National Fossil Day spotlights the unique ways in which fossils are clues to the world’s history. It was first organized in 2010 to promote public awareness and stewardship of fossils, as well as to foster a greater appreciation of their scientific and educational value.
National Fossil Day is co-sponsored by the National Park Service and by the American Geological Institute. In the United States, fossils can be found at more than 230 national park areas around the country.
Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and all related STEM fields.
The celebration is named in honor of English mathematician Augusta Ada King (1815-1852), Countess of Lovelace, known colloquially as Ada Lovelace. Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is sometimes considered the world’s first computer programmer for the algorithm she wrote for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, one of the world’s first mechanical computers. Over the years there have been historical disagreements over the extent of Lovelace’s knowledge of the subject and the originality of the work she published in her article, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator,“ but Babbage himself seemed to dismiss such future claims in his memoir.
5 Questions for a Scientist: Glaciologist Kelly Brunt
Occupation: Associate Research Scientist Institution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and University of Maryland Field: Glaciology Focus: Remote sensing of ice shelves and icebergs
Kelly is an Associate Research Scientist with the University of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She has a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Syracuse University, a master’s degree in Geology from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Chicago. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she worked on ICESat laser altimetry data, and she is currently part of the ICESat-2 mission, which launched last Saturday, September 15, working on validation of the elevation data. On the weekends in the winter, Kelly coaches alpine ski racing at Liberty Mountain, in southern Pennsylvania.
You can follow both Kelly’s NASA and skiing activity or connect with her on Twitter (@KellyMBrunt).
1. Explain what you do in your work in one sentence (or two).
I am a glaciologist (I study ice sheets) and I am part of NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) mission. I am specifically tasked with looking at the ice sheets and validating the satellite elevation data products.
2. When did you first become interested in your field?
I have always preferred the winter. Growing up in Connecticut, my extended family liked to ski together and we often took trips to Vermont. The love of winter and snow (and the cold) led me to work in places like Montana, Alaska, and even Antarctica. Working in these places, and wanting to know more about ice, drove me to go back to school for a Ph.D. in geophysics, with an emphasis in glaciology.
AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books Longlists
AAAS and Subaru are pleased to announce the longlist for the 2019 AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize. The prize, sponsored
by Subaru, has been celebrating outstanding science writing and
illustration for all age groups since 2005. Awards are presented in five
categories: Children’s Science Picture Book, Middle Grades Science Book, Young
Adult Science Book, and Hands-On Science Book. Beyond honoring these books with
an award, AAAS and Subaru partner to bring them into the community. Through the
#SubaruLovesLearning initiative, the finalists and winning books are donated to
schools all over the country. Additionally, we creates free K-12 teaching materials based on the books. AAAS believe that,
through good science books, this generation, and the next, will have a better
understanding and appreciation of science.
Longlist for 2019 Children’s Science Picture Book Award
She Found Fossils, by Maria Eugenia Leone Gold and Abagael Rosemary West. Illustrations by Amy J. Gardiner. CreateSpace, 2017. [Also available in Spanish.]
Mary Golda Ross was the first Native American woman engineer. Her work at Lockheed and NASA included developing the Agena rockets, designing concepts for flights to Mars and Venus, and creating operational requirements for spacecraft.
After graduating from Northeastern State College with a math degree, she decided to put her skills to work on behalf of other Native Americans, working first as a statistician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then at a Native American boarding school in New Mexico.
Math always called Ross’s name, and in 1942, armed with a master’s degree, she joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As World War II raged, the company was working on new military aircraft. Ross helped them troubleshoot the P-38 Lightning, a fighter plane that came close to breaking the sound barrier and that engineers worried would collapse during dives. (Thanks to the work of Ross and her fellow mathematicians and engineers, Lockheed eventually realized that their fears were unfounded.)
After the war ended, Lockheed sent Ross to UCLA to earn a classification in aeronautical engineering and slowly, she began to progress through the company’s male-dominated ranks. “She worked with a lot of guys with slide rules and pocket protectors,” says Jeff Rhodes, Lockheed Martin’s historian and the editor of Code One magazine. “The stereotype was real.”
Women had always been a part of Lockheed Martin, says Rhodes. Nonetheless, when Ross was recruited to join Skunk Works, the company’s then-top-secret think tank, she was the only woman aside from the secretary.
Image Credits:
Mary G. Ross from Beyond Curie by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
During August, Subaru and its retailers are once again partnering with AAAS to donate more than 80,000 award-winning science books to K-12 schools across the country.
You can help! Visit a participating local Subaru retailer to add your name and a message to one of these books. You can also take a quiz for a chance to win a prize and pick up this free hands-on science activity book.
The Perseid meteor shower is the best of the year! It peaks on a Moonless summer night from 4 p.m. EST on August 12 until 4 a.m. EST on August 13.
Because the new Moon falls near the peak night, the days before and after the peak will also provide nice, dark skies. Your best window of observation is from a few hours after twilight until dawn, on the days surrounding the peak.
