Not all women scientists are good...

If I share the good news, I've also got to share the bad...


The Indian Express: Outrage! Woman scientist says girl's intestine would have been intact if she didn't resist rape

“Had the girl simply surrendered (and not resisted) when surrounded by six men, she would not have lost her intestine. Why was she out with her boyfriend at 10 pm?” These comments made by an agricultural scientist at a seminar organised by the police provoked an outrage in Madhya Pradesh on Thursday, and demands for punitive action against her.
Dr Anita Shukla, a scientist at the Rajmata Vijayaraje Scindia Krishi Vishwa Vidyalaya, had been invited to the seminar on “Women’s Empowerment” in her capacity as the president of Lion’s Club on Wednesday. Women, Shukla said in her speech, had misused the facilities and rights given to them.
Following an uproar, Shukla apologised in the evening: “I empathise with the victim and pray to God for her speedy recovery.”
Before coming out with the apology, Shukla, however, had appeared to defend her comments by saying the victim would have been better off not putting up resistance. “When a group of men intend to rape, they will do it. The victim should save herself for bringing the perpetrators to book.”
Senior police officers and the State Women's Commission said they were examining Shukla’s comments.

 If anyone has been following the story...this rape victim has now died.

In the States, we say this kind of thing if the girl is out at 3:25 in the morning, has been drinking with two guys at a bar and then invites them back to her bedroom.

But a girl out with her boyfriend, at 10 pm?????

 

 

A scientific pioneer and a reluctant role model

From the Globe and Mail:  A scientific pioneer and a reluctant role model

In the early 1950s, Wilder Penfield, one of the world’s leading neurosurgeons at the time, performed what should have been a straightforward elective surgery. The patient, an engineer who headed his department, had come to the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital, affiliated with McGill University, with epileptic seizures. The results of the surgery were catastrophic. “He couldn’t remember anything that happened. He couldn’t go out for dinner and follow a conversation,” recalls the neuropsychologist Brenda Milner. “He had to be demoted to draftsman. But there was no loss of intelligence, no loss in reasoning.”

