essential to understanding science and social studies to their children beginning in early childhood through exposure to travel, museums, and even simple excursions like going to the supermarket or the post office. [...]

Childhood has been reconceived, not as a time to compensate for the alienated labor of adult life, but a time to prepare for adult life. The rapidly intensifying stratification not just among the rich and poor in America, but even among those within the top 1 percent (the top 0.01 percent have gained more than the rest of the top 1 percent, which has concrete consequences in rich and middle-class parents’ perceptions and behavior toward their children), means that rich and middle-class families accurately perceive the cultivation of their children, the constant search for the competitive edge, as essential to ensuring their children access as adults to the knowledge professions rather than offshored and devalued vocational work.

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FiveThirtyEight: Does The United States Really Need To Improve Its Image Abroad?

And when residents of other countries are asked essentially the same question, their views of the U.S. president tend to closely track with what Americans think they think. The Pew Research Center asked people in a wide range of countries how much confidence they had in the U.S. president “to do the right thing” when it comes to global affairs. Looking at 14 of those countries, we can see a low point in confidence around 2008 and then a restoration of confidence after Obama’s election, followed by a slow slide downward again.1 All these countries had more trust in the American president toward the end of the Obama administration than they had toward the beginning of the Bush administration. And almost all have a higher opinion recently (in 2015 or 2016) than they did in 2008, at least by a couple of percentage points. (The only exception: Russia, which went from 22 percent in 2008 to 11 percent in 2015.)

Things get complicated when it comes to asking residents of other countries about their perceptions of the United States in general, as opposed to the American president specifically. The trend varies a lot more from country to country. In Germany and France, there was a surge in U.S. favorability ratings after Obama’s election. Meanwhile, Pakistan’s opinion of the U.S. fell a little. Of the 14 countries I looked at,2 five — Germany, the United Kingdom, Jordan, Russia and Turkey — have less favorable views on America now (or in 2015) than they did in 2002. And four — Jordan, Russia, Lebanon and Kenya — lowered their opinion of the U.S. during Obama’s term. But it’s reasonable to say that the world still likes us; in 2015, Pew found that the median favorability rating among 39 countries from that same survey was 69 percent.

Judging by these measures, you could say that promises to restore America’s rightful place are both a political statement and a reflection of reality. Obama’s and Trump’s calls for renewal are legit — each really did inherit a presidency in need of image rehabilitation abroad, although Trump maybe has less restoration work to do than Obama did. On the other hand, both have probably overstated how poor our reputation as a country is. That is, unless, they were both talking about Russia.

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The Guardian: How can Britain exit the EU? As a nation state it doesn’t really exist

Once upon a time there was a Roman province called Britannia, but it did not include Ireland, or Scotland north of Hadrian’s Wall. What does exist today is a state called the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is not a nation state like France or Denmark. It is a multinational state, like the former Yugoslavia or the Austro-Hungarian empire.

It is also a distinctly odd state. It contains four nations, one far richer, more populous and more powerful than the other three. England contains almost 84% of the UK population, Scotland has just under 8.5%, Wales just under 5%, and Northern Ireland just under 3%. The state populations of Germany and the United States vary widely, but none towers over the rest to remotely this extent. To judge by what they say and do, the London-centred political and media elites are blind to the tangled history this oddity reflects. As a result the union state is now heading for break-up. [...]

Like a mortar bomb crashing into a building infested with dry rot, the EU referendum has torn great holes in the structure, the operational codes and the underlying assumptions of the increasingly rickety union state. Two of the union’s four nations voted to leave the European Union; two voted to remain. There were dramatic differences within three of the four. The Scottish vote to remain was pretty uniform across the nation. But in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin areas voted to remain while DUP areas voted to leave. England voted to leave but London, Liverpool and Manchester voted to stay. Wales also voted to leave but Cardiff, the Vale of Glamorgan and Monmouth in the south, and Ceredigion and Gwynedd in the north, voted to remain.

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The Guardian: Lost British birdsong discovered in New Zealand birds

A new study reveals that a type of native birdsong, now lost in Britain, can still be heard in New Zealand where the birds were introduced in the 19th century.

By comparing recordings of yellowhammer accents in both countries scientists were able to hear how the birds’ song might have sounded in the UK 150 years ago.

The study, published in Ecography, examined yellowhammer accents in the UK and New Zealand, where over 600 of the birds were introduced in the 1860’s and 70’s and later became pests. It found some dialects that likely existed in the UK appear to have gone extinct, yet they still exist in New Zealand – a phenomenon that also occurs in human languages. [...]

The New Zealand birds had almost twice as many dialects as their British relatives, overturning the scientists’ expectations that the range of dialects would be greater in the mother country.

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Business Insider: The youngest pope in history was a tween who ruled 3 separate times in his life

HBO's new show "The Young Pope" takes place in a world where we get a new pope.

As you may have surmised from the title, he's a sprightly one — just 47 years old. That's pretty young for a pope, who are, on average, elected in their 60s.

The character, Lenny Balardo, is played by Jude Law, 44, who takes the title of Pope Pius XIII.

The youngest pope in history, however, is less than half that age. That would be Pope Benedict IX, born Theophylactus of Tusculum, who was picked as pope on three separate occasions in his lifetime, ruling during a tumultuous period in the church with seven different papacies over a short period of time. The date of his birth is uncertain, but his first papacy, in 1032, was given to him somewhere between the age of 11 and 20.

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The Conversation: How to talk to your dog – according to science

There is already quite a lot of research evidence showing that the way we communicate to dogs is different from the way we communicate to other humans. When we talk to dogs, we use what is called “dog directed speech”. This means we change the structure of our sentences, shortening and simplifying them. We also tend to speak with a higher pitch in our voices. We also do this when we are not sure we are understood or when talking to very young infants.

A new study has shown we use an even higher pitch when talking to puppies, and that this tactic really does help the animals to pay attention more. The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, showed that talking to puppies using dog-directed speech makes them react and attend more to their human instructor than regular speech. [...]

But there are significant differences in how dogs understand our communication and how children do. The theory is that dogs, unlike children, view human pointing as some kind of mild command, telling them where to go, rather than a way of transferring information. When you point for a child, on the other hand, they will think you are informing them about something.

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Deutsche Welle: Germans not opposed to same sex marriage

Gays, lesbians and bisexuals still face discrimination in Germany, even though the country's General Law on Equal Treatment (AGG) prohibits it. Christine Lüders, the head of Germany's Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, told journalists in Berlin on Wednesday that it is "clear" that there are still problems. She cites the examples of a lesbian couple that was refused an apartment by a landlord, a man who was fired when it transpired that he was living with another man, or a gay couple that was asked to leave a hotel lobby because the pair was seen kissing there. The people affected all turned to the Anti-Discrimination Agency.

Yet, a study commissioned by Lüders' office shows that a majority of Germans clearly support legal equality for homosexual and bisexual marriage. Of those surveyed, 83 percent are for same-sex marriage and 95 percent believe it is a good thing that gays and lesbians are legally protected from discrimination. [...]

A large part (75.8 percent) of the approximately 2,000 people surveyed between October and November 2016 are in favor of allowing same-sex couples to adopt children together. The current laws do not allow it. [...]

Beate Küpper, head of the study, also found that the younger and more educated the interviewees were, the less prejudiced theya were against same-sex marriage. Women generally have a more positive view of homosexuality than men. Another factor that plays into attitudes is religion. The more religious people are – be it Jewish, Christian, Hindu or Muslim – the less tolerant they are of homosexuals and bisexuals.

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