Science rock

Mathematician, professor and satirist Tom Lehrer died last week. He was 97.

Lehrer’s heyday in the pop world peaked in the 50s and 60s. I only knew about him in an ancillary fashion, because my parents weren’t on the intellectual left of the spectrum, and I was more of a Stan Freburg girl. But I came to enjoy Lehrer when his songs popped up as retro in my adulthood.

One of the most amusing, to my mind, is “The Elements”, a song listing all the Periodic Table elements (up to time of writing) to the melody of the Gilbert & Sullivan patter song, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”, from Pirates of Penzance.

Fun Fact: The song was a clue in an episode of NCIS, many years ago.

I’m not giving you Lehrer singing it, because I rather fancy this animated version; it neatly illustrates Lehrer’s cleverness.

I know people who sang this over and over again to learn the Periodic Table. (I made a big model of it on butcher paper and taped it to the wall on the way to the bathroom.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

The ghost of life/Gratitude Monday: Treasure in the jewelled skies

Today I’m grateful for all the scientists in all the fields who are working all the hours God sends to find vaccines and treatments for all the viruses. They’ve been doing this forever, but you’re only noticing them now because of the current pandemic. Many of them are even doing it not to make squillions for big pharma.

So today’s National Poetry Month entry is a sonnet from…Edgar Allan Poe.

Yes, he’s bitching about science dispelling all the mysteries and myths, but I think he’s missing the point. Scientists explore, they pioneer, they open millions of new doors and pathways. They make the universe bigger even as they burst the bubbles of ignorance and superstition. Poe might whine about being prevented from speculating, but that’s a self-created limitation, IMO. He may well have been having a bad day. He had rather a lot of them.

“To Science”

Science! true daughter of Old Time thou art!

   Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart,

   Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise,

   Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies,

   Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car,

   And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star?

   Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Elfin from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

Cosmic convergence

Well, the sun hid behind the moon today. Several of my friends traveled to the path of totality (one to Wyoming, one to Knoxville, Tenn., and one to Columbia, S.C.). I’m looking forward to their reports,* especially whether the temperature dropped, birds stopped singing and vampires came out.

Here in the District They Call Columbia, we had only 81% coverage, and none of those things happened.

Well, except for the vampires part:

(Honestly—everyone on the planet has been told a squillion times not to look into the sun without protective glasses. This is proof positive that the Kleptocrat absolutely will not learn anything.)

What a maroon.

I went out with my ISO-certified eclipse glasses (pro tip: only wear those suckers when you’re looking up at the sun; they’re as black as the inside of a cow) around 1350 and checked periodically as the sun disappeared. It was both hot and humid, so I’d have welcomed a drop in temperature, but no luck.

Le tout Washington was out there, with glasses, pinhole cardboard and aluminium-foil-covered cereal boxes. I’m not entirely ashamed to say that the thought occurred to me that Monday, at around 1430, would have been an excellent time to knock over a liquor store, because everyone was out gawping at the sky.

Look: even without the grandeur of the totality, it was still an awesome experience, watching that sun disappear. You really can understand how primitive cultures in pre-science days and in the Republican Party could puke with terror. I didn’t get any photos that were worth sharing, but here is some stunning video, courtesy of NASA, in Idaho:

But it was on my trip home on Metro, checking my Twitter feed, that the moon’s ability to throw shade was assured:

*Knoxville: "Aside from giving birth, seeing the total eclipse was the most amazing experience of my life. Literally wept in awe." 

Peace out, my brothers and sisters.

Brain STEM

I’m feeling kinda geeky today, so here are a couple of STEM visual jokes.

You’re welcome.

Resistance moon: Dreaming my cubs about the den

Since today I’m celebrating the more than 600 Marches for Science held around the world on Saturday, it seems like a good time to have a poem that’s not, perhaps, a protest, but an elegy for the things we’ve lost and will continue to lose because of policy makers’ science denial.

