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Pura Lempuyang Door by Gophrette Power

Lovely crystallization effect from an extraction the other day

10 Amazing Women in STEM Who Changed How We Live Today

1) Sally Ride

As the first American woman to go to space in 1983, Sally Ride served as an inspiration for countless American girls. She also remains the youngest American astronaut to have traveled to space at age 32. Ride was extremely private about her personal life, but her obituary revealed her partner of 27 years was Tam O’Shaughnessy, making Ride the first known LGBT astronaut.

2) Ada Lovelace

Born in 1815, British mathematician and writer Ada Lovelace was way ahead of her time. She is considered to be the founder of scientific computing, and is chiefly known for her work on Charles Babbage’s early mechanical computer, the Analytical Engine. For the Analytical Engine, Lovelace wrote the first algorithm to be carried out by a machine, and is regarded as the first computer programmer

3) Marie Maynard Daly

Marie Daly was the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry in the United States (from Columbia University in 1947). Daly worked as a physical science instructor at Howard University while conducting research under the direction of Herman R. Branson. Daly was then awarded a grant by the American Cancer Society to support her research. She studied the role of cytoplasmic ribonucleoprotein in protein synthesis, and the effects of feeding and fasting conditions on how protein metabolism changed in mice. She also worked as an assistant professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine at Yeshiva University, served as an investigator for the American Heart Association, and was a member of the prestigious board of governors of the New York Academy of Sciences.

4) Chien Shiung Wu

Chien Shiung Wu was a Chinese American experimental physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, and helped develop the process of separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238. Though her colleagues took the credit and won the Nobel Prize in physics, Wu is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity.

5) Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson, age 97, is an American physicist and mathematician who contributed to America’s aeronautics and space programs. Her enormous contributions with the application of early digital electronic computers at NASA, and her accuracy in calculating celestial navigation made her a key part of the 1969 Apollo 11 flight to the moon. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2015.

6) Rosalind Franklin

While working as a research associate in 1951 at King’s College in London, Franklin encountered Maurice Wilkins, who was also studying the structure of DNA. Rosalind Franklin used x-rays to take a picture of DNA—known as photo 51. James Watson and Francis Crick were studying DNA at Cambridge University, and communicated with Wilkins, who showed them Franklin’s image of DNA without her knowledge. While Franklin’s image of the DNA molecule was key to the work of Watson, Crick, and Wilkins, they received significantly more credit and acclaim. Franklin died of ovarian cancer four years before Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize.

7) Hypatia of Alexandria

Women have been in STEM fields forever! Hypatia of Alexandria was born somewhere between AD 350-370, and was murdered by a Christian mob in AD 415. She was a Greek mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher in Egypt, and was most notable for being the head of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy.

8) Annie J. Easley

Born in 1933, Annie J. Easley was a computer scientist, mathematician, and rocket scientist. She was also one of the first African-Americans in her field. In her work with NASA and its predecessor (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), she was a leading member of the team that developed software for the Centaur rocket stage.

9) Gertrude B. Elion

American biochemist and pharmacologist is best known for her Nobel Prize winning work developing a multitude of new drugs, and using research methods that led to the development of the AIDS drug, AZT. Elion fittingly said, “I had no specific bent toward science until my grandfather died of cancer. I decided nobody should suffer that much.”

10) Flossie Wong-Staal

Virologist and molecular biologist, Flossie Wong-Staal, was the first scientist to clone HIV, which was a major step in proving that HIV is the cause of AIDS. Wong-Staal’s work has also focused on hepatitis C, and she currently works as Chief Scientific Officer at a drug development company.

Rosalind Franklin at work on the microscope.

“Conclusion: Big helix in several chains, phosphates on outside, phosphate-phosphate inter-helical bonds disrupted by water. Phosphate links available to proteins.” — Rosalind Franklin

Underlined in typewritten lecture notes, with handwritten annotations, as report (7 Feb 1952) on ‘Colloquium November 1951’. As given in Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA(1975), 128.  

Open Your Heart

You are born with it open

Joyous and free.

You don't even know how to close it.

The instinct to let everything inside

As natural as breathing.

So wide open are the passages of your heart

That you can find no distinction

Between yourself and the rest of the world.

Open your heart, you hear,

And you do, gladly. Easily.

Uncomprehending

Of the enormity

Of what this platitude asks of you.

