I think my umbilical hernia is getting bigger. I’ve had it since my pregnancy over five years ago, the result of diastasis, a situation where the abdominal muscles pull apart from the baby taking up so much darn room. I’ve consulted with a surgeon, and the hernia is tiny, not worth fixing until I’m done [...]

Life history trade-offs are the bread and butter of biological anthropology. The way we understand the importance of certain traits and life events is in how they vary in response to selection pressures like energy availability or climate, but also cultural beliefs and practices. That’s why it matters to us when you got your first [...]

(Alternate, Twitter-sourced titles: “5 Ways to Prove Darwin Wasn’t Crazy,” “Shut the Eff Up and Science Already,” “5 Ways Psychology Needs to Evolve.”) Evolutionary psychology, the study of human psychological adaptations, does not have a popular or scientific reputation for being rigorous, even though there are rigorous, thoughtful scientists in the field. The field is [...]

It’s vacation time for Team Family, as my daughter calls us. While we’re skating and skiing, enjoy this repost from my old blog on hormonal contraceptives and mate choice. Imagine you are a single, heterosexual woman. You meet a nice man at the driving range, or on a blind date. You like him and he [...]

This here blog is many things — ladybusiness explainer, bad science outer, and a place where I reflect on higher education and the academic life. Today is the last day of the semester here at the U of I, there’s a lovely dusting of snow on everything, and it seemed like a nice time to [...]

I tend to go to bed freezing, especially so in the winter, so I pile our flannel sheet, blanket, and down comforter over me when I settle in to sleep. A few times each menstrual cycle, clustered together in the luteal phase between ovulation and menses, I wake up from sleep completely soaked in my [...]

You all must forgive me for this blog post. You see, I am in my premenstrual phase, and so with all my insane-o premenstrual symptoms I simply cannot access the part of my brain that makes political decisions. Perhaps when I get through the devastation and physical wreckage we ladies like to think of as [...]

A paper that came out on August 20th in PNAS suggests a factor in semen that could induce ovulation. The idea that this could happen isn’t new, but identification of the factor that might do it certainly is. Ratto et al (2012) contend that they have found The Magical Semen Ingredient That Makes the Ladies [...]

Trigger warning: discussion of violence against women and graphic mention of miscarriage.

The idea for this post came from a question I received when a guest on Skeptically Speaking: is menstrual blood an attractant to bears? Scicurious has since covered that paper in her usual delightful way, and I’m going to focus more on cultural issues and deer. Yes, deer. * * * That’s right ladies, it’s [...]