Dr. Milner was then a 30-something PhD candidate, one of the few women employed by The Neuro (as those who work there call it). “Dr. Penfield was shocked. He didn’t know what happened.” She and the master surgeon wrote up the case, not knowing what would come of it. Soon after, she received an invitation from a neurosurgeon at Harvard. He had a similar case he hadn’t thought significant; did she have any interest?
“I couldn’t imagine why he would invite a young woman to study this case,” remembers Dr. Milner, who at 94 continues her research full-time. The patient, identified for decades only as H.M., became the most important case study in the history of neuroscience, leading to many discoveries about how the brain creates memories. Although doctors had assumed H.M. was unable to form any new memories, Dr. Milner’s groundbreaking research showed that he could develop new motor skills and spatial memories, proving for the first time that there are different types of memory. The Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel credited Dr. Milner with creating a whole new field called cognitive neuroscience.
On November 21, Dr. Milner became the ninth woman to be named to the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame, joining 53 other history-making researchers such as Alexander Graham Bell and J. Armand Bombardier. But she doesn’t like to to be recognized as being one of the few women who have reached the highest ranks of science in Canada.
After her Hall of Fame acceptance speech, a group of young female scientists swarmed her eagerly to snap photos with her, showing how Dr. Milner, albeit somewhat unwillingly, has become an icon of what female scientists can accomplish in a male-dominated field.
“I have not set myself up to be a role model for women, but it does seem to be more of an issue than it used to be,” Dr. Milner explains, recalling how she increasingly gets mobbed by women after public lectures in the past five years. “There is rarely a man in the group.”
Although the landscape, particularly at medical schools, has changed significantly since Dr. Milner began her career, women continue to be underrepresented in many scientific fields. They make up only 39 per cent of students in physical sciences and 17 per cent in engineering and computer science.  According to a recent study from the Council of Canadian Academies, only a third of faculty members in Canada are women, and that number shrinks to 15 per cent in the physical sciences, engineering and computer science.
Yet the toughest competition that Dr. Milner says she ever faced was against other women. When she was in high school she announced her intention to pursue mathematics against her headmistress’s wishes she go into languages. The best science students in her native Britain went to Cambridge, yet the school’s rigid college system only allowed for 400 female students to enroll. “It was tremendously difficult to get in,” she says. “My competition was all women.” Her all-girls school didn’t have the calibre of teacher in math and physics to get her up to a competitive level, so they sent her elsewhere to a male lecturer.
For the rest of her career, however, Dr. Milner was determined to compete with the best scientists, male or female. “She never wanted to win prizes that were only for women, she wanted to win prizes open to both genders so she could beat the men,” says Denise Klein, who has worked at The Neuro since starting a post-doc with Dr. Milner in 1992.
Early in her studies at Cambridge, Dr. Milner realized she would never be a great mathematician and switched to psychology, earning her degree in 1939. She met her husband Peter Milner while working for the military during the Second World War. They hastily married when he was asked to launch Canada’s atomic energy program, and moved to Montreal.
After a teaching stint at the Université de Montréal, she realized that “in North America you were nobody if you didn’t have a PhD.” Dr. Milner wanted more than a teaching career. “I knew I had it in me to do something big,” she says.
When she arrived at The Neuro in June, 1950, to begin her PhD, she was one of few women. “The institute was authoritarian,” Dr. Milner recalls. “People who were junior would not speak out of turn. But it was not sexist.” Dr. Klein goes a step further in describing it as a “chauvinistic environment.”
Dr. Milner’s response to the male-dominated atmosphere was to challenge stereotypes about psychology being a less rigorous approach to brain science than the work of the primarily male neurosurgeons. “She took what she did seriously enough that other people took her seriously and did not dismiss her work as soft science,” says Dr. Klein. “She showed people that her field could be as scientific, as useful and as data-driven as other fields that are taken more seriously.” During this period before brain imaging, when surgery was required to see what was happening in the brain, Dr. Milner’s behaviour-based diagnostic work was eventually seen as crucial.
Dr. Milner insists she never encountered any barriers because of her gender. Her resistance to being recognized as an outstanding woman seems to stem from her desire to be a great scientist in general. “Brenda was good at showing people she was necessary,” says Dr. Klein. “She showed people that the pieces of information she was providing from thinking about the brain and behaviour were important. She told me to make myself useful and I would have a job.”
Far from being dismissed as a woman, Dr. Milner intimidated people. “Remember that she was a very strong woman,” explains Gabriel Leonard, a clinical scientist at The Neuro. “There were very few people that had the courage and the necessary tenacity to fight her. She was a formidable person to debate, with a large vocabulary and a great knowledge of literature.”
Three years ago, Dr. Milner received the prestigious international Balzan Prize, netting $1-million for her research. Now, she is in the midst of launching into a new research area looking at how the hemispheres of the brain interact. This year she is taking on two new post-docs and her colleagues reckon that she may be the oldest scientist in the world to do so.

 

Unequal Access to Resources Depresses Women Scientists' Publication Rates, Study Finds

From ScienceMag:  Unequal Access to Resources Depresses Women Scientists' Publication Rates, Study Finds

Why do women scientists publish less than their male colleagues?   A study appearing in  PLOS ONE  on 12 December suggests an answer: women get a "lower level of institutional support" from their universities. 

Jordi Duch of Northwestern University and her co-authors took a circuitous route to this conclusion.  They compared the publication rates of male and female research university faculty in chemical engineering, chemistry, ecology, industrial engineering, material science, molecular biology, and psychology. These seven disciplines vary considerably in the amount of resources that scientists need to do research, as measured by what they typically spend in a year.  At the low end is industrial engineering, in which much of the work is "theoretical and computational in nature" and "faculty tend to train a small number of students at a time."  At the high end is molecular biology, which requires extensive labs, lots of expensive equipment, and, often, numerous grad students and postdocs to do the bench work.

Because of their relatively small requirements,industrial engineering faculty "do not need to compete against one another for limited resources," the authors state. The "institutional support" needed to do battle for funding is therefore a relatively unimportant "factor in productivity" in the field, the authors suggest.  For molecular biologists, on the other hand, winning large competitive grants is crucial to supporting their labs.  "Institutionally granted resources or institutional support for securing large grants" are vital to this competition and therefore become "crucial components of academic success," the authors write.

Universities have a long history of favoring men over women when allocating resources and support among their faculty members, note the authors, who reason that differences in publication rates should be expected to reflect this discrepancy. Gender differences in publication rates, the hypothesize, should therefore be much smaller in fields like industrial engineering that impose low resource demands than they are fields like molecular biology, where resource demands are very high.