You feel that perhaps

Everything might live in your heart.

That would certainly explain the warmth you feel

As each one settles just beneath your ribs,

Nestling into the threads

You wove from your love.

♥

Inevitably,

A hole rips through your chest

As one of them tears itself from you,

Rending your tapestry to shreds.

And you are left holding your

Stuttering,

Gasping,

Bleeding heart

In your hand.

You did not know.

You did not understand.

Your fingers trace the outline of your wound

As you think of all of the others you have invited in

And imagine what shapes they might make,

When they leave you.

Your heart continues to pump,

Its contents dribbling through your fingers.

It can only try to keep beating;

It does not know how to do anything else.

Numbly,

You pull your heart close

And begin to stitch it closed.

♥

When it has healed

And sensation has returned,

You can feel fluttering against the outside of your heart,

Searching in vain for an entrance.

You feel safe.

Your heart cannot be torn open

From the outside.

At first they do not tempt you,

The flutterings,

The echo of pain still resonating in your hollow chest.

But though you do not want to admit it,

Your heart still beats

And remembers

And wants.

A flutter lingers,

Becomes a gentle caress.

It is so bright and warm and full of wonder.

Your heart aches.

Inevitably,

You surrender.

You reach back into your ribcage,

Pull out your heart,

And tear open the stitches

To let the warmth in.

It hurts

To leave it open.

It throbs with each beat,

Seeping through the hole in your chest.

But, you feel that perhaps

It might hurt less now,

When they leave you.

♥

Your heart stays open

And warm.

You begin to feel the tug

Of your broken threads reattaching.

The outline of your wound is not so raw as it once was.

The edges have grown stronger with use.

Inevitably,

Each one leaves.

But you have left the way open,

And though the snap of every thread is keenly felt,

It stays open, still.

♥

SUPERSLIPPERY SIDE UP

These two steel balls sit in a pool of octane, a component of petroleum, that has been dyed yellow. Though the ball on the left has picked up streaks of the oily liquid, the ball on the right has repelled the octane thanks to a self-healing, superslippery coating called X-SLIPS. Researchers developed this coating, which repels both water and oil, based on the slippery interiors of Nepenthes pitcher plants and the wax layer on plant leaves. To make the coating, the team applied a 2.5- µm-thick layer of fluorinated silane to the sanded surface of the ball. A spritz of DuPont’s Krytox lubricant, a perfluorinated oil similar to Teflon, adheres tightly to the silane to create a surface that fends off water and oil. After damaging the coating with blasts of oxygen plasma or abuse with 40-grit sandpaper, the researchers could restore it by simply heating it, causing the remaining silane to redistribute across the surface and re-adhere. The coating could be useful on ships or in condiment packaging.

Credit: Tak-Sing Wong/ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2016, DOI: 10.1021/acsami.6b00194

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The Harvard Computers (Hint: They were women, not machines!)

Today is the birthday of Annie Jump Cannon, born December 11, 1863, known as one of ‘Harvard’s Computers’. She is credited along with Edward Pickering as the creator of the Harvard Classification Scheme which remains the foundation of today’s stellar classification system.

One of a dozen women hired by Pickering to do the hard work of identifying, classifying and cataloging hundreds of stellar objects, Cannon distinguished herself as the brightest of the bright and rose finally to a full professorship before her death in 1941. Pickering hired the first of his ‘computers’ in a pique of frustration, noting that his maid could probably do better work than he was getting from his students.  Indeed, he hired his maid, Williamina Fleming, who became the first of his ‘computers’ and quickly distinguished herself. Pickering was pleased enough with her work (and lower wages) that he soon built a team comprised entirely of women to compose the catalog. Cannon was hired a little later to oversee a catalog of the southern skies.  While no eponym celebrates her name, her contribution (along with the remaining group at Harvard) as well as the countless women throughout history to impact science, math, politics and all human endeavor, today we remember and say Happy Birthday. A true gifted scientist and true pioneer, gone but not forgotten. As in most human endeavors, nameless and tireless women support the work of more celebrated men with little or no credit.  Newton said of his work:  ’If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’  Today we acknowledge that many of those giants were and are women.

Image curently in the public domain courtesy New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper.

Today’s post is for hb-she does twice the work and asks for half the credit.  Our boys are who they are because of her.