It's Only Coming Out In German This Weekend, But Wow This Looks Cool.

Something a little more frivolous

I have been all of these at one point or another.

Science Aesthetics

I was feeling inspired last night, so I decided to make this purely for fun.

To the moon and back: Cold, dark nights clutching thermos flasks of hot coffee. Machinery whirring as telescopes trace a star across the sky. Intricate, geometric drawings of the celestial sphere. A messy bun and a NASA t-shirt. Filling in the logbook while punk rock blares in the background to keep you energised and awake. Pictures of nebulae and galaxies everywhere, because pretty space pictures is half the fun. Annoyed huffs every time someone mentions their star sign.

Natural Philosopher: Long, intellectual debates in coffee shops about mathematics, physics, philosophy. Chalkboards covered with equations and calculations in a precise, curving handwriting. That Eureka moment while deep in thought, expressed only with a small smile and a scribbled proof on the back of a serviette. Chaotic desks in front of bookshelves groaning with old textbooks. Antique lab equipment as functional decor.

“Trust Me, I’m a Scientist”: Large computer screens running freshly-typed code. Neat lab books and PDFs of journal articles. The smell of whiteboard markers. Polished new equipment in a tangle of cables, hooked up to a digital oscilloscope. Exact amounts of chemicals in rows in metal shelves. Resting your feet up on the bench after a long day in the lab. The satisfying hum of your colleagues as they work on their experiments around you.   

Science Expedition: Dirt under your nails and a loosely-bound collection of field notes. Plant clippings carefully taken to be analysed back in the lab. Soft fur on tough, wild animals. The bitter smoke from eco-friendly firewood while you roast marshmallows and listen to a supervisor’s witty stories. Free-handing diagrams while looking through a microscope. Sketching flowers and that gorgeous ocean view from your last field trip. Reading Darwin on the bus home but falling asleep on your lab partner’s shoulder out of sheer exhaustion after the first three pages.

Life is a Science: Scrolling past an anti-vax facebook post and resisting the urge to burn down the internet. Shiny dissection kits and the sharp smell of formaldehyde. Making time to work out and pack a healthy lunch because your mind is sharpest when your body is well. Debunking the latest superfood fad with peer-reviewed journal articles. Making friends with some of the nicer med school kids in anatomy class. Colour-coded, neatly labelled diagrams and a thousand different terms memorised. Getting a double-helix DNA sculpture for your desk.      

What they show on TV isn’t real hacking: Rubbing your eyes after staring at a screen for five hours straight. Having a blank keyboard because all the letters are rubbed off already. Energy drinks in strange colours at strange hours. Being fluent in four different coding languages. Circuit boards and printouts. Ones and zeroes. Running jokes about turning everything off and on again. Rage-quitting when you realise you forgot a comma or a colon somewhere. Black screens with brightly coloured lines. The comforting click-click of fingertips tapping keys. Applying to intern at Google every three months because maybe they’ll take you this time. Writing a piece of code to do something simple just because.

Hugh Herr: The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance

The victors write history

"Lost Cities" Discovered In Libya

The Garamantes were an ancient civilization, in what is today Libya, on the African northern coast.  Unfortunately for their legacy, most of what we knew about them comes from their enemies, the Romans. Unsurprisingly, the Roman accounts described the Garamantes as “barbaric nomads and troublemakers on the edge of the Roman Empire.” This view of the Garamantes as a minor, annoying tribe is being overturned by recent digs. In 2011, a team of researchers led by archaeologist David Mattingly from the University of Leicester discovered more than 100 fortified farms, towns, and villages with castle-like structures in Libya that date from 1 CE to 500 CE. The Garamantes operated a trans-Saharan trade, and were even pioneers at building oases! Hardly the “barbaric nomads” the Romans unfairly called them.

Showed this to some friends, it almost seems to be along religious lines?

Burial vs Cremation in the United States

Elytra Filament Pavilion / Achim Menges

Woman who loves science over here

Science Side of Tumblr, I need your help!  Ladies of the Science Side of Tumblr, I especially need your help!

