--- title: DistractinglySexy Hashtag Trends After Tim Hunt Resigns description: Hashtag distractinglysexy trends when Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt resigns after calling girls who fall in love, cry in labs a distraction canonical: https://time.com/3918909/distractingly-sexy-tim-hunt/ author: Olivia B. Waxman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-06-12T14:56:22.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:43:38.585Z og:title: DistractinglySexy Hashtag Trends After Tim Hunt Resigns og:description: Hashtag distractinglysexy trends when Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt resigns after calling girls who fall in love, cry in labs a distraction og:url: https://time.com/3918909/distractingly-sexy-tim-hunt/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: DistractinglySexy Hashtag Trends After Tim Hunt Resigns twitter:description: Hashtag distractinglysexy trends when Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt resigns after calling girls who fall in love, cry in labs a distraction twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # #DistractinglySexy Trends in Response to Nobel Scientist's Sexist Remarks > Sponsored content. 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It curates the day's top headlines with TIME's reporting and analysis across politics, world affairs, business, health and culture. It is free to join at time.com/newsletters. #### How do I sign up for The Brief? The Brief is available free at time.com/newsletters, where readers can select it along with any of TIME's other six newsletters. There is no subscription required to receive it. #### Is The Brief free? Yes. The Brief is a free daily email newsletter from TIME. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes The Brief? The Brief is led by editor Richard Hall and draws on reporting from TIME's newsroom. Every edition is assembled by TIME editors rather than generated automatically. ## Video: The Science Of Awesome [Watch (HLS stream): The Science Of Awesome](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/tmGTDYff.m3u8) (2:39)  _Published 2013-12-03. The Science Of Awesome_  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jun 12, 2015 2:56 PM UTC  by [Olivia B. Waxman](https://time.com/author/olivia-b-waxman/)  ## Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Jun 12, 2015 2:56 PM UTC On Wednesday, Nobel Prize winner Tim Hunt [resigned](http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news-articles/0615/100615-tim-hunt) from his position as honorary professor at University College London after telling a conference in South Korea that it’s distracting to work alongside “girls” in laboratories because “they fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry.” Since then, the hashtag #distractinglysexy has been trending on social media, as women have been posting photos of the unglamorous life of a research scientist to ridicule the embattled biochemist, who shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology for research on [how cells divide](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel%5Fprizes/medicine/laureates/2001/). I was so [#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) when collecting cheetah crap that even I lost track of what I was doing and dropped some. [pic.twitter.com/3qDS7Hd9aG](http://t.co/3qDS7Hd9aG) — Anne Hilborn (@AnneWHilborn) [June 11, 2015](https://twitter.com/AnneWHilborn/status/609147719756738561?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) It's just really hard working in a coed lab because I'm too distracting to the male scientists [#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/9cZMUpy6TL](http://t.co/9cZMUpy6TL) — Danielle Spitzer (@DNAielleSpitzer) [June 11, 2015](https://twitter.com/DNAielleSpitzer/status/608826769907568640?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) I did an entire Liver Transplant without crying or falling in love. [#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/6RdApuzFo9](http://t.co/6RdApuzFo9) — Tiffany Anthony MD (@drtanthony) [June 12, 2015](https://twitter.com/drtanthony/status/609343267986014208?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) I wish I could concentrate in the lab, but I fell in love with Europasaurus holgeri [#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [#WomenInSTEM](https://twitter.com/hashtag/WomenInSTEM?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/UdKrpKAamJ](http://t.co/UdKrpKAamJ) — Franziska Sattler-Morrison, M.Sc. (@ohyeahfranzi) [June 12, 2015](https://twitter.com/ohyeahfranzi/status/609297151567495168?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) Mind you, guys in the lab were always checking out my nice rack...[#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [#TimHunt](https://twitter.com/hashtag/TimHunt?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/xT7jpL0hiE](http://t.co/xT7jpL0hiE) — 🧬💻Laura Baxter 🌱🔬 (@scientist\_me) [June 10, 2015](https://twitter.com/scientist%5Fme/status/608607052517285888?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) There were also jokes about history’s most famous female scientists: I'm really glad that Curie managed to take a break from crying to discover radium and polonium [#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) [pic.twitter.com/txYVHoidK5](http://t.co/txYVHoidK5) — Amy Remeikis (@AmyRemeikis) [June 11, 2015](https://twitter.com/AmyRemeikis/status/608961761052459008?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) Rosalind Franklin was so [#distractinglysexy](https://twitter.com/hashtag/distractinglysexy?src=hash&ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) that Watson and Crick forgot to give her credit for figuring out how DNA worked — a luminous presence shaped like Seth D. Michaels (@sethdmichaels) [June 12, 2015](https://twitter.com/sethdmichaels/status/609351222630420480?ref%5Fsrc=twsrc%5Etfw) ### See The Best Biology Photos Of The Year  Two Bisons on the Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park, Wyo. Lukas Gawenda  A spider at sunset in Predel, Bulgaria. Krasimir Matarov  Parasitoid wasps building clay pots in Borneo, Brunei. Thomas Endlein  Siblings watering newly planted seedlings in Rizal, The Philippines. Ysabel M Victoriano  A leopard in its natural habitat in Karantaka, India. Nagarjun Ram  A farmer protects his family and animals from mosquitos in Gujarat, India. Dimple Pancholi  A tarsier in its natural habitat in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Wolfgang Weinhardt  A plant takes advantage of the available shelter in a dilapidated house in Kolmanskop, Namibia. Kelsey Green  A female blackbird holding a dried mealworm in her mouth in Lincolnshire, United Kingdom. Billy Clapham  A chick embryo in a hardened eggshell is sustained until full development in Rizal, The Philippines. Robert Cabagnot  An adult female Italian crested newt stationed below the fresh water surface in Piedmont, Italy. Matteo Riccardo Di Nicola  A sea turtle eating a jellyfish in The Maldives. Boris Barath ## Transcript >> Feelings of awe have always been associated with feelings of spirituality or religion. It's hard to be an atheist when you're looking at the Grand Canyon. One of the reasons it's so powerfully spiritual is because, first of all, it makes us feel small. And second of all, it makes us question how the thing that's making us feel that way came to be in the first place. A new study in psychological science tried to apply the scientific method to that very unscientific phenomenon and found a creative way to do it. All of the subjects in the study were shown one of four videos. The first was a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace. >> There are very few us then in this world, by your standards, who are worthy of love. >> Unfortunately, yes. >> The second was a nature show with images and footage of animals behaving in funny or silly ways. The third were all inspiring scenes of nature from a BBC documentary and the last were surreal images of, say, waterfalls flowing down city streets. Consistently subjects who would see the inspiring or surreal videos had a greater sense of a universe that unfolds according to a master plan and had a lower tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. As a control, subjects were also asked to look at a series of randomly generated ones and twos and to decide on a scale of 1 to 10 how likely it was that the numbers have been organized either randomly by a computer or intentionally by a human being. Once again, people who had experienced awe were likelier to conclude that a human being had organized the numbers, the sense again being that there must be some designer behind the plan. The question naturally arises of course that if seen things that cause you to experience awe make you seek answers, couldn't looking at space simply make you wanna be an astronomer who are looking at the Grand Canyon make you want to be a geologist? And the answer is maybe, but the scientists aren't so sure. 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