Girl Scientist Club, chapter 1

The Girl Scientist Magazine is changing into a fictoin blog, featuring three 14-year old girls, interested in the sciences.

There's:
Trelane Scott, who wants to be an oceanographer,
Amber Karlovassi, who is interested in dinosaurs,
and Emily Shimako, who intends to become an astronaut.

As they each pursue their ambitions, everything they learn about their own particular field will be shared with the readers of this blog.... so it's an educational and fun blog at the same time. We hope you enjoy.

The story will be updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Fourteen year old Emily Shimako walked down the hallway of her new school to Room 113. She paused in front of the door, and took a deep breath. Within that room was her Advanced Algebra class. It was an elective class, and chances were very likely that she’d be the only girl in the class.

She’d already spent half of 7th grade in the school on the Air Force base in Ramstein, Germany. But her mom’s mother – her grandmother – had taken ill, and she and her mom had moved here to Cheyenne, Wyoming so that they could take care of her grandmother, while her dad remained at Ramstein until the end of the year.

At Ramstein, she’d been the only girl in the class. Things probably wouldn’t be different here…

Emily took a deep breath, opened the door and walked in. Her eyes scanned the room, and to her surprise she saw in a back corner that there were already two girls in the class!

Fifteen boys – she had counted rapidly – and three girls total in the class.

Emily’s eyes caught those of one of the girls, who smiled at her and jerked her head, inviting her to come over and join them.

“Hi,” she said, sitting down in the rear row. “I’m Emily Shimako.”

“I’m Amber Karlovassi,” said the cheerful-faced, blonde-haired, slightly tubby girl who’d invited her over. “And this” – she indicated a slender, very pretty girl with brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, “Is Trelane Scott.”

They exchanged greetings.

“Where have you transferred from, Emily?” asked Trelane.

Emily explained about her grandmother’s illness.

“Well, it’s always nice to have another girl in class,” said Trelane. “Me and Amber, we’re kind of like the two musketeers. We’re the only girls in our geology class, too.”

Emily laughed. “Not anymore.”

“Hey, that’s great, you must really be in to science…”

Before she could say anymore, the teacher entered the room, opened his book, and the class began.

Inwardly, Emily breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been nervous about starting in a new school, but worse, being the only girl to take science-centric classes like Advanced Algebra and Geology. But it looked like she’d found a couple of kindred spirits. The rest of this year might not be too bad, after all.

Marine Sciences: Sonar

Drop a pebble into a still pond. A circle of pushed-up water forms around the spot where the pebble entered the water. These little waves move outward. As these waves spread out, they mover less and less water, until they stop altogether.

Similarly, when a sound is made, waves form. These sound waves are invisible.

Waves are a way of moving energy from one okace to another. As the energy moves, it makes waves.

Soundwaves resemble water waves. The highest prt of the wave is called the crest. The distance between the crests is called the wavelength. The lowest point of a wave is called a trough.

Bibliography
Sonar, by Karen Price Hossell

Sonar, by Karen Price Hossell

Sonar, by Karen Price Hossell
Heinemann Know It series, Heinemann Library, 2003
39 pages, 2 appendices, glossary and index.
Oversize, illustrated with color photos throughout book.


Table of Contents
1. Sound waves
2. Sound Waves and Echoes
3. Underwater Sound
4. Why Can't People Hear Sonar?
5. Early Sonar
6. Submarines, Sonar and War
7. Kinds of Sonar
8. Mapping the Ocean Floor
9. Finding Faults
10. Underwater Archaeology
11. Looking for a Monster
12. Sonobuoys
13. Sonar and Robots
14. Bats and Sonar
15. Dolphins, Whales and Sonar
16. Finding Mines
17. Ultrasound
18. Careers in Sonar
Appendix A: Ocean Maps
Appendix B: Sonar Tools
GLossary
More Books to Read
Index

Reconocen en Texas a Pilar Luna por más de 30 años de investigación

I share the Spanish version of this article because for some reason the English version isn't coming up.

I'm sure all my readers here either know Spanish or are learning it. Just goes to show it's necessary to understand several languages, as scientific exploratoi occurs in all countries.

The subject of this article is Pilar Luna, a pioneer of Mexican Underwater Archaeology. She has been working in this field for 30 years.

Informador.com.mx: Reconocen en Texas a Pilar Luna por más de 30 años de investigación
Este galardón se otorga anualmente por la Sociedad de Arqueología Histórica (SHA por sus siglas en inglés)

CIUDAD DE MÉXICO (17/ENE/2011).- La mexicana Pilar Luna Erreguerena, precursora de la Arqueología Subacuática en México, fue condecorada con la medalla 'J.C. Harrington', en reconocimiento a su trayectoria de más de 30 años dedicados a la investigación y preservación del patrimonio cultural sumergido.

