Forgotten women of science win recognition online | Science By late afternoon scores of red women on Sam Haskell's list had turned blue: female scientists, some dead and some living, many immensely distinguished, some geniuses, but whose names have almost been forgotten even by their peers. Up the grand marble staircase of the Royal Society in London, under the imposing gold and white library ceiling, women and a handful of men had gathered, joined by many more online across the world, to correct a gross injustice. The list gradually changing colour on Haskell's screen represented hundreds of women scientists who have either never had a Wikipedia entry, or whose lives and work are dismissed in a stub a few lines long. The event in London was booked out for weeks, but many more joined online, some starting work days ago. "It is shameful that when you ask people, including scientists, to name well-known female scientists and engineers, they can barely get past Marie Curie," she said. Other stubs were expanded. "Well honestly!"
Earth - Why we do not sleep around all that much any more On first glance, sticking with one partner for life seems like quite a bad idea, at least from an evolutionary point of view. Sperm is plentiful and does not take long to make, so it would not benefit a male to invest in only one female, who will take a long time to reproduce. If monogamy is not that useful, why did it become a favoured way of life in so many cultures? A female can also benefit from having a variety of partners. For these reasons, monogamy is extremely rare among mammals and many other animal groups, as BBC Earth recently explained. The same is true of human societies, many of which permit taking several spouses, or "polygamy". So if monogamy is not that useful, why did it become a favoured way of life in so many cultures? A new analysis provides a possible reason. If you think a behaviour is not acceptable, you have to spend time protesting They argue that this change in lifestyle was socially imposed. His theory goes like this.
Invisible women of science – now appearing at the Royal Society | Uta Frith | Science Women in science have an image problem. It is not so much deciding whether they should aspire to the hard image of being a scientist or the soft image of being feminine, it is the more serious problem of invisibility. Nowhere is this more obvious than in our august institutions, our imposing portrait galleries and grand museums. There is a dearth of dignified portraits of women scientists produced by distinguished artists. There are historical reasons for this. In the Royal Society's buildings there are many portraits of great scientists, mainly donated, and many portraits of past presidents, usually commissioned. Preparing for this exhibition made it strikingly clear that there is a void in representations of women in science. Perhaps the time has come to take some steps towards a change. Garry Kennard is an artist who has long been making links between science and art. What does science say? Previous work suggested that men would speak longer than women in this sort of situation.
Are lab mice too cold? Why it matters for science A typical mouse laboratory is kept between 20 and 26 degrees C, but if the mice had it their way, it would be a warm 30 degrees C. While the mice are still considered healthy at cooler temperatures, they expend more energy to maintain their core temperature, and evidence is mounting that even mild chronic cold stress is skewing results in studies of cancer, inflammation, and more. Researchers review the evidence April 19 in Trends in Cancer. "Most people only look at results from experiments at standard lab temperatures," says Bonnie Hylander, an immunologist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute. There are multiple reasons to keep a mouse lab cool. A few years ago, Hylander and Elizabeth Repasky, an immunologist at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute, along with their colleagues, began investigating the effects of cold stress on the mouse immune system's ability to fight tumors. But the answer isn't necessarily just turning up the thermostats. Disclaimer: AAAS and EurekAlert!
A Secret History Of Women In Science, From Marie Curie To Florence Nightingale “This is not the run-of-the-mill stuff you can find at a library,” curator Ronald Smeltzer says. But the exhibit doesn’t just focus on the scientific discoveries of the female scientists. There’s plenty of artifacts that add a biographical dimension to some of the famous (and not-so-famous) names. “We were trying to embed the human interest story in the scientific life,” Smeltzer says. Whether you’re looking to further explore the work of a female scientist you already know about, or ready to discover a totally new researcher, the exhibit has something to offer. Florence Nightingale, Passionate Statistician What do you think of when you hear the name “Florence Nightingale?” Actually, one of Nightingale’s greatest legacies is related to math. The number of soldier deaths in the Crimean War attributed to enemy fire is in red; the number of deaths attributed to disease is in green. courtesy Ronald Smeltzer On a tour of America, Curie gifted the machine to the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia.
What Is it Like to Be a Bat? "What is it like to be a bat?" is a paper by American philosopher Thomas Nagel, first published in The Philosophical Review in October 1974, and later in Nagel's Mortal Questions (1979). In it, Nagel argues that materialist theories of mind omit the essential component of consciousness, namely that there is something that it is (or feels) like to be a particular, conscious thing.[1] He argued that an organism had conscious mental states, "if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism Summary[edit] The thesis attempts to refute reductionism (the philosophical position that a complex system is nothing more than the sum of its parts). Nagel begins by arguing that the conscious experience is widespread, present in many animals (particularly mammals), and that for an organism to have a conscious experience it must be special, in the sense that its qualia or "subjective character of experience" are unique. Criticisms[edit]
This Brilliant Female Physicist Was Overlooked for a Nobel Prize History is full of household names … the Roosevelts, the Kennedys — you know, those familiar names from textbooks. But often if you dig a little deeper, the most moving stories involve names still in relative obscurity. Chien-Shiung Wu is a perfect example. Born in 1912, Wu was raised in a small town in Taicang, China. Her father was an advocate for girls’ education and had founded a women’s school in China. During World War II, Wu worked on the Manhattan Project at Columbia University. In 1956, Wu devised an experiment with revolutionary results. Wu’s work was termed the most important development in the field of atomic and nuclear physics to date; a 1959 AAUW press release called her experiment the “solution to the number-one riddle of atomic and nuclear physics.” The October 1959 “AAUW Journal” article announcing Wu’s Achievement Award Despite the obvious omission, Wu received many accolades for her work.