An analysis of the publications of more than 4000 faculty members "fully confirms our hypotheses," the authors state. The differences between the publication rates of male and female industrial engineers are negligible. Female molecular biologists, on the other hand, "consistently publish at a rate significantly lower than" their male colleagues.  This shows, the authors conclude, that "gender differences in institutional support have had a crucial effect on the publication rates of females."

Although the authors caution that their results show only correlation, co-author Luis Amaral of Northwestern University finds them "very suggestive of causality," according to a an article in Inside Higher Ed. You can read the PLOS ONE study here.

 

New posting schedule

Now that I've got this new full-time job, I'll be posting in this blog twice a week - on Monday's and Wednesdays.

So the next post for this blog will be on Monday.

Thanks for your patience.

Posts resume this Wednesday

I'm a freelance writer and I am way behind on a job I have to do, so I won't be posting here until Wednesday..

Thanks for your patience!

Three female Rebel pilots were discharged from ‘Return of the Jedi’

From YahooNews:  Three female Rebel pilots were discharged from ‘Return of the Jedi’

Photo: Star Wars Aficionado Magazine

The Rebel Alliance now seems a little bit less like a galactic Boys Club.
The final battle against the Death Star in "Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi" (1983) used to have a bit more of a woman's touch as it's been revealed that there were actually three female Rebel pilots taking on TIE Fighters and Star Destroyers as they waited for Han Solo and the gang to blow up the shield generator bunker on Endor (ah, old war stories!).
There were three unnamed lady pilots in "Jedi," two of which can be seen in the extras for the Blu-ray release of the original "Star Wars" trilogy. Both of them were A-Wing pilots, with one even getting a line ("Got it," which was actually dubbed by a male actor in post-production) before getting shot down by a TIE Fighter seconds later. The second pilot is, surprisingly, considerably older ... and could now indeed be the inspiration for a new wave of fan fiction (she's a retired Rebel vet who's allowed to come back for one last hurrah against the Empire after being deemed too old for duty during the Battle of Yavin in "A New Hope," perhaps?).
There was a third female pilot in the Battle of Endor as well. French actress Vivienne Chandler didn't make it into the Blu-ray extras, even though she spent three days on the "Jedi" set and had an entire line of dialogue between herself and another pilot. She also got to fly the much more iconic X-Wing, the ship of choice for her Rebel colleague, Luke Skywalker. Even though actual footage of her in full Rebel mode doesn't seem to exist, she's managed to stay a part of the "Star Wars" universe as she's now a staple on the convention circuit.
There's been no official explanation as to why these characters were cut, though fan speculation suggests that the filmmakers may have deemed the sight of ladies getting blown to smithereens to be too intense for moviegoers ... especially when one could pass for your grandmother.
We have a feeling a lot of the Rebellion's apparent gender discrimination will have dissolved in time for "Episode VII." "Star Wars" needs women, and "Star Wars" will get them if Disney has anything to say about it.

US Dept. of State Announces Webinars for Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Fields

From eNewsChannels:  US Dept. of State Announces Webinars for Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) Fields

WASHINGTON, D.C. /eNewsChannels/ — The Secretary of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, in partnership with the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the global engineering firm CH2M HILL, will host a series of webinars starting November 29th to support emerging women leaders in the science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields who are studying in the United States as part of Brazil’s “Scientific Mobility Program” (also known as “Science Without Borders”).
The first webinar on “Career Paths for Women in STEM” will focus on the successes and challenges of women leaders in the STEM fields, and will take place at 12:00 p.m. EST Thursday, November 29th. IIE’s Center for Women’s Leadership Initiatives will moderate the panel, which will include a top executive from CH2M HILL, a leading scientist from the National Cancer Institute, and a leading engineer from Juniper Networks. To view a recording of the webinar after the event, visit www.iie.org/women.
This series of webinars for women in STEM falls under the U.S. – Brazil Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on the Advancement of Women signed by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and former Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim in March 2010. Through the MOU, the United States and Brazil focus on recruiting, retaining, and advancing women and girls in STEM fields. The two countries have jointly conducted numerous professional and educational exchange programs and events to promote these goals.

 

NOAA chief says she will leave in February

From WKRN Nashville:  NOAA chief says she will leave in February

NEW YORK (AP) - The woman who was a key figure in the federal government's response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 said Wednesday she will leave her post at the end of February.

"I have decided to return to my family and academia," Jane Lubchenco, administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, wrote to NOAA employees.