I frankly don’t much give a toss why these people fly at Mach 3 directly into the face of facts—whether it’s religion or greed that blinds them. Stupid is stupid, and the Kleptocrat and his Gauleiters are certainly leading the charge in the stupid stakes.

Okay, for a scientifically-themed poem, I’m calling on Irish poet, playwright, lyricist and teacher Paula Meehan. Meehan earned her stripes in the resistance army as a teenager, when she was expelled from Saint Michael’s Holy Faith Convent School in Finglas for organizing a protest march against the school administration. She eventually earned a degree from Trinity College Dublin, and then an MFA from Eastern Washington University.

Meehan puts herself at the vortex of the arts—writing poems that have become songs, and others for film producers, dance companies street theatre groups.

“The Solace of Artemis” is about climate change—appropriate for the weekend’s focus. We frequently refer to Artemis, twin to Apollo, by the shorthand label, “goddess of the hunt”. She was actually more than that. Homer called her “Artemis of the wildland, Mistress of Animals”; she was the conservator of the wilderness and of wild animals. Yep—she was a hunter but she kept things in balance. (She’s also the goddess of childbirth and virginity, and the protector of young girls.)

So it makes sense that here the poet-goddess takes comfort in the connection between the Irish brown bear and her majestic descendants. The contrast between the mama bear in the cave with her honied cubs and the children of the machine caring only about getting cheap memory (as in silicon chips? or something more ephemeral, like cheap vacation memories?) is as sharp as a Celtic spear.

"The Solace of Artemis"

I read that every polar bear alive has mitochondrial DNA

from a common mother, an Irish brown bear who once

roved out across the last ice age, and I am comforted.

It has been a long hot morning with the children of the machine,

their talk of memory, of buying it, of buying it cheap, but I,

memory keeper by trade, scan time coded in the golden hive mind

of eternity. I burn my books, I burn my whole archive:

a blaze that sears, synapses flaring cell to cell where

memory sleeps in the wax hexagonals of my doomed and melting comb.

I see him loping towards me across the vast ice field

to where I wait in the cave mouth, dreaming my cubs about the den,

my honied ones, smelling of snow and sweet oblivion.

Gratitude Monday: Some of it IS rocket science

There were big doings around the Mall and around the world on Saturday. Hundreds of thousands of people—bench scientists, academics, concerned human beings—marched in support of the notion that scientific research is vital to all of us.

Seems really odd that in 2017 this is even up for debate, but it is, particularly with the Kleptocrat and Gauleiters at the head of the Executive Branch, and the Repugnants in control of both houses of Congress. We’ll have to see how SCOTUS rolls with the usurper now seated on the bench.

At any rate, I volunteered Saturday at the headquarters of one of the major constituent organizations supporting the March for Science in D.C. It was actually glorious—the buzz was amazing, and even the rain that came and went throughout the day did not materially dampen the marchers.

They’re scientists. Rain happens. And as at least one sign proclaimed, at least it’s not acid rain. For which you can thank the EPA.

So, here are a few of the photos I shot in between handing out swag and signs to carry to marchers who gathered for a pre-march rally. (As an aside: among our giveaways were magnetic bumper stickers; think refrigerator magnets writ large. One fellow was truly chuffed, because he has a magnetometer app on his iPhone. Of course he does. I had to look up "magnetometer" on my mobile.)  While the signs we handed out were good, I really loved the ones that people had hand-made. I’m grateful to have been part of this event.

This woman told me that she actually nearly did die of dysentery. Science is personal for her. (Well, it is for all of us; we're just not all personally aware of it.) 

You knew we weren't going to get through the day without Star Trek:

 In case you're wondering--scientists really do have a sense of humor:

This one's a little hard to read through the rain-protecting plastic wrap. But it invites fellow marchers to submit their posters (inside joke: many scientific conferences have poster competitions, but the posters are very intense synopses of research projects that are, in fact, peer reviewed. In this case posters = signs, but still) for peer review. I was told that the fellow who'd made this sign had printed cards that offered check boxes: accepted, minor revisions required, major revisions required, rejected. I told you--these people are just as funny as they come.

