Smart Women

Scott LaFee
Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700
Lifestyle

The magazine New Scientist recently conducted an online poll asking who was the most inspirational female scientist of all time. The results:

1. Marie Curie (1854-1923). Physicist and first European woman to be awarded a doctorate of science. She won shares of two Nobel Prizes for her work in radioactivity.

2. Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958). Chemist laid the groundwork for James Watson's and Francis Crick's Nobel-winning discovery of DNA.
Updated: Wed Jul 29, 2009

The magazine New Scientist recently conducted an online poll asking who was the most inspirational female scientist of all time. The results:

1. Marie Curie (1854-1923). Physicist and first European woman to be awarded a doctorate of science. She won shares of two Nobel Prizes for her work in radioactivity.

2. Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958). Chemist laid the groundwork for James Watson's and Francis Crick's Nobel-winning discovery of DNA.

3. Hypathia of Alexandria (370-415). Lived in Roman Alexandria, writing treatises on geometry, algebra and astronomy. She was a staunch critic of religion who was killed by a Christian mob.

4. Jocelyn Bell Burnell (1943-). Astrophysicist who co-discovered pulsars as a research student. Her male colleagues got the Nobel.

5. Ada, Countess Lovelace (1815-1852). Contributed major theoretical work to Babbage's early thinking on computing.

Nos. 6-10: Lise Meitner, Dorothy Hodgkin, Sophie Germain, Rachel Carson and Jane Goodall.

VERBATIM

The spike was so big Google mistook it for an attack.

— R.J. Pittman of Google on the surge of Internet searches using the term "Michael Jackson" in the hours after the singer's death

BRAIN SWEAT

If you stack the words that match these definitions, you will have a word square that reads the same across and down.

1. Geometric shape

2. Not shut

3. Lack or want

4. Brings to a conclusion, finishes

PRIME NUMBERS

43 — Percentage of people surveyed in the United States, South Africa and India who agreed with the statement that God created life in its present form. The three countries had the highest pro-creationist percentages of the 10 countries polled.

Source: British Council

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

CONE

OPEN

NEED

ENDS

'TRUE FACTS'

NASA scientists are turning off the transmitter of Ulysses, the solar probe launched in 1990 to study various comets, the sun and Jupiter and interstellar dust blowing through the solar system. Finally running out of power, the shutdown probe will become a kind of artificial comet itself, taking a looping solar orbit that will carry it outside the solar system and back.

WHAT IS IT? ANSWER

A sandfish lizard. Using high-speed X-ray observations, researchers recently discovered the lizard does not use its limbs to burrow through loose Sahara Desert sand. Instead, it flattens the limbs against its sides and propels itself forward with large, undulating waves of its body.

ANTHROPOLOGY 101

The farmers of East Anglia used to test the readiness of soil for planting by pulling down their pants and sitting bare-bottomed on the ground.

PATENTLY ABSURD

The whole contraption seems a little bit too reminiscent of Hannibal Lecter, but this "anti-eating mouth cage," patented in 1982, was designed not to stop the consumption of people, but mere food, stuff like fava beans.

The device could be locked onto one's head to eliminate cheating (except, perhaps, through a straw). Wearers would still be able to speak, though it's not at all certain anybody would be willing to speak to them.