No successor was immediately announced for Lubchenco, who has held the job since 2009. She became well-known to the public for her role in response to the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana in April 2010.
Her agency was accused of accepting for too long the oil company's low estimates for the amount of oil leaking. It also was criticized for a report saying that by August of that year most of the spilled oil was gone, or at least not visible. The agency said much of it had dispersed naturally, had burned or was removed.

A few weeks later, a study by independent scientists reported an invisible, 22-mile underwater plume of oil ingredients. And NOAA acknowledged the deepwater oil was not degrading as fast as they initially thought.

Still, Lubchenco was praised Wednesday by the Ocean Conservancy. "Dr. Lubchenco and NOAA were quick to respond to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and continue to play a pivotal role in ensuring that the Gulf region, including the marine ecosystem, is restored," said interim president and CEO Janis Searles Jones.
Lubchenco also oversaw in 2010 the controversial transition to a new fishery management system in New England that allots fishermen individual shares of the catch, which they pool and manage in groups.

The system aimed to give fishermen flexibility to fish when the market and conditions were good, and free them from being restricted to an ever-dwindling number of days they were allowed to fish. And it pleased environmentalists because it established hard, enforceable catch limits to better prevent overfishing.

A marine ecologist and environmental scientist by training, and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Lubchenco is one of several prominent scientists hired by the Obama administration.

She was a professor at Oregon State University when the president appointed her in 2009. She said in her email Wednesday that "as many of you know, my home and family are on the West Coast."

 

Encouraging women in science

From IowaNow:  Encouraging women in science

With 100 billion nerve cells interconnected via a vast network of neural pathways, the complexity of the human brain is awe-inspiring.
Your brain serves as command center for your body’s vital functions, houses your future hopes and cherished memories, and serves as the seat of consciousness through which you draw purpose and passion.
Shreya Ahuja marvels at how the human brain executes these countless functions, especially after holding one in her hands.
“It was a lot lighter than I thought it would be,” Ahuja says. “For the number of capabilities the brain has, it is pretty amazing it only weighs three pounds.”
Ahuja and Emily Wechsler, 16-year-old high school students at The Hockaday School in Dallas, received an intensive two-week introduction to neuroscience at the University of Iowa last July. Melissa Duff, faculty member in the UI’s Interdisciplinary Graduate Program in Neuroscience, hosted the students in her laboratory as part of this pilot program. Duff holds a faculty appointment in Communication Sciences and Disorders in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.
The Hockaday School—an independent college preparatory day and boarding school for girls—has established an informal partnership with the UI allowing its students to gain summer research experience in UI laboratories. The relationship between the two schools was initiated by Hockaday science teacher Katie Croft, who earned her doctorate in neuroscience at the UI in 2009.
“Melissa is a perfect choice to work with. Her research is cutting edge, very accessible, and very interdisciplinary,” Croft says. “She’s had lots of experience mentoring students with all different abilities. Furthermore, she’s a perfect role model of a young, successful female scientist. I want our students to have an appreciation for science and feel like they have a good understanding of the real scientific process, which is best taught by doing it.”
Duff, who was a postdoctoral scholar in neurology at the UI when Croft was a graduate student, enjoyed introducing the young women to the world of neuroscience.
While at the UI, the students gained hands-on experience working alongside Duff. The students observed patients with neurological disease, read basic neuroscience research papers, assisted on a project in Duff’s lab, and learned more about traumatic brain injury.
“I’ve never mentored 16-year-old ladies, so I was intrigued about how this research experience would look for younger women,” says Duff, director of the Iowa Traumatic Brain Injury Registry. “As a woman in science and the mother of a little girl, it was fantastic. We talked a lot about the science process, the experience of going to graduate school, and what careers in science look like.”
Ahuja and Wechsler presented a poster about their Iowa experience at the Society for Neuroscience’s 2012 annual meeting in New Orleans in October. Their presentation was part of the conference session Teaching of Neuroscience: K-12.
“The poster focused on what we learned and the partnership between The Hockaday School and the UI,” Ahuja says. “It also was about how we plan to carry this experience to Hockaday.”
Both students agreed that the most valuable aspect of their research experience at Iowa was the people.
“We talked to graduate students, Ph.D.s, undergraduates,” Ahuja says. “Picking up on those conversations throughout the two weeks expanded our knowledge tenfold.”
“The most important thing we did was talk to all different people. They’re who made this experience great,” Wechsler says. “This was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever done. Being here and doing the things we did probably has changed what I will do later on in life. Now, I might do neuroscience because I absolutely love it.”
Barbara Fishel, dean of studies and director of the Hockaday Research Program, wants Hockadaystudents to participate in authentic scientific investigation, and says the UI is a great place for that to happen.
“(In our research program), we’ve seen a maturing in our girls’ scientific reasoning and understanding of the process of science, which enriches their learning experience,” Fishel says. “We would like to make this partnership a formal partnership. This has potential to be a flourishing long-term model for us.”
In addition to presenting a poster at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, Ahuja wrote an essay about traumatic brain injury for the International Science Essay Competition at Dartmouth College.
Ahuja’s entry—“Humpty Dumpty without the King’s Men”—placed second out of more than 80 submissions from more than 20 countries and has been selected for publication in the Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Science.
In her essay, she calls for more researchers, funding, and awareness to be given to patients with traumatic brain injury—an “invisible” condition that is complicated to diagnose and treat. The essay was inspired by the two weeks studying neuroscience at the UI.
“I wanted to go into medicine, and I had been leaning toward surgery,” Ahuja says. “When I came to the University of Iowa, I knew nothing about neuroscience. This experience opened up a whole new world of research. Now, there are so many more possibilities for me to look at.”
Those words bring a smile to Duff’s face.
“What’s exciting about this partnership is the mission of The Hockaday School to give young women opportunities in science, coupled with the investment to make neuroscience more accessible and more attractive to younger and younger people,” Duff says.