Note the "brain hat" she's wearing. I saw a few of them on Saturday.

Another brain hat.

Most of the signs were reversible, so you got messages coming and going.

A lot of family groups on Saturday.

And one final truth:

Chemistry and couraging

It’s the second Tuesday in October, so it must be Ada Lovelace Day, when we honor women who’ve made major contributions to the advancement of society via one of the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines.

In the past I’ve brought to your attention the mother of modern computers, Grace Hopper (whose Celebration is taking place in Houston this week); Nobel Laureate (in Physiology/Medicine) Rosalyn Sussman; Hedy Lamarr (if you’re reading this on a mobile device, you can thank her for developing the frequency hopping system on which mobile communications are based); and two engineers who contributed to the Allied victory in World War II: Joan Struthers Curran, whose work on little aluminum bits called “chaff” helped to foil Nazi radar and divert attention from the D-Day landings; and Beatrice Shilling, who solved the problem of British fighter planes cutting out mid-dogfight due to carburetors that weren’t designed to support the kinds of maneuvers necessary to take on the Luftwaffe.

Last year I wrote about a woman who went through two careers—one military and one in private practice—as an occupational therapist, during which she designed and patented various devices to help patients achieve and maintain balance. Eventually, after retiring twice, and in her 90s, Barbara Beskind got to achieve her longstanding dream of being an inventor when she joined Silicon Valley design giant IDEO.

Today, though, we’ll go back to academia and to bench research, and talk about Marie M. Daly, the first African American woman to be granted a Ph.D. in chemistry. If you are concerned about your cholesterol, happy about your cholesterol or know anything at all about your cholesterol, it’s largely because of the work that Daly did.

Born in Queens in 1921, Daly was encouraged to follow her interest in science by her family and her teachers at Hunter College High School (which was all-female, a fact that I cannot believe is insignificant). She pursued studies at Queens College, living at home to keep expenses down, and graduating magna cum laude in 1942 with a degree in chemistry.

She followed with a master’s in a year from New York University, while working part-time as a lab assistant at Queens College (who thought enough of her potential to fund her studies at NYU). Following a year tutoring chemistry students she enrolled in the doctoral program at Columbia University, working under another woman pioneer, Mary L. Caldwell, whose focus was on the digestive enzyme amylase. She was awarded her Ph.D in 1947.

Daly taught for two years at the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C., then received a grant from the American Cancer Society to support a postdoc at the Rockefeller institute in New York. There she worked on understanding the metabolism of components of the cell nucleus. Her career included teaching at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.

Daly was also an investigator for the American Heart Association, researching how hypertension affects the circulatory system. She was also a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

In addition to her research and teaching, Daly set up programs and scholarships to increase diversity in the ranks of chemists. Her real passion was expanding knowledge, whether it was as a bench researcher, a teacher or an encourager.

It’s hard to know what kinds of hurdles she faced as a black woman in science in academia. Bias against women and minorities is still rife at all levels of STEM (and elsewhere); rather ironically, this is well-documented in scientific study after scientific study. But she never wavered, not from her first discovery as a child of Paul De Kruff’s book, The Microbe Hunters. She knew at an early age what she wanted to do, and she did it.

All this is an extraordinary tale. But the thing that drew me to Daly’s story is this quote, which is applicable to everyone: “Courage is like—it’s a habitus, a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts. It’s like you learn to swim by swimming. You learn courage by couraging.”

Well, yes you do.

Get a clue

After the morning I had yesterday—involving losing my Metro fare card and all the steps necessary to replace it—I was rather taken by this headline at NPR:

Because wouldn’t “Glowing Space Blobs” make a great band title?