Este galardón se otorga anualmente por la Sociedad de Arqueología Histórica (SHA por sus siglas en inglés), agrupación estadunidense que aglutina el mayor número de académicos en la materia.

Con este reconocimiento, que se concedió recientemente en Austin, Texas, Pilar Luna se convirtió en la primera investigadora de América Latina y la cuarta mujer en recibir ese premio.

La presea representa además un reconocimiento a la labor que a lo largo de tres décadas ha desarrollado México en la investigación y salvaguardia de los bienes culturales e históricos que yacen en las profundidades. Tarea que ha sido encabezada desde 1980 por la experta del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH).

La 'Medalla J.C. Harrington' —nombrada en honor de Jean Carl Harrington, padre de la arqueología histórica en Estados Unidos— es la presea más importante que concede la SHA a quienes a través de su trayectoria profesional han contribuido a la investigación y preservación del patrimonio cultural del orbe.

Es la segunda ocasión que esta insignia se concede a un investigador en el campo de la Arqueología Subacuática, la primera le fue entregada en 1999 al Dr. George F. Bass, considerado el 'padre de la arqueología subacuática en el mundo'.

'Cuando me informaron el año pasado que la Sociedad de Arqueología Histórica había decidido otorgarme la Medalla J.C. Harrington, no sabía realmente a qué se referían y necesité de unos minutos para empezar a comprender la magnitud de este reconocimiento', recordó Pilar Luna, titular de la Subdirección de Arqueología Subacuática (SAS) del INAH.

'Me considero un ser privilegiado, puesto que estoy convencida de que hay personas que merecen reconocimientos por sus logros y nunca los reciben. Además, haberlo recibido en vida, y en compañía de tantos seres queridos, ha sido un verdadero regalo de Dios', comentó.

La ceremonia de premiación tuvo lugar hace unos días, en el marco de la 44 Conferencia Anual de Arqueología Histórica y Subacuática, celebrada en Austin, Texas, donde las doctoras en arqueología Margaret Leshikar-Denton y Toni L. Carrell, presentaron una semblanza de la arqueóloga mexicana.

Como parte de dicha exposición, la cual será publicada por la SHA, ambas especialistas citaron fragmentos de 10 cartas escritas por reconocidos expertos de varios países en el tema del patrimonio cultural, en apoyo a la candidatura de Pilar Luna.

En este mismo foro, un grupo de nueve investigadores de la Subdirección de Arqueología Subacuática del INAH, entre ellos la arqueóloga Luna, presentaron una serie de ponencias bajo el título Treinta años de Arqueología Subacuática en México. Investigaciones actuales.

En la primera conferencia, 'Treinta años de arqueología subacuática en México: de la visión a la acción', Luna Erreguerena hizo una revisión desde los inicios en 1980 de esta disciplina en México, hasta la actualidad.

Los otros investigadores mexicanos —cinco arqueólogos, una historiadora, un biólogo y una restauradora— expusieron los proyectos específicos que el INAH ha impulsado a lo largo de 30 años en este país, entre ellos el de la Flota de la Nueva España de 1630-1631, enfocado a la búsqueda de pecios hundidos que pudieron haber tenido alguna relación con dicha escuadra que zarpó en 1631 de Veracruz hacia España.

Otro de los esquemas presentados fue el del Inventario y Diagnóstico de Recursos Culturales Sumergidos en el Golfo de México, y las exploraciones en torno al cráter del Nevado de Toluca, entre otros.

'Los logros de la arqueología subacuática mexicana a lo largo de 30 años han sido muchos. De tal modo que la postura de nuestro país en lo que se refiere a la protección del patrimonio cultural subacuático es reconocida internacionalmente', dijo Luna.

México forma parte de varios consejos internacionales especializados en este tema, como el Consejo Asesor en Arqueología Subacuática y el Comité Internacional sobre Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático (ICUCH-ICOMOS), señaló la fuente.

Agregó que también es miembro desde su creación en diciembre de 2009, del Consejo Científico y Técnico para la Convención sobre la Protección del Patrimonio Cultural Subacuático de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura (UNESCO).

Con motivo del nombramiento de Luna como uno de los 11 miembros de dicho Consejo de la UNESCO, tanto el presidente Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, como el secretario de Educación Pública, Alonso Lujambio, le enviaron sendas cartas de felicitación, en las que reconocen la labor de la especialista del INAH en la salvaguardia del patrimonio cultural de la humanidad.

Respecto a los proyectos para este 2011, la Subdirección de Arqueología Subacuática seguirá avanzando en los proyectos de investigación de la Flota de la Nueva España y en el Inventario y Diagnóstico de Recursos Culturales en el Golfo de México.