 

Book recounts activism, struggles of U.S. women scientists

From Chronicle Online: Book recounts activism, struggles of U.S. women scientists

For four decades, Cornell science historian Margaret Rossiter has been researching, writing and publishing on the history of women scientists in America. She started in 1972, when everyone assured her that there had never been any women scientists in the United States, or anywhere, she said.
"Not even Madame Curie counted. But the more I looked, the more I found," said Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science.
Rossiter has completed a trilogy on the topic, with her third book focusing on women scientists' most recent pioneering efforts and contributions. In "Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972" (Johns Hopkins University Press), she guides us from the "rather quiet, mundane, even ladylike" emergence of female researchers' first interest groups to their later direct confrontations.
Central to this story are the struggles and successes of "clever, astute, hardworking and determined" women scientists in the era of affirmative action. Scores of previously isolated women scientists were suddenly energized to do things they had rarely, if ever, done before: form organizations and recruit new members, start rosters and projects, put out newsletters, confront authorities and even fight (and win) lawsuits. Rossiter follows the major activities of these groups in several fields -- from engineering to the physical, biological and social sciences -- and their campaigns to raise consciousness, see legislation enforced, lobby for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment and serve as watchdogs of the media.
The 528-page book also covers the changing employment picture in the federal government, academia, industry and the nonprofit sector and discusses contemporary battles to increase the number of women in the National Academy of Sciences and of women presidents of scientific societies.
Rossiter mined nearly 100 previously unexamined archival collections and more than 50 oral histories to write the book.
The previous books in her series are "Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940" and "Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-72," also published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The former won an award for the best book by an American woman from the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. The latter was the winner in 1997 of the History of Science Society's Pfizer Award for Outstanding Book in the History of Science.

