Remember All Those Times Your Parents Told You It Was Rude To Sigh? Well, You Can Discount That Advice

Girls and young women should be exposed more to S.T.E.M. fields. They should have guidance from dedicated and exceptional role models.

Alex Luma (

@luminarysiralexrluma

)

🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾🙌🏾

(via amey-winehouse)

Spidery crystals appeared after rotovap-ing. I think they look like dandelion fluffs.

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.

Here is a very quick video of my space pin painting progress! 

Sorry for the weird angle, I took this on my phone and i don’t have a proper stand for it yet lmao 

While you see many varieties of the common mold in your house and garden, the scientific word to describe them has a fascinating history.  Aspergillus is a genus of 300 or so common molds found in all types of climates around the world.  The Aspergillus mold was first catalogued in 1729 by the Italian priest and biologist Pier Antonio Micheli. These molds are in the fungus kingdom and while almost all are microscopic, colonies of the mold are easily recognizable and can grow quite large. Viewing the fungi under a microscope, Micheli was reminded of the shape of an aspergillum, which is the Latin word for a holy water sprinkler, itself from Latin spargere meaning to sprinkle, and named the fungus for the shape of the sprinkler.

You can see the similarity above, in the image of a silver aspergillium next to a microscopic view of aspergillus mold next to a colony of aspergillus mold growing on a damp terra cotta pot.

Image of aspergillium courtesy of Andreas Püttmann under a Creative Commons 3.0 license.  Image of aspergillus and mold colony courtesy Kathie Hodge and the Cornell University Fungi team.  

I have a lot of friends who are premeds, so they definitely aren't all bad. That said, some of them are pretty hard to be in class with. Especially the ones who are SUPER competitive - they dominate office hours and take up the instructor's time with questions that are sometimes only relevant to themselves. One of my TAs was complaining about one of the that argued with him for 30 minutes over half a point. There's a point where it goes past acceptable academic competition.

At the risk of being incredibly whiny, what exactly is everyone's beef with med students? D: I just finished my biology degree with pre-med and I guess I was just surrounded by med students because I do not understand

It’s just exhausting to be in a class you enjoy and are taking because you want to do science and be surrounded by students who are constantly complaining about how much they hate it, and don’t need it, and are only taking it because it’s going to be on the MCAT. Certainly not all pre-meds are like that, but even the 10% who constantly ask questions about if they’re going to get an A and look down at the mere science students kind of ruin it when you have to deal with them in every class.

I will say, a large part of the problem isn’t even pre-med students themselves, it’s the fact that biology departments have to bear the burden of the majority of their students being pre-professional in some capacity, who have completely different needs than pre-doctoral students who want to be biologists. Bio programs end up teaching to the MCAT almost out of necessity, which does a disservice to the students who want to be scientists. 

I know that at my university, I considered switching to bio from chem, but ended up staying in the science and engineering college because the bio college was so focused on pre-professional students that they did a really poor job preparing you to be an actual scientist. Just based on the classes I took for my biochem minor, it was really obvious. I suspect that this is the case at a lot of schools, which sort of compounds the issues and makes pre-doctoral students frustrated with pre-meds, even though it’s not their fault directly.

We take for granted that drops which impact a solid surface will splash, but, in fact, drops only splash when the surrounding air pressure is high enough. When the air pressure is low enough, drops simply impact and spread, regardless of the fluid, drop height, or surface roughness. Why this is and what role the surrounding air plays remains unclear. Here researchers visualize the air flow around a droplet impact. In (a) we see the approaching drop and the air it pulls with it. Upon impact in (b) and © the drop spreads and flattens while a crown of air rises in its wake. The drop’s spread initiates a vortex ring that is pinned to the drop’s edge. In later times (d)-(f) the vortex ring detaches from the drop and rolls up. (Photo credit: I. Bischofberger et al.)

Home is coming... Cob makes a deal.