I enjoyed the first volume of this. Proceeds to the Society of Women Engineers.

Originally shared by Mary Fan

BRAVE NEW GIRLS Cover Reveal and Story Line-Up!!

Today, I’m revealing the cover and story line-up for

BRAVE NEW GIRLS: STORIES OF GIRLS WHO SCIENCE AND SCHEME, coming August 2017!

This YA sci-fi anthology (edited by sci-fi authors Paige Daniels and Mary Fan) features

stories about girls in STEM (Science, …

Originally shared by Yonatan Zunger

It’s really nice to be able to share good news for once. A new study in JAMA Pediatrics studied the effect of same-sex marriage laws on teen suicide rates. They looked at 32 different US states which changed their laws at different times, as a way of disentangling this effect from other effects.

The net result? Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to a 7% overall drop in teen suicide attempts, and a 14% drop among LGBT teens.

It turns out that being publicly told that you’re an accepted member of society and not a pariah does make a difference in people’s lives, especially teenagers. Who woulda thunk?

But the upshot of this is: All of you who worked on this, in one way or another? You just saved some lives. Well done.

The article itself is available online: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/2604258

(NB: For clarity, that’s a 7% drop in the rate, not a seven percentage point drop drop. We should be so lucky as to have any one thing eliminate seven percentage points. As a baseline, a weighted 8.6% of all high school students, and 28.5% of LGBT high school students, attempted suicide in the year before same-sex marriage legalization. Suicide is the second most common cause of death among people aged 15-24 in the US.

For those who want technical notes: The paper seems to have done a very careful job on statistics, testing a wide variety of alternate hypotheses and ruling them out from the data. One test worth calling out: the two-year leading indicator (suicide rates two years prior to law changes) was not correlated to suicide rates, indicating that this was not triggered by general changes in the state which were also leading to this; the two-year trailing indicator (two years after), however, was correlated, with the same correlation as the immediate future, indicating a lasting effect rather than a one-off.)

Cosplay: a nerd woman thing from the start.

Originally shared by Self-Rescuing Princess Society

“For more than 10 years Morojo and Ackerman were an inseparable, intellectually compatible dream duo, and 1939 was an especially big year for the pair: they started their first major zine together, jointly financed the publication of teenage Ray Bradbury’s first sci-fi zine, and attended the first-ever World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) wearing ‘futuristicostumes’ straight out of the 1936 H.G. Wells movie Things to Come — the FIRST FAN COSTUMES EVER WORN IN RECORDED HISTORY.

“Handsome Forrie cut a dashing figure in his giant shoulder pads and breeches, tiny Morojo’s ball gown converted into a ROMPER with a CAPE, and every other attendee who wasn’t busy hatin’ on ‘em for out-fanning the rest of the world started planning their own costumes for next year.”

I had no idea!