Se continuará con las exploraciones en torno al Galeón de Manila, en Baja California, del Nevado de Toluca y Banco Chinchorro, en Quintana Roo, precisó.

Así como en la incorporación de nuevos sitios al Atlas Arqueológico Subacuático para el registro, estudio y protección de cenotes y cuevas inundadas en la Península de Yucatán, además de la protección, conservación, investigación y difusión del patrimonio cultural sumergido del país, agregó.

'En síntesis, se continuarán cumpliendo los objetivos para los cuales fue creada esta área del INAH, en beneficio del legado cultural que yace en aguas continentales y marinas de la República Mexicana', finalizó.

Saturday: Sylvia Earle Day (Marine Sciences)

Sylvia Earle: (born August 30, 1935 in Gibbstown, New Jersey) is an American oceanographer. She was chief scientist for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from 1990-1992. She is a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, sometimes called "Her Deepness" or "The Sturgeon General."

Abyss - pronounced uh-biss - is "the very deepest part of the ocean."
Other words that use Abyss are:
Abyssal plain, a flat area on the ocean floor
Abyssal zone, a deep extent of the sea

Word origin - how did the term develop?
late 14c., earlier abime (c.1300), from L.L. abyssus "bottomless pit," from Gk. abyssos (limne) "bottomless (pool).





How to Use Vocabulary Builder
Start a notebook (I prefer a 3 ring binder, with alphabetical sections, but if you prefer to stay technical, do it on your computer) and input these vocabulary words. After you've written them all down, try to use them in a sentence.

Keep this notebook forever and ever. Even if your interest in the marine sciences wane for a time...you'll get it back and then go a-hunting for this vocabulary builder to refresh your memory!

System, Order and Method are coming!

Up until now, the posts in this blog have been rather haphazard. That will all change with our Friday post.

From now on, posts here will be made every Monday, Wedneday and Friday.

Posts will focus on

1. Women scientists of the past
2. Women scientists of the present
3. Women scientists of the future (news on girls who are showing a keen interest in the sciences)
4. The sciences themselves. We'll go back to adding our vocabulary posts, for both space and marine science.
5. Space science
6. Marine science
7. Scientific organizations

So stay tuned!

Jacques Cousteau's Granddaughter Continues His Legacy

Georgetown University: Jacques Cousteau's Granddaughter Continues His Legacy

January 4, 2011 – Using some of the underwater gear created by her famous grandfather, Alexandra Cousteau (C’98) and her international team, Expedition Blue Planet, traveled 14,500 miles across North America in 2010 to investigate global water issues.

At a recent luncheon sponsored by Georgetown College, she said Jacques Cousteau, who died the year before she graduated from Georgetown, taught her to scuba dive at the age of 7.

He educated her about the environment, biodiversity, and underwater ecologies, she said, but also kept her guessing.

“If you want to know about the world, you’ll have to go see for yourself,” she said he told her.

Blue Legacy
The Georgetown government major followed her grandfather’s advice, studying dolphins at the Harvard Oceanographic Institution, diving with humpback whales in Maui and helping fisherman in Costa Rica with sustainable fishing practices.

In 2008, she founded Blue Legacy, an initiative that explores and documents environmental change.

An outgrowth of that initiative, Expedition Blue Planet is resulting in blog posts, photo essays and short web documentaries to help viewers understand their role in story of America’s changing watersheds.

“When you poison your water, you destroy your community,” Cousteau explained to students at the lunch. “In the United States, Over half of our rivers are neither fishable, drinkable nor swimmable.”

Systems Thinking
She pointed to the Gulf of Mexico is as a prime example of an ecosystem in extreme distress. Even before the BP oil spill, she said, there was a dead zone “the size of New Jersey” in the gulf, a result of agricultural runoff.

“We thought that was the worst,” she said. But now she said it’s clear that marine ecology has been destroyed and the generations of people who relied upon those waters no longer have a way to make a living.

The spill is “an intergenerational issue that we’ve stopped talking about six months after the fact,” Cousteau lamented.

Cousteau emphasized using “systems thinking” which she said considers how everything from politics to ecology has a global effect. This way of thinking combats the fragmentation of knowledge that she said arises when people don’t connect daily practices with their environment impacts.

The Greatest Tool
Cousteau said her coursework at Georgetown profoundly affected her future.

Her international relations classes, she explained, taught her about global cause and effect, which proved to be “the greatest tool I have used in everything I’ve done.”

Cousteau encouraged students to become involved in their local water issues and find out where their water comes from and where it goes.

“If we don’t write ourselves into stories, we don’t internalize them,” she explained. “That’s what my grandfather did … he told us stories and helped us connect the dots.”