Unlike most meteor showers, which have a short peak of high meteor rates, the Perseids have a very broad peak, as Earth takes more than three weeks to plow through the wide trail of cometary dust from comet Swift-Tuttle.
The Perseids appear to radiate from the constellation Perseus, visible in the northern sky soon after sunset this time of year. Observers in mid-northern latitudes will have the best views.
You should be able to see some meteors from July 17 to August 24, with the rates increasing during the weeks before August 12 and decreasing after August 13.
Observers should be able to see between 60 and 70 per hour at the peak. Remember, you don’t have to look directly at the constellation to see them. You can look anywhere you want to-even directly overhead.
Meteor showers like the Perseids are caused by streams of meteoroids hitting Earth’s atmosphere. The particles were once part of their parent comet-or, in some cases, from an asteroid.
The parade of planets Venus, Jupiter, Saturn and Mars–and the Milky Way continue to grace the evening sky, keeping you and the mosquitoes company while you hunt for meteors.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Rosalind Franklin, one of the most consequential scientists of the 20th century—indeed, of the entire history of biology—and not just because her 98th birthday would have been last week. She’s been on my mind since the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) issued its June report detailing the prevalence of sexual harassment in university science. Franklin was the victim of one of the most well-known incidents of the particular kind of scientific disrespect that the report calls “gender harassment.”
Gender harassment—defined in the report as disrespecting, demeaning, and deprecating women and their work, abilities, and accomplishments, simply because they are women—has gotten less attention in the report’s aftermath than other forms of sexual harassment, such as sexual coercion and unwanted sexual attention. The report emphasizes, however, that gender harassment is by far the most prevalent form of sexual harassment in academic science, as our colleague Meredith Wadman highlighted. Beyond that, sexual harassment in any form “is not just damaging to targets and bystanders, but also to the integrity of science,” the report states. Franklin’s story illustrates how gender harassment corrodes integrity.
The Matilda Effect
Franklin, one of the very few women doing world-class research in the 1950s, is among history’s most prominent subjects of what historian of science Margaret Rossiter terms the “Matilda Effect”: the practice of ascribing women’s accomplishments to men. An expert in x-ray crystallography, Franklin led the team that created what has been called “arguably the most important photo ever taken,” the celebrated Photo 51, which revealed the helical structure of DNA.
When the structure was published in 1953, however, Franklin—a research associate at King’s College London at the time—was not among the authors. Her crucial contribution was mentioned cursorily at the end of the article as having “stimulated” the authors, James Watson and Francis Crick, who were both researchers at the University of Cambridge—and who, with their paper, gained priority as discoverers.
How did this happen? Shortly after Franklin started at King’s College in 1950, her relationship with another King’s College researcher, Maurice Wilkins, soured. At this remove, and without Franklin’s testimony, we can’t reconstruct how these strong personalities interacted. But we do know that Wilkins, without Franklin’s knowledge or permission, showed Photo 51 to Watson.
The rest, as they say, is history. In 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the structure of DNA. Franklin had died 4 years earlier at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer—possibly related to x-ray exposure, some have suggested—and thus was ineligible for science’s highest honor, which cannot be awarded posthumously. We can’t know whether she would have been considered for the prize had she lived. But we do know that her contribution to the discovery received little attention for years.
Maria Mitchell, the first professional American woman astronomer, was born on this day in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Mitchell was also the first woman member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two years after its formation, in 1850.
Mitchell was born to Quaker parents who believed in the education of all of their ten children, regardless of gender. Mitchell received a formal education, as well as learning from her father, who was a schoolteacher, banker, and astronomer. He also helped to maintain chronometers, a timepiece sailors used to measure longitude based on time and celestial navigation, for the local whaling fleet. His daughter would assist him in doing astronomical observations and later was trusted to complete them on her own.
In 1835, at the age of 17, Mitchell founded her own elementary school, which was open to girls regardless of race. The following year, Mitchell left the school to take a job at the Nantucket Athaneum, then a private, but affordable, library. She remained at the Athaneum until 1856.
On Oct. 1, 1847, Mitchell was using a two-inch telescope on a Nantucket rooftop when she noticed a blurry object that did not appear on her star charts. This turned out to be a comet, which became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” and later C/1847 T1. She became the third woman, after two 18th-century German astronomers—Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch—to discover a comet. King Frederick VI of Denmark, who had offered a prize for the discovery of new comets, awarded Mitchell a medal. She also became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences because of her discovery.
In 1865, Mitchell was the first person invited to join the faculty of the newly established Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She accepted the founder’s invitation, in part because it came with the promise of an observatory outfitted with a 12-inch telescope, then the second largest in the country. She went on to become a beloved professor, teaching more than 20 years and nurturing her students’ abilities as researchers in their own right. Her students did independent, original research and even engaged in field work with Mitchell’s professional peers during the solar eclipses of 1869 and 1878. Mitchell, who was involved in suffrage organizations and who served as the second president of the American Association of Women, also organized discussions and lectures for her students about women’s rights and politics.
