I Always Get Stupid Names For These So I Have Devised An Egalitarian Solution

My window is smarter than yours…

When Given Colored Construction Paper, Wasps Build Rainbow Colored Nests

Planet Saturn, observed by the Cassini space probe on March 16, 2016.

Doing vs. Writing | PHD Comics | http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1887

The Harvard Computers (Hint: They were women, not machines!)

Today is the birthday of Annie Jump Cannon, born December 11, 1863, known as one of ‘Harvard’s Computers’. She is credited along with Edward Pickering as the creator of the Harvard Classification Scheme which remains the foundation of today’s stellar classification system.

One of a dozen women hired by Pickering to do the hard work of identifying, classifying and cataloging hundreds of stellar objects, Cannon distinguished herself as the brightest of the bright and rose finally to a full professorship before her death in 1941. Pickering hired the first of his ‘computers’ in a pique of frustration, noting that his maid could probably do better work than he was getting from his students.  Indeed, he hired his maid, Williamina Fleming, who became the first of his ‘computers’ and quickly distinguished herself. Pickering was pleased enough with her work (and lower wages) that he soon built a team comprised entirely of women to compose the catalog. Cannon was hired a little later to oversee a catalog of the southern skies.  While no eponym celebrates her name, her contribution (along with the remaining group at Harvard) as well as the countless women throughout history to impact science, math, politics and all human endeavor, today we remember and say Happy Birthday. A true gifted scientist and true pioneer, gone but not forgotten. As in most human endeavors, nameless and tireless women support the work of more celebrated men with little or no credit.  Newton said of his work:  ’If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.’  Today we acknowledge that many of those giants were and are women.

Image curently in the public domain courtesy New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper.

Today’s post is for hb-she does twice the work and asks for half the credit.  Our boys are who they are because of her.

PUMPKIN-SPICED FLUORESCENCE

Inside a pumpkin, seeds don’t need much chlorophyll—the molecule that helps plants convert light into food—because there isn’t a lot of light deep inside the fruit’s flesh. Instead of chlorophyll, the green seeds are chock-full of protochlorophyllide, a highly fluorescent molecule that glows orange-red under ultraviolet light and can be converted into chlorophyll a by an enzyme in the seeds. The enzyme reduces protochlorophyllide to produce chlorophyll when the enzyme encounters light, which occurs only after the seed has left the pumpkin and therefore needs to start producing its own food so it can grow. Helmut Brandl, a science communicator and professor at ETH Zurich, extracted this protochlorophyllide by grinding up pumpkin seeds and mixing them with nail polish remover (bottom row).

Submitted by Helmut Brandl

Enter our photo contest here!

Related C&EN content:

Happy Little Plant Cells

Look Deep Inside

Gale pin design✨

Water Drop on Hydrophobic Sand

daniel stoupin, a doctoral candidate in marine biology at the university of queensland, has photographed a variety of coral species from the great barrier reef using full spectrum light to reveal fluorescent pigments that would otherwise be invisible to the naked eye. (see more at bioquest studios)

coral growth rates in the great barrier reef have plummeted 40 percent in the last 40 years, a result, according to a recent study, of increased ocean acidification. since the beginning of the industrial revolution, about one third of the carbon dioxide that has been released into the atmosphere as a result of fossil fuels has been absorbed by the oceans, where it in turn prevents coral from using a mineral called aragonite to make their calcified skeletons.

new modelling has also shown that if ocean waters continue to warm by even one degree, which most now see as unstoppable, the coverage of corals on the great barrier reef could decline to less than 10 percent, which is a level too low for the reef to mount a recovery.

further complicating matters for the coral is the plastic detritus left by humans which now litter the oceans and which the coral now consume. unable to expel the plastic bits and thus take in nutrients, the coral slowly starve. a recent study found that each square kilometre of australia’s sea surface water is contaminated with approximately 4,000 pieces of tiny plastic.