As for the fare card saga, I still have a couple more mountains to scale, since—having cancelled the lost card, bought a new one and registered it with WMATA—I must now contact my HR department to transfer the $400 in benefit to the new number. That’s going to be a slice of an entirely different cake.

Not Schrödinger

Taking a break from heavy-duty political issues, let’s move to the world of science, which—truth be known—can be just as red in tooth and claw as presidential campaigns.

Do you doubt me? Well, for instance, it turns out that a cat co-authored a paper published in the journal Physical Review Letters, an arm of the American Physical Society (APS).

Okay, the paper, “Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc 3He” was published in 1975, so you might have missed it, even though it was an in-depth exploration of atomic behavior at different temperatures. Pretty riveting stuff, I’m sure, to a physicist.

It seems that the human author, Jack H. Hetherington, professor of physics at Michigan State University, had written up his research findings using the editorial first person plural. But then he realized that the journal to which he was submitting it would view it as fishy (which, in the academic world means “unpublishable”) if the paper was littered with “we”, “us” and “our”, but had only one author listed. This being back in the 1970s, Hetherington did not have word processing software, so he was faced with either retyping the entire paper or coming up with a quick fix on the front end.

So he added his Siamese cat Chester as a co-author, granting him rather more gravitas by giving him the nom de plume “F.D.C. Willard”, viz.: Felix Domesticus Chester Willard, the alleged surname referring to Chester’s father, so a legitimate patronymic.

Based on my experience with felis catus, I’ve no doubt that Chester was a contributor to the creative process. In fact, I’m betting that the hard copy submission had more than a few cat hairs on it.

Evidently when the Physical Review Letters editors found out about Chester’s antecedents, they were not amused. But by that time they’d already published the paper. And how is it that they didn’t ask for academic bona fides at the time of submission? Hetherington’s department, on the other hand, offered Chester a full-time position.

Eventually the APS found its sense of humor. Two years ago they announced that all cat-authored papers would be open-access. No word on dog-authored papers, but I guess these things take time.

Of course they poop!

In case you’re thinking that the research and issues reported in the venerable Science magazine are too hifalutin for the average reader, I direct your attention to a story that was published in the 23 March 2016 issue.

If the title, “Why watching comb jellies poop has stunned evolutionary biologists” doesn’t get you, what about the opening sentence: “No buts about it, the butthole is one of the finest innovations in the past 540 million years of animal evolution”?

Well, if that doesn’t draw you in to the article, I just don’t know what will.

I love that there’s apparently a comb jelly(fish)—formal name ctenophore—and that they call it Ctenopolooza. I’m betting these evolutionary biologists really know how to party.

And I love it that videos of the ctenophores engaging in acts of ingestion and egestion were received like a Tarantino film at Cannes.

Well, the excitement doesn’t end there. If you scroll down, the first couple of dozen comments are all asking the big question: how can you write about a revolutionary video of comb jellies pooping without including the, you know, video?

(Yeah, the comments end up going to hell when some troll gets into the act and someone else feeds it. They go on for a couple of dissertations, but once you see Frankensteinsmonster, you can stop reading.)

In case you're curious about the video, too, I've looked. William Browne, of the University of Miami is clearly keeping it close to his vest, and it's nowhere to be seen. He may be working on a distribution deal.

But wait, there’s more. Because in the 3 June issue of Science, a letter was published from Sidney L. Tamm, PhD, of the Boston University Marine Biological Laboratory, under the title, “No surprise that comb jellies poop”. Tamm, one of the Ctenopolooza organizers, assures us, “It is now recognized that ctenophores expel waste from both ends.”

Well, there you go.

Listen—in a presidential election year, I’m going to take my enlightenment wherever I can find it.

Moral fiber

A hundred years ago, battlefield soldiers who exhibited neurological symptoms like insomnia, tremors and hypersensitivity to noise without showing visible wounds were often charged with cowardice. Eventually (and reluctantly) the term “shell shock” was coined to describe the injuries that caused disrupted lives decades after the end of the First World War.