Women in Science: Florence Bascom 1862-1945

From Daily Kos:  Women in Science: Florence Bascom 1862-1945

When the subject of geology is raised it is only recently that women usually get some mention (although there were more in the past than is generally thought.) It took the efforts of a very unusual person to break the ground for other women. Florence Bascom's work resulted in our knowledge of Appalachian geology being to a large extent defined by a women, who was also a top-notch scientist and recognized as such even fairly early in her career. She was in fact the first professional female geologist in the United States.  Although not the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in geology (Mary Holms did that at the University of Michigan in 1888), she was the first to be hired as a geologist by the United States Geological Survey and, not only the first, but the sole woman listed in the premier issue of  "American Men of Science" in 1906.
Florence Bascom was born in Williamstown, Massachusetts in 1862, during the Civil War. Her mother was active in the women's voting rights movement and her father, who was a professor of rhetoric, supported equal opportunities for women.  She was awarded a Ph.D. by Johns Hopkins University in 1893, after having earned two bachelor's degrees at the University of Wisconsin in 1882 and 1884. She was able to go to the University of Wisconsin because when her father became president in 1874, one of the first of his actions (1875) was to admit women to classes. She also was awarded a master's degree from the same institution before going on to Johns Hopkins.  Bascom went on to establish herself as one of the formost geologists and experts in crystallography in the country. Her life was a series of being the first woman in a number of other geological areas. In 1901, she became the first woman speak at a meeting of the Geological Society of Washington. In 1924 she was elected as the first woman on the Council of the Geological Society of America and became the society's first woman officer. She published more than 40 articles and became recognized as an expert especially in the geology of the Appalachian Mountains.
Not only a researcher, she taught at several colleges and universities, including one for blacks and Native Americans, finally being appointed to teach geology, then considered to be a secondary subject, at Bryn Mawr in 1895. She founded the geology department there and made geology into a respected discipline at the college. The graduate program that she developed trained the majority of women geologists in the first third of the Twentieth Century. She also built up the geological collection.  Bascom was a demanding, but highly respected teacher and was a pioneer in both research and instruction. She deserves much more than being virtually unknown except to those in the field.
Internet References
Florence Bascom, Pioneer Geologist http://www.usgs.gov/...
Florence Bascom http://en.wikipedia.org/...
Rock Stars: A Life of Firsts: Florence Bascom http://www.gsahist.org/...

 

Women scientists join the men on Antarctica mission to collect meteorites

From Cordis:  Women scientists join the men on Antarctica mission to collect meteorites

A team of women scientists will be joining their male counterparts on a mission to collect meteorites in Antarctica, from 3 December until 12 December.

The meteorite research team consists of five Belgian scientists, led by Vinciane Debaille (Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB), Laboratoire G-Time, Faculty of Science), and three Japanese scientists from the National Institute for Polar Research (NIPR) in Tokyo.

This mission follows the success of a previous Belgo-Japanese collaboration, the Belgian SAMBA team (Search for Antarctic Meteorites, Belgian Approach), with the collection of over 800 meteorites in the Sør Rondane Mountains region. Now they are set for their latest mission to take on the Nansen blue ice field, to the south of the Princess Elisabeth station, in Antarctica.

Meteorites provide valuable information on the 4.5 billion years of evolution of the solar system and planets, including Earth. Studying these helps researchers to better understand the formation and age of the solar system, the planets, asteroids and comets. Micrometeorites constitute the largest fraction of the extraterrestrial material that falls on Earth, totalling an average of approximately 40,000 tonnes per year.

The systematic collection of meteorites, using Ski-doo snowmobiles, will concentrate on the southern and eastern sections of the Nansen blue ice field, where the scientists hope to find a piece of Mars or the Moon.

However, their research may be hampered by the fierce weather conditions expected in Antarctica. Climatic conditions are set to be very difficult, with temperatures in the region of -20 degrees Celcius, and with an average wind speed of 50 km/h giving a perceived temperature of -37 degrees Celcius. These inclement weather conditions will dictate the pace of work, as strong blizzards can sometimes halt all specimen gathering for several days at a time.

During the previous mission in 2010-2011, after searching for 13 days, 4 to 6 hours a day, a team of 5 people had found a total of 218 meteorites, varying in size from 1 to 15 cm. However, it was the types of meteorites found that proved exceptional. Among the 218 meteorites, two rare types of achondrite (stony meteorites that attest to magmatic activity in the solar system) and a carbonaceous chondrite (the most primitive meteorites having a similar composition to that of the initial material of the solar nebula) were identified.

Their mission will be carried out as part of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and ULB research programme, run by Philippe Claeys (VUB) and Vinciane Debaille (ULB). Funding for the mission has come from the Belgian Federal Science Policy Office (BELSPO) and logistical support is provided by the International Polar Foundation (IPF).

In 2010, Steven Goderis (VUB) and Vinciane Debaille (ULB) were awarded the InBev-Baillet Latour Antarctica Fellowship to carry out a detailed study of micrometeorites in order to better understand the formation of the planets and the development and evolution of our solar system. Recent studies have shown that micrometeorites can accumulate in the cracks and interstices of the nunataks in the Frontier Mountains, Queen Maud Land, Antarctica.