I had a conversation at my non-science day job that went like this:

A friend who shall be called Diane (not her real name) comes to my desk to chat.  Just one of the many topics we discuss is that her boyfriend is  taking a class in wildlife biology.  She has decided that she has grown tired of hearing about local wildlife and hearing him recite a plethora of scientific names. 

I responded positively to this subject, and told her that I too found the subject interesting.  A third person had heard our conversation.  We shall call her Claire (again, not her real name).  Claire immediately responded, “Girls don’t like that kind of thing.”

“Are you saying that girls don’t like science?” I asked.

“No, not normally they don’t,” she responded.

Before you all screech with anguish, bear with me for a moment.  We all know that this is not true.  As a man, I find this idea upsetting for countless reasons that have all been validly discussed before.  To try to debate the issue is rather moot.  Instead, I’d like a show of hands.

Ladies of the Science Side of Tumblr!  I call you to arms!  Will you rally around me in saying that women can and do indeed love science, of any variety?  Gentleman of the Science Side of Tumblr who know someone who is a girl who also happens to love science, will you stand with me too?  We all like and reblog the pro-women-in-science posts we see so often, let’s all stand and be counted in one place this time.

Reblog this if you are a woman who loves science.  Reblog this if you are a man who knows a woman who loves science.  Let us disprove her beyond all doubt!

Does No One Understand How To Deport A Man?

After visiting the Soviet Union in 1930, Massachusetts-born and reared Burton K. Wheeler, Democratic Senator from Montana, urged that the United States abandon its isolationist policy and extend diplomatic recognition to Russia. He had learned that Britain and France were buying U.S. cotton and selling it to the Russians, and thought that doing business directly with Russia might help pull the United States out of the growing depression.

When a newspaper in Red Lodge, Montana, said that wheeler ought to be deported for urging recognition of a Communist government, the Senator exclaimed: “Where would you deport me – back to Massachusetts?”

Like Britain, Seattle also takes it as a sign of weakness to use an umbrella

In the early 1750s, an Englishman by the name of Jonas Hanway, lately returned from a trip to France, began carrying an umbrella around the rainy streets of London. People were outraged. Some bystanders hooted and jeered at Hanway as he passed; others simply stared in shock. Hanway was the first man to parade an umbrella unashamed in 18th-century England, a time and place in which umbrellas were strictly taboo. In the minds of many Brits, umbrella usage was symptomatic of a weakness of character, particularly among men. The British also regarded umbrellas as too French—inspired by the parasol, a Far Eastern contraption that for centuries kept nobles protected from the sun, the umbrella had begun to flourish in France in the early 18th century when Paris merchant Jean Marius invented a lightweight, folding version that, with added waterproofing materials, could protect users from rain and snow. In 1712, the French Princess Palatine purchased one of Marius’s umbrellas; soon after, it became a must-have accessory for noblewomen across the country. Later British umbrella users reported being called “mincing Frenchm[e]n” for carrying them in public.

Scientific Women You Haven’t Heard of (Yet): Louise Pearce

Louise Pearce is best known for her work that lead to a cure for sleeping sickness. Pearce traveled to what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo to test the arsenic based cure, tryparsamide, in cooperation with a hospital in Léopoldville that was coping with an outbreak of sleeping sickness. This trip helped establish parameters for treatment (such as safe and optimum dosages) of sleeping sickness with tryparsamide. Pearce also used rabbit colonies to study syphilis and cancer over generations.  Pearce was lesbian and a feminist and lived with Sara Josephine Baker and Ida A.R. Wylie. Pearce’s curriculum vitae is impressive and lists Standford University, Boston University and Johns Hopkins University as her alma maters.

Learn more: (x) (x) (x)

Previous Installments:  Lynn Conway, Noella Marcellino, Tu Youyou

About the series: (x)

“You fight like a girl.”

I’m sorry

I didn’t

realise

that 

was 

a

bad

thing