Activewear brand Sweaty Betty has become involved in a new dispute over advertising slogans, which a period underwear company claims were copied. Kelly Newton said Sweaty Betty's use of two taglines that were very similar to her firm Nixi Body's seemed a little off, and while she could not get them trademarked she felt Sweaty Betty was taking from other female founders. Sweaty Betty said the No ifs. Ms Newton said she was speaking out after seeing personal trainer Georgina Cox reveal Sweaty Betty had offered her a settlement over a disputed slogan . Ms Newton, who co-founded Nixi Body in 2019, said the company has advertised its leak-proof period underwear with the lines Keeping you moving through menstruation, motherhood and menopause and No leaks.

For centuries, menstruation was managed with homemade solutions--until the world changed in a hurry. Patented in 1931, the first Tampax tampons were sold in 1936 as the first widely marketed internal menstrual product. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. About half of us will use them at some point in our lives. But few of us like to talk about them, at least in public.

Women are at higher risk of Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases after menopause, and yet research connecting female brain health to sex hormone fluctuations is limited. We seek to investigate this connection by developing tools that quantify 3D shape changes that occur in the brain during sex hormone fluctuations. Geodesic regression on the space of 3D discrete surfaces offers a principled way to characterize the evolution of a brain's shape. However, in its current form, this approach is too computationally expensive for practical use. In this paper, we propose approximation schemes that accelerate geodesic regression on shape spaces of 3D discrete surfaces. We also provide rules of thumb for when each approximation can be used. We test our approach on synthetic data to quantify the speed-accuracy trade-off of these approximations and show that practitioners can expect very significant speed-up while only sacrificing little accuracy. Finally, we apply the method to real brain shape data and produce the first characterization of how the female hippocampus changes shape during the menstrual cycle as a function of progesterone: a characterization made (practically) possible by our approximation schemes. Our work paves the way for comprehensive, practical shape analyses in the fields of bio-medicine and computer vision. Our implementation is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/bioshape-lab/my28brains.

Kilinc, who works in the lab of biological engineer Linda Griffith at MIT, is among a small group of scientists using new tools akin to miniature organs to study a poorly understood--and frequently problematic--part of human physiology: menstruation. Heavy, sometimes debilitating periods strike at least a third of people who menstruate at some point in their lives, causing some to miss weeks of work or school every year and jeopardizing their professional standing. Anemia threatens about two-thirds of people with heavy periods. And when menstrual blood flows through the fallopian tubes and into the body cavity, it's thought to sometimes create painful lesions--characteristics of a disease called endometriosis, which can require multiple surgeries to control. No one is entirely sure how--or why--the human body choreographs this monthly dance of cellular birth, maturation, and death.