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There’s a genetic factor, present in male mammals, that is vital to making sure those mammals develop male sex characteristics. But it’s not only important during embryonic development. Oh, no. Turns out, this factor must be active in order for a male’s gonads to stay 100% male. Turn it off, even in an adult male, and the cells in his testes will start to take on more feminine characteristics.

The genetic factor is called DMRT1, and it is not the only thing responsible for maintaining a mammal’s biological sex throughout life. There’s another factor, called FoxL2, that does the same job in females. Scientists already knew about the lifelong necessity of FoxL2. This new research, performed by a team led by Drs. David Zarkower and Vivian Bardwell of the University of Minnesota, confirmed that DMRT1 is FoxL2’s male counterpart.

Turns out, biological sex determination in mice is kind of an ongoing battle. It doesn’t end during fetal development. It doesn’t even end at birth.

What’s that mean for humans? This part isn’t really clear yet. Naturally-occuring DMRT1 deletions are rare, but they do happen. They can end in a range of effects. Some genetic males born without DMRT1 have small or underdeveloped testes. Others are born with indeterminate physical sex. About 30% of the time, Zarkower said, a natural DMRT1 deletion leads to an XY female—someone who looks physically female on the outside, but who has male genes and nonfunctional gonads instead of either testicles or ovaries. Usually, nobody notices the difference until the person doesn’t experience a normal female puberty.

Can we design teams to perform better?

Malone: We hope to look at that in the future. Though you can change an individual’s intelligence only so much, we think it’s completely possible to markedly change a group’s intelligence. You could increase it by changing members or incentives for collaboration, for instance.

The depth and gravity of the current economic and social crisis in countries like Greece, Portugal, and Spain present women with a new opportunity. Confronted with what many of them perceive as the equivalent of an “economic war,” women are playing an increasingly important role in maintaining their families’ financial security. And the more widespread this becomes, the more women will seek a political role that reflects their economic clout.

Of course, women’s changing status may not translate immediately into growing political influence. And the rest of Europe might never follow the example of Scandinavia, where gender equality has advanced much further than anywhere else. But such a dynamic does now seem to be in motion.

Unnatural Selection by Mara Hvistendahl charts how the trend towards choosing boys over girls, largely through sex-selective abortions, is rapidly spreading across the developing world.

While the natural sex ratio at birth is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, in India the figure has risen to 112 boys and in China 121. The Chinese city of Lianyungang recorded an astonishing 163 boys per 100 girls in 2007.

The bias towards boys has been estimated to have caused the "disappearance" of 160 million women and girls in Asia alone over the past few decades. The pattern has now spilled over to Azerbaijan, Georgia and Armenia, the Balkans and Albania, where the sex ratio is 115/100.

The unnatural skewing towards male populations has become so pronounced in recent decades that Hvistendahl, a writer for Science magazine, says it has given rise to a new "Generation XY". She raises the possibility that with so many surplus men – up to a fifth of men will be single in northwestern India by 2020 – large parts of the world could become like America's wild west, with excess testosterone leading to raised levels of crime and violence.

when I went to change back to @quietriot_girl twitter told me ‘this name has already been taken’. I thought that was weird, so I went to look and there I saw ‘my old self’ with my avatar, my name, my location and my blog URL. But it wasn’t me. To cut a medium-sized story short, it turned out that someone had taken my handle when I’d dropped it for @quietriot_boy and just copied the details of my profile to make it look like me. They only made two tweets, both obscure youtube videos, making references to things I was saying on twitter, or things they thought about me. I found it disconcerting but I didn’t let it get to me too much.

Then the person who had done this ‘identity theft’ emailed and owned up. It was one of my feminist ‘adversaries’ who seemed to have a particular bugbear about how I write aout trans issues. I didn’t get an apology but I got my log-in details back and was able to close down @quietriot_girl.