The View From A Height

Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) had a degree in biochemistry, and was a well-known Golden Age science fiction writer with his Positronic Robot series and his Foundation series to name only a few. But for most of his writing years he saw himself as a science popularizer. From 1957 until his death, he wrote a series of articles, on a wide variety of scientific subjects, for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. All but a handful of the 399 essays he wrote were then collected into anthologies and published in hardback and subsequently in paperback.

All of those books are out of print now, and you'll be lucky to find them in a library, too. (I assembled my collection of these essays by purchasing used books through Amazon.com's service - more than half of the books I recieved were de-accessioned library books.)

And this is a pity, because more than half of the essays Asimov wrote still have applications today. He explained his topics simply and clearly, so that even if a layperson couldn't quite grasp the intricacies involved, they still understood the general concept. These books really should be read by everyone aspiring to a scientific education. (And that should be all of us!)

Asimov explains it in his introduction to the anthology Adding A Dimension. I reproduce a few of the relevant paragraphs below.

[There is a fallacy called] the "growing edge," the belief that only the very frontier of scientific advance counted; that everything that had been left behind by that advance was faded an dead.

But is that true? ...

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before. "If I have seen further than other men," said Isaac Newton, "it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants."

... In fact, an overly exclusive concern with the growing edge can kill the best of science, for it is not on the growing edge that growth can best be seen. If a growing edge only is studied, science begins to seem a revelation without a history of development.

... Science gains reality when it is viewed not as an abstraction, but as the concrete sum of work of scientists, past and present, living and dead. Not a statement in science, not an observation, not a thought exists in itself. Each was ground out of the harsh effort of some man [or woman] and unless you know the man and the world in which he worked; the assumptions he accepted as truths, the concepts he considered untenable; you cannot fully understand the statement or observation or thought."

This blog is dedicated to the girl scientist, and I cover a variety of sciences here, such as chemistry, classical physics, astronomy, and so on. All these disciplines come together to make someone an informed scientific layperson - and that is the goal of this blog.

(Asimov continues in this vein and has some interesting things to say on the scientific method, and I'll share that in my next post.)

If you'd like to collect all of Asimov's collected essays from the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, here are the titles:

Fact and Fancy (1962)
View from a Height (1963)
Adding a Dimension (1964)
Of Time, Space, & Other Things (1965)
From Earth to Heaven (1966)
Science, Numbers and I (1968)
The Solar System and Back (1970)
The Stars in Their Courses (1971)
The Left Hand of the Electron (1972)
The Tragedy of the Moon (1973)
Of Matters Great & Small (1975)
The Planet that Wasn't (1976)
Quasar, Quasar, Burning Bright (1977)
Road to Infinity (1979)
The Sun Shines Bright (1981)
Counting the Eons (1983)
X Stands for Unknown (1984)
The Subatomic Monster (1985)
Far as Human Eye Could See (1987)
The Relativity of Wrong (1988)
Out of the Everywhere (1990)
The Secret of the Universe (1990)

Most of these can be bought from Amazon for a penny...and $3.99 postage. Others are more expensive. All of them are worth the cost, as you will discover as this blog progresses.

Silent Sky, About a Female Astronomer's Discovery, Will Premiere at South Coast Rep

This news article is from 20 Dec 2010:
Silent Sky, About a Female Astronomer's Discovery, Will Premiere at South Coast Rep
The world premiere of Silent Sky, Lauren Gunderson's new play about a real-life female astronomer named Henrietta Leavitt, has been added to the 2010-11 season at South Coast Repertory.

Performances play April 1-May 1, 2011, on the Segerstrom Stage.

Silent Sky, an SCR commission, "mingles science and history with a dose of feminism and romantic love," according to the Costa Mesa, CA, not-for-profit. "It's the story of Henrietta Leavitt, a Massachusetts pastor's daughter who leaves her home and beloved sister for a job at Harvard University's Observatory. There she maps the night sky by studying photographic plates and meets Peter Shaw, the head astronomer's apprentice, who makes her re-think her vow never to marry. Despite her lowly position and limited access to scientific equipment, Henrietta makes an amazing discovery. But will she get the credit? Will her health give out before she gets the answers she’s seeking? Will her family obligations keep her from the man she loves?"

This is Gunderson's second produced commission at SCR. Her first, Emilie: Le Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life at the Petite Théâtre at Cirey Tonight, also looked at a real-life female scientist who never received proper credit for her ideas. Gunderson holds an MFA in dramatic writing from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. Some of her other works include Fire Work, Baby M, Leap, Parts They Call Deep and Exit, Pursued By a Bear.

Silent Sky will be part of the 2011 Pacific Playwrights Festival. The run coincides with the PPF slate of staged readings of new plays.

For tickets and information, visit www.scr.org or call (714) 708-5555