As we progressed through a century’s worth of wars, we referred to the condition as battle fatigue and then Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). We’re still somewhat ambivalent about the diagnosis, and treatment is also a bit of a crapshoot, depending upon both enlightened clinicians and funding of resources.

(During World War II, the Royal Air Force actually distinguished “medical casualties” from those classified as Lacking Moral Fibre (LMF). It was a diagnosis intended to prevent shirkers of combat missions turning their experience to profit as private pilots.)

We’re much more adept at sending men and women off to fight than we are at caring for them after they return. If they return.

So I was very heartened by this report out of NPR this week about a medical researcher and combat veteran who answered the unspoken call for help from a comrade, switched specialties and hung on for a decade to hunt down the physiological factors that constitute what we now call Traumatic Brain Injuries (TBIs). We are in the midst of a bumper crop of TBIs, thanks to the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in Iraq and Afghanistan, so Kit Parker and his team are meeting a critical need.

There are several parts to this story that are worth highlighting.

We’re a hundred years on from the Western Front, with incredible advances in both life-ending and life-saving technologies, and we’re still teetering at the edge of the Dark Ages in terms of how we characterize the human costs of warfare. As one of the on-the-ground investigative leaders put it, “If you don’t have blood coming out of your head, if you don’t have a penetrating injury, you’re fine, everything’s OK, have a nice day.”

I love the way that Parker, a Harvard biophysicist specializing in the cellular workings of the heart as a muscle, essentially sat still and listened to what was not being said when his National Guard comrade Chris Moroski called him. He heard what his friend didn’t have the words to ask for, and he took action to ensure that Moroski got proper diagnosis and care for his TBI.

Then he took extraordinary action to ensure that others with TBI would also get proper diagnoses and care. Because he changed his research focus from the heart to the brain to understand how blast waves produced by IEDs physically disrupt brain tissue and function. Until he started his inquiry, no one had investigated this.

There have been some exceptional people working on unravelling this mystery, and I love how they’ve been unremitting in their pursuit of nailing down the cause of these injuries, and laying out preventive and therapeutic measures to protect soldiers. Many of them are combat veterans, but they all have that scientific curiosity that drives them to pursue “ground truth”. I applaud their tenacity and devotion; may their funding never wither away.

I am not at all surprised by the fact that there’s no corresponding research into drug therapies because pharmaceutical companies can’t see profits in the prospect of repairing broken brains, so they don’t see any merit to investing in it—even though TBIs are sustained in a lot of non-combat situations like auto accidents. They haven’t found a way to rake in millions from Alzheimer’s; they’re not going to piss away bench scientists on TBI when they can tweak the formula of Viagra or Lipitor, file new patents and spend that money on advertising direct to the consumer.

(If anyone should be labeled as LMF, it’s Big Pharma.)

So Parker’s team continues to work on gathering the data that will eventually lead to something that might entice some drug company to produce a treatment. NPR’s going to continue reporting on this, and I’m looking forward to following the story. This is why we need basic and applied science, and this is why we need to know about it.

Science grows on trees

In the exhibition hall at the AAAS Annual Meeting, they had something I found interesting: a Science Wish Tree. Well, three of them.

The deal was they had red tags for scientists to write down their greatest wishes, and blue ones for the non-scientists.

A couple of the reds:

Including one that seems to have a bit of an edge:

And a couple of blues:

To be honest, I’m not sure that people understood the red/blue significance, because I’m not finding a distinction between practitioner and non-practitioner issues. However, here’s one that articulates definite science pain:

The family of science

You see some interesting sights when you visit the Family Science Days at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I was there this weekend, and the place was a positive hive of activity. It really was a treat to watch the way even the smallest kids got wrapped up around various scientific inquiries.

The adults were a hoot, too.

Here are a couple of shots—one of the posters on display:

(What animal do you see?)