Why do consious beings exist? Thomas Nagel The philosopher Thomas Nagel thinks the materialist scientific worldview cannot explain consciousness. Is he right? Image: perpetualplum If we’re to believe science, we’re made of organs and cells. But what if science is fundamentally incapable of explaining our own existence as thinking things? For most philosophers, and many people in general, this is a radical departure from the way we understand things. Nagel’s pessimism about science’s ability to explain things like consciousness has a long history. Nagel’s argument has been criticised in a variety of ways. But this line of attack is hard to accept. Of course philosophers sympathetic to science have many ways to make this seem like a non-problem. Nagel, however, goes much further, which is what makes Mind and Cosmos interesting. By this stage Nagel’s argument might have begun to appear absurd. What sort of explanations are there for human consciousness? Another explanation looks to the theory of evolution.
Women Nobel Prize Winners: 16 Women Who Defied Odds To Win Science's Top Award (PHOTOS) Women make up a bit more than half of the world’s population, yet even in the most developed countries, men hold the lion's share of jobs in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. What's more, men take home most of the prestigious scientific awards. That includes the Nobel Prizes, widely considered the ultimate mark of scientific achievement. Of the 357 people awarded a Nobel in the science categories — Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, and Economic Sciences — only 16 have been women (see slideshow below). What accounts for this discrepancy? "This low representation is likely due to there unfortunately being very few women scientists in the first half of the 20th Century," Dr. Until the 1970s the number of women who received Nobel Prizes was roughly proportional to the number of women doing scientific research — a small group of women winning a small number of Nobels. Check out our list below of the 16 women who have won a Nobel Prize in science.
Spurious Correlations Ladies Last: 8 Inventions by Women That Dudes Got Credit For October 15 is Ada Lovelace Day, named for the world's first computer programmer and dedicated to promoting women in STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math. A Victorian-era mathematical genius, Lovelace was the first to describe how computing machines could solve math problems, write new forms of music, and much more, if you gave them instructions in a language they could understand. Of course, over the ensuing 100-plus years, dudes have been lining up to push her out of the picture (more on that below). Lovelace is hardly the only woman to be erased from the history of her own work. (This isn't a complete list, by tragically epic degrees. Rosalind Franklin Wikimedia Commons Rosalind Franklin, discovery of the DNA double helix: Watson and Crick's famed article in Nature on the discovery of the DNA double-helix structure, which would win them a Nobel Prize, buries a mention of Rosalind Franklin's role in the footnotes. Ada Lovelace Wikimedia Commons Lise Meitner Wikimedia Commons
Is Time Linear, or Can the Future Influence the Past? You’re thinking about time all wrong, according to our best physical theories. In Einstein’s general theory of relativity, there’s no conceptual distinction between the past and the future, let alone an objective line of “now.” There’s also no sense in which time “flows”; instead, all of space and time is just there in some four-dimensional structure. None of these facts are easy to accept, because they’re in direct conflict with our subjective experience of time. When formulating explanations, most of us tend to think in terms laid down by Isaac Newton over 300 years ago. But imposing old Newtonian Schema thinking on new quantum-scale phenomena has landed us in situations with no good explanations whatsoever. Also in Physics The Sacred, Spherical Cows of Physics By David Kaiser Early in their training, many physics students come across the idea of spherical cows. And we have one. The Lagrangian Schema doesn’t just allow future-based explanations.
Cotton gin "The First Cotton Gin", an engraving from Harper's Magazine, 1869. This carving depicts a roller gin, which preceded Eli Whitney's invention.[1] A cotton gin is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibers from their seeds, allowing for much greater productivity than manual cotton separation.[2] The fibers are processed into clothing or other cotton goods, and any undamaged seeds may be used to grow more cotton or to produce cottonseed oil and meal. Although simple handheld roller gins have been used in India and other countries since at least 500 AD,[3] the first modern mechanical cotton gin was created by American inventor Eli Whitney in 1793, and patented in 1794. It used a combination of a wire screen and small wire hooks to pull the cotton through, while brushes continuously removed the loose cotton lint to prevent jams. History Rationale Early cotton gins Between the 12th and 14th centuries, dual-roller gins appeared in India and China. Eli Whitney's patent References
Peer review — reviewed Most scientists have horror stories to tell about how a journal brutally rejected their landmark paper. Now researchers have taken a more rigorous approach to evaluating peer review, by tracking the fate of more than 1,000 papers that were submitted ten years ago to the Annals of Internal Medicine, the British Medical Journal and The Lancet. Using subsequent citations as a proxy for quality, the team found that the journals were good at weeding out dross and publishing solid research. “The shocking thing to me was that the top 14 papers had all been rejected, one of them twice,” says Kyle Siler, a sociologist at the University of Toronto in Canada, who led the study1. Siler and his team tapped into a database of manuscripts and reviewer reports held by the University of California, San Francisco, that had been used in previous studies of the peer-review process. Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, says that these desk rejections were not necessarily mistakes.