For more information, please visit:

Expedition blog:
http://antarctica.oma.be/

Université libre de Bruxelles:
http://ulb.ac.be

 

Teen Starts Campaign for Gender Neutral Easy Bake Oven

From ABC News:  Teen Starts Campaign for Gender Neutral Easy Bake Oven
Like most four year olds,  Gavyn Boscio knows what he wants for Christmas — a dinosaur and an Easy Bake Oven.
But the budding chef and his 13-year-old sister McKenna Pope, weren’t thrilled to find out the only colors the Hasbro oven comes in are pink and purple or that the ads and packaging don’t show a single boy.
McKenna decided to take the issue into her own hands and began a petition on Change.org asking Hasbro to alter its packaging and color options. To date, the petition has garnered nearly 10,000 signatures.
“He should know that it’s okay for him to go against societal norms and gender roles,” McKenna said.
Hasbro did not immediately return requests for comment on whether they plan to make the Easy Bake Oven in any other colors.
Jeff Gardere, a child psychologist, said gender neutral toys are crucial to child development.
“In order for children to not face limitations in their occupational choices, we need to present them with gender neutral toys,” he said.
VIDEO: Girl, 4, Blasts Companies for Pushing Girls to Buy ‘Pink Stuff’
This holiday season, overly-gender-specific toys are a hot button issue.  The Butterfly Beauty Shop from Lego’s Friends line has drawn the ire of a group called the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.
They’ve nominated it for one of their “TOADY” (Toys Oppressive And Destructive to Young Children) award, saying it’s “so jam-packed with condescending stereotypes it would even make Barbie blush.”
Lego did not immediately respond to a request for comment.  But previously, in response to the criticism which began late last year, Lego officials said in a statement that their “goal with LEGO Friends is to engage more girls in the positive benefits of construction play.”
Read: Top 5 Nominees for 2012′s Worst Toy
In contrast, in Sweden, the Top Toys group just published a catalog of gender-neutral toy images, showing girls playing with toy guns and boys with blow dryers.
The company is even selling a blue and green kitchen, and depicts a budding chef, a boy like Gavyn, using it.

 

Top secret Doctor Who script found by student in taxi on night out

Okay, not really science related, but interesting!

From Wales Online :  Top secret Doctor Who script found by student in taxi on night out

If you found a top secret script for a new episode of one of TV’s most popular shows, would you be able to hand it straight back without releasing any spoilers?
That’s exactly what one Cardiff student did after finding a Doctor Who script in the back of a Cardiff taxi.
Hannah Durham stumbled upon the script for a forthcoming episode of the sci-fi show during a night out with friends.

Producers, scriptwriters and fans of Doctor Who thanked her for returning the missing script and preventing precious plot details from being leaked online.
Hannah told WalesOnline she was unaware of the significance of the find until she was bombarded with praise from the show’s “Whovian” fans.
She said: “I had never even heard of a Whovian before. I have had so many tweets from people thanking me for returning it – it has just been crazy.”
She added: “I like Doctor Who but I haven’t seen it in a while, so the whole significance passed me by a bit.”

Hannah discovered the script on Halloween night at about 10pm after getting into a black cab with friends in Cathays.
Dressed as a skeleton, Hannah spotted the top-secret script, entitled The Last Cyberman, tucked inside a seat pocket.
The 20-year-old said she placed the script in her bag and only fully realised it was a Doctor Who script the next day.
Hannah said she wasn’t tempted to read the contents – or sell it.
She said: “I glanced at it enough to see that it was a script and I saw the title and everything, but I didn’t feel the urge to read through it or copy it or anything.”
Hannah set about attempting to return the script to show bosses by e-mailing and tweeting scriptwriters and producers.
Her friend Ben Rowling, a fan of Doctor Who, helped her get in touch with the show’s production team.
Cardiff University student Hannah said: “He was more excited than me to be honest. It made his life really. He was just really happy that he could help out.”
She eventually arranged to hand in the script at the BBC’s Roath Lock studios in Cardiff Bay.
The final year English Literature student’s good deed was widely praised.
And scriptwriter Neil Gaiman, who wrote the episode, personally offered his thanks.
He wrote on Twitter: “A world-sized pat on the back to Hannah who found a copy of the Dr Who I wrote, an actress left in a taxi, and returned it safe & sound.”
Hannah said she hoped the BBC would be able to offer her some work experience after returning the Doctor Who script.
What can Doctor Who fans expect from The Last Cyberman?
Doctor Who villains the Cybermen will make a reappearance when the show returns for a run of eight episodes in Spring 2013.
An all-star cast has been lined up to appear in the episode, including Eastenders actress Tamzin Outhwaite and Warwick Davis, the star of Ricky Gervais’ sitcom Life's Too Short.
Jason Watkins, from Being Human and Lark Rise to Candleford, will also appear among the stellar cast.
The official Doctor Who team blog said the guest stars would portray “a band of misfits on a mysterious planet”.