And one of…well, the embodiment of the science of Africa booth:

Fiber of life

My, my, time does roll around, doesn’t it? Seems like only yesterday I was writing about Beatrice Shilling, the woman who solved one of the more important engineering problems for the Royal Air Force during World War II. But, here we are at Ada Lovelace Day again, and I’m spoilt for choice in terms of subject matter.

But since I’m a military historian, I’ll stay with my area of expertise (a couple of years ago I introduced you to Joan Strothers Curran, who developed “window” or “chaff”, which was successfully used to confuse German radar reception in aid of D-Day). I’m honoring Stephanie L. Kwolek, the chemist whose curiosity led to the synthetic fiber we now know as Kevlar.

Kwolek, who died in June at age 90, actually took the job with the textile chemistry division of the DuPont Company as a temporary measure between undergraduate study and medical school. (As a child, she loved sewing and working with fabrics, but her mother convinced her that she wouldn’t make a good fashion designer because she was such a perfectionist; so she gave that up for medicine.) But she found the research she was doing into polymers so interesting that she decided she was where she should be and dug in.

It was in the mid-1960s, while she was looking into the creation of fibers capable of performing in extreme conditions, that she came across something that didn’t emerge from the process as expected—instead of a clear, syrupy liquid, it was thin and opaque. Ordinarily this sort of disappointing output would have been thrown away (which is what her colleagues wanted to do), but Kwolek was curious. She persuaded one of them to run it through a spinning process to remove liquid solvent and reveal fibers.

What came out of the spinneret was an exceptionally stiff fiber that tested five times as strong as steel of equal weight. It was also fire resistant. The DuPont crowd latched onto its potential right away—Kevlar has been used by law enforcement officers and combat troops since the mid-70s. It’s integral to body armor and helmets that deflect handgun and rifle fire, as well as shrapnel (which is ugly, ugly stuff).

Additionally, the fiber is used in tires, sporting equipment, cables and cellular phones.

Here’s what I really like about Kwolek: she was curious. She saw possibilities where her colleagues saw useless goop. She was willing to push for further information, again and again. She saw connections and tested everything. She was a successful and respected professional in an industry that typically expects those qualities to come in a package containing the Y chromosome and advanced degrees. And she shared her experience, her expertise and her enthusiasm, inspiring generations of potential scientists.

A paper she co-wrote for the Journal of Chemical Education in 1959, “The Nylon Rope Trick”, describes how to demonstrate condensation polymerization in a beaker at atmospheric pressure and room temperature. Yeah, beyond me, too, but it’s commonly demonstrated in classrooms around the country.

It’s possible that someone would have come up with a Kevlar-like fiber eventually, but Stephanie L. Kwolek got there first, doing what she loved. Saving thousands of lives, doing what you love; it don’t get any better than that.

Great heaviness of this city

Wow—filed under the heading of reporting the bloody obvious, apparently it’s big news that Richard III, last of the Yorkist kings of England, “died brutally during battle.”

Viz.: he sustained 11 wounds from knife, sword and/or battle axe spike.

We know this because scientists have been examining his remains in the past couple of years, since they were uncovered in a parking lot in Leicester.

Hello? Battle fought in 1485? Weapons basically swords, daggers, battle axes and pikes? And leader of the opposing (losing) army?

Of course Henry Tudor’s men were going to make sure the man was dead. Everyone would have wanted to take a hack at him, like Caesar at the Forum.

But, I’ll tell you, what this does is underscore the description of their loss that the people of York put on record at the time:

“King Richard, late mercifully reigning over us, was through great treason…piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this city.”

Now, Voyager

Ah, Voyager has left the building.

Yesterday NASA confirmed that the unmanned probe called Voyager 1, launched 36 years ago this month, has boldly gone where nothing from this planet has gone before. We’re pretty sure.

It’s doing a good job; but so is its sister craft. Voyager 2, is also still soldiering on. And I have a personal stake in V2.

