Boston/Cambridge in the last year or two has been a sort of ‘ground zero’ for women in science issues, so I thought I’d point your attention to this Q&A on Inside Higher Ed with the editors of a new book called Why Aren’t More Women in Science: Top Researchers Debate the Evidence.

In putting together their book, they gained some insight into how difficult it is to have a measured discussion of the evidence about different genders in science. Here are some of their answers:

For us, the worrisome aspect of the debate was not so much its substance as its tone. Defenders of Summers’s remarks were vilified and dismissed. This does not serve the purpose of science — it led to muzzling of the scholarly debate, with one side effectively silenced by the other. When we first sent out invitations to contribute essays to our book, we were saddened by the stories of some scholars who felt that they could not contribute because their views were scorned, and had resulted in personal attacks against them on their campuses. If you read between the lines in several of the essays, you will detect this theme even among those who did contribute essays.

…It is only by open and honest consideration of all types of evidence that society can hope to navigate this issue. What, if anything, should be done to increase the representation of women in certain fields? The answer to this seemingly simple and straightforward question is anything but simple, and it requires consideration of multiple viewpoints and diverse types of data. (Note that we said data, not rhetoric.)…

In other news, a Harvard Medical School research has engineered a mouse that can run on a mouse treadmill 25 percent longer than normal mice before becoming exhausted, by shifting the balance between the types of muscle fibres, according to this news@nature article..

There’s been a lot of talk lately about ethanol and other biofuels as renewable resources. But ethanol comes from corn (lots of corn) so that could bring in a whole new set of problems, like more expensive corn flakes, according to this Boston Globe article today.