Sex is supposed to be simple—at least at the molecular level. The biological explanations that appear in textbooks amount to X + X = and X + Y = . Venus or Mars, pink or blue. As science looks more closely, however, it becomes increasingly clear that a pair of chromosomes do not always suffice to distinguish girl/boy—either from the standpoint of sex (biological traits) or of gender (social identity).

In the cultural realm, this shift in perspective has already received a wide embrace. “Nonbinary” definitions of gender—transfeminine, genderqueer, hijra—have entered the vernacular. Less visible perhaps are the changes taking place in the biological sciences. The emerging picture that denotes “girlness” or “boyness” reveals the involvement of complex gene networks—and the entire process appears to extend far beyond a specific moment six weeks after gestation when the gonads begin to form.

To varying extents, many of us are biological hybrids on a male-female continuum. Researchers have found XY cells in a 94-year-old woman, and surgeons discovered a womb in a 70-year-old man, a father of four. New evidence suggests that the brain consists of a […]

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labourers at work on the Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah causeway in Kuwait City in February.
Credit: Yasser Al-Zayyat/AFP/

It is 9am and the temperature in Kuwait City is 45C (113°F) and rising, but already people working outside. A row of litter-pickers are already hard at work along a coastal highway, their entire bodies covered to protect them from the sun. Outside one of the city’s many malls, valets hover beside the air-conditioned entrance, while two men in white hats huddle wearily next to their ice cream stands.

Other city residents are luckier. They can avoid the outdoors altogether, escaping the inferno by sheltering in malls, cars and office buildings, where temperatures are kept polar-cold.

For years, Kuwait’s climate has been steadily heating up. In the summer months, the Gulf state now frequently touches 50C, and was last year awarded the grim prize of being the hottest place on earth, when temperatures reached a staggering high of 54C.

But while the capital is making […]

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Millennial climate activist
Credit: Erik M/Pacific/Barcroft

If progressives can’t take back control of the White House and Congress from climate change deniers in the next three years, it’s conceivable that humankind could be screwed. But evidence is mounting that a new political force is up to the task. It has millions of potential supporters across the US, the UK and Canada. It’s openly critical of capitalism. And it’s led by millennials such as Moumita Ahmed.

The 25-year-old activist is intimately aware of what’s at stake. She grew up in Queens, New York, and rose to prominence during the 2016 Democratic primaries as co-founder of a group now known as Millennials for Revolution.

She has since rallied thousands of people her age against Donald Trump’s travel ban and the Republican healthcare bill. Yet climate change is never far from Ahmed’s mind. Rising oceans directly threaten her family members back in Bangladesh. “It makes me so angry and upset,” Ahmed said. “But at the end of the day, I still believe there is hope.”

The window for hope […]

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Illustration credit: Vice

Rachel Lamb grew up thinking that climate change was a liberal hoax. That’s what everyone thought at the rural Michigan church where her dad was the pastor. The world was slowly getting hotter, but that fact was rarely mentioned in the Baptist social circles she spun through, and when it was, it was in the context of something Democrats blew way out of proportion. Her attitude about the subject was more wary than antagonistic. If someone were to come up to her clique and suggest that the climate was changing, their response would most likely be a sarcastic, Where’d you hear that from?

Although the 27-year-old used to go hiking in national parks with her family as a kid, she was taught to think of her love of Jesus and her appreciation of nature as being separate—two puzzle pieces that made up the larger picture of her personality but didn’t fit together. Then she took a climate change politics course at Wheaton College, a Christian university in Illinois, […]

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Pastor Jim Bakker Evangelical grifter

The science behind human understanding of today’s solar eclipse is nothing new. Astronomer Johannes Kepler figured out the science behind how eclipses happen in the 17th century when he mapped out the orbits of various celestial bodies. But all of that is just new-fangled nonsense according to some of the most prominent Christian nationalist commentators.

Televangelist and convicted felon Jim Bakker, who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for defrauding viewers, is telling viewers that they need to see routine physical events as signs from God.