Back in 1977 I was working for the Pasadena Star-News; I’d started as an intern at the beginning of the summer (just before my junior year in college), but when a couple of their reporters were invalided out, they brought me back as staff writer. Getting money to write stories every day. I thought I’d been hauled straight into heaven without all that pesky business of dying first.

They put me on General Assignment, with an emphasis on features, because it was always the human side of the stories that interested me. And I have a gift for it.

But on 20 August 1977, for some reason, the guy who reported the science beat wasn’t available to get out to Jet Propulsion Lab to cover the launch of Voyager 2 (which was sent up a couple of weeks before Voyager 1, but on a slower trajectory). So they sent me, one of my last assignments before the Fall semester started.

I didn't really know anything about the program, had never been to JPL, so I focused on what I do best: the people.

What I found was a bunch of mostly men (though a few women), in short-sleeved shirts, as high as it’s possible to be in a strict no-booze/no-drugs work environment. And before the days of energy-drinks. They were whooping and wheeing, just buzzing around the room like bees on supercharged pollen.

And what I remember was one of them explaining to me that what the whole Voyager program was “like putting together a huge jigsaw puzzle with the picture side down and you’re not sure you have all the pieces.” But they were thoroughly and completely dedicated to putting that sucker together and figuring out what to do with the picture that emerged.

I often thought of that when I watched Space Shuttle launches (and disasters). It’s a tremendous leap of faith to embark on projects like that.

Speed well, Voyager.

Eclipse of beauty

I wouldn't ordinarily do this, but this is an extraordinary circumstance.

A friend of mine took a trip to Australia; on the itinerary was a stop in Cairns, Far North Queensland, to view the solar eclipse yesterday. Here are the photos he sent me:

Partial:

 Total:

And here's one he called a diamond ring:

He commented that there would be "well-lubricated revelry" last night.

Well, I'll certainly drink to that.

Mother of chaff

It’s Ada Lovelace Day again; time to honor a woman in science who inspires admiration & achievement. Lovelace, you’ll recall, was a progenitor of computer programming—way long before Steve Wozniak & Bill Gates.

In past years I’ve written about computer science pioneer Grace Hopper and Rosalyn Sussman Yalow, a Nobel Laureate in physiology and medicine.

This time round I present to you Joan Strothers Curran, a Welsh optician’s daughter whose sheer brilliance opened academic doors that would have otherwise been locked and barred to a young woman in 1930s Britain. As it is, although she won an open scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge, the University didn’t award degrees to the women who had earned them.

Curran, a scientist and physicist, didn’t get a degree until 1987, when Strathclyde University gave her an honorary Doctor of Laws degree.

From Newnham Curran went to the Cavendish Laboratory, a hotbed of physics research, where she met Sam Curran, a fellow researcher, who would become her husband of more than 50 years.

But World War II came along and Curran and her fellow researchers turned their minds to supporting the war effort. While her husband focused on radar, Curran joined the Counter Measures Group. She is credited with developing “window”, also known as “chaff”, for the Allies. Window consists of bits of reflective material that is dropped into the air to confuse radar.

Specifically, Curran’s window was deployed in the Pas de Calais during the early hours of D-Day to support the idea that the Allied landing would take place there instead of in Normandy. This contributed greatly to the success of D-Day.

At the time of the landings, the Currans were at the University of California at Berkeley, working on the Manhattan Project. Following the war, the family settled in Glasgow, Scotland, and Curran devoted much of her time to advocacy for the physically and mentally disabled.

I first heard of Curran when I read Anthony Cave-Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies, about the multi-layer deceptions surrounding D-Day. A single-line mention of her contribution in all those 900+ pages of text was enough to spark my interest. There does not seem to be anything by way of a biography of her, which is a loss. Joan Strothers Curran’s brilliant scientific mind helped shorten the worst war the world has known (so far), and turned it to improving the quality of all people’s lives. I want to know more.