Courtney Stevens assigns outreach projects to inspire her students

From WIllamette University:  Courtney Stevens assigns outreach projects to inspire her students

Sydney Moberg ’13 was nervous about dissecting a sheep brain. But once she held a scalpel in her hand, she discovered the only thing she didn’t enjoy about it was the smell.
“I was fascinated by how the brain looked, how it felt and where each individual part was located,” says Moberg, a psychology major. “When it came time to choose an outreach project, I knew I wanted to teach a brain dissection lab. I wanted other students to have the same type of experience I did.”
Through professor Courtney Stevens’ Cognitive Neuroscience course at Willamette University, students pick an outreach project that connects neuroscience to real-world issues, and in doing so, act out the university’s motto, “Not unto ourselves alone are we born.”
Some, like Moberg, have helped high school students dissect a sheep brain, while others have taught a brain class at Bush Elementary School or discussed the effects of drug addiction with incarcerated teens.
Through community outreach, Stevens hopes to link neuroscience content to her students’ individual career goals and interests. She also wants to connect her students with neuroscience content and resources they can access after graduating.
“Some students come in not believing that cognitive neuroscience is relevant to their future,” Stevens says. “But as they begin to work on their projects, they see the connections between neuroscience and the real world.”
Stevens’ program has been adopted in classes at the University of Oregon. Her program also received praise from the Society of Neuroscience, which awarded Stevens the Junior Faculty Next Generation Award in October for outstanding contributions to public communication, education and outreach about neuroscience.
“For me, the beauty of the outreach project is that students take ownership of the material,” Stevens says. “They choose what they will do. They’re the ones making connections within the community.”

Community Partnerships

Stevens developed the Cognitive Neuroscience course in 2008. Back then, outreach activities were relatively uncommon in undergraduate, neuroscience classes — and they still are today.
“For large classes of 300 students, there would be concerns about quality control,” Stevens says. “There’d be little incentive for faculty members to do this because it’s too much of a burden.”
But in Stevens’ class, not only is there no need for outside funding, students absorb the responsibility.
First, they pick a neuroscience project that interests them. The project features a tangible component that may be evaluated — such as a video or a set of lesson plans.
Students then develop an evaluation rubric that describes what A-, B- and C-level work looks like. Prior to implementing their projects, they submit a project proposal, which Stevens evaluates to help them refine their plans.
When delivered, supervising teachers and participants help grade the presentations, worth up to 10 percent of the students’ final grade.
So far, more than 75 Willamette undergraduates — most of whom are psychology, exercise science and biology majors — have taken the upper-division course.
Two of these students are Linnea Hardlund ’13 and Jennifer Wade ’13, who taught a brain class at Bush Elementary. Through pictures and demonstrations, they showcased the lobes of the brain and the functions of each lobe.
As part of the interactive class, the primary students colored worksheets on the brain and ate a “brainfood” snack of frozen blueberries, which stimulates healthy brain function.
Hardlund and Wade say the outreach project not only challenged them to think critically, it forced them to find creative ways to share their knowledge.
“Professor Stevens’ class was one of the best I have taken at Willamette,” says Hardlund, a biology major. “The outreach project allowed us to take our knowledge from the classroom and bring it full circle in a real-life situation.”

Making a Difference

Maxx Kaplan ’11 also enjoyed Stevens’ class. For his project, he and another student gave a PowerPoint presentation to youths incarcerated at the Hillcrest Youth Correctional Facility in Salem.
The presentation focused on the neural effects of drugs and the biological explanations for cravings and addiction.
“We wanted the youths to come away with an understanding that the brain is a growing, changing organ, and that they weren’t necessarily doomed by their family history or past experiences, ” says Kaplan, a psychology major who had interned at the facility.
For Kaplan, seeing the teens make connections between his presentation and their own experiences proves Stevens understands the value of community outreach.
“Professor Stevens knows what she’s talking about, and everyone in the classroom knows it,” he says.
Going forward, Stevens plans to continue soliciting feedback from students and area partners to improve the outreach activities.
“I want my students to do more than read a textbook and take an exam. I want them to be creative and to take ownership of the material,” Stevens says. “They’ve done that. Some of their work has blown me away.”