Women in science: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin with insulin model.
About.com: Chemistry

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was a founder of protein crystallography.

Hodgkin and her mentor, J.D. Bernal, were the first to successfully apply X-ray diffraction to biological crystals. She identified the structures of cholesterol, lactoglobulin, ferritin, tobacco mosaic virus, penicillin, and vitamin B-12. She also described the structure of insulin in 1969, a problem on which she worked for 34 years.

Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1964 for her work on vitamin B-12. Her biography on this Nobel Prize Web site notes, "By choosing projects others considered impossible, she helped to establish one of the characteristic features of contemporary science: the use of molecular structure to explain biological function."

This post was created to mark the second annual Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. Read more about Ada Lovelace Day and women in science here.

Geek girl, circa 1830

Ada Augusta Byron, Lady Lovelace (1815-52) has been described as the first computer programmer.

She was the daughter of the poet George Gordon Byron. Her mother, who was briefly married to Byron and wanted to stamp out any poetical tendencies in their daughter, encouraged Ada to study mathematics and sciences.

Ada met mathematician/inventor Charles Babbage and was fascinated by his design for the analytical engine, a machine for making numerical calculations. She published an annotated summary of his work, adding (with his approval) several pages of notes on a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers, a sequence of numbers important to number theory.

Lady Lovelace took Babbage's ideas one step further, speculating that the analytical engine could be used for "developping [sic] and tabulating any function whatever," including music composition.

Today, March 24th, is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

Read about pioneering computer programmer Admiral Grace Hopper and other women scientists at the Women in Science site, sponsored by the San Diego Supercomputer Center.

Geometry of pie

Modular pie-cosahedron

This is pie.

Specifically, it's a pecan pie with the topology of a sphere, made up of 20 triangular sub-pies.

The baker/architect, a professor of computer science at UC Irvine, made isoceles-triangle-shaped pie pans out of sheet metal, then connected them with extra-strong magnets. He reports "surprisingly little slump" during serving.

Beautiful AND edible!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dance your Ph.D.

Check out some of the winners of the second annual Science Dance Contest, sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Contestants choreographed and performed dances illustrating their Ph.D. theses.

This is my favorite, the winner in the graduate-student division: Sue Lynn Lau, of the University of Sydney, Australia, and some friends interpreted her thesis, titled “The role of vitamin D in beta cell function.”



(The Sugar Plum Fairy is feeding the beta cells marshmallows, a.k.a glucose.)

Go geeks! You never see anything like this on "Dancing with the Stars."

I wouldn't have a clue how to dance this thesis: “Resolving pathways of functional coupling in human hemoglobin using quantitative low temperature isoelectric focusing of asymmetric mutant hybrids.”

But here is the winner in the professors' division, Vince LiCata, a biology professor at Louisiana State University, with his interpretation of said thesis, which he calls, "A Molecular Dance in the Blood, Observed."



The music is perfect; it's Laurie Anderson, "Born, Never Asked," from the album Big Science. (Years ago, I had an excerpt from "O Superman" as the outgoing message on my answering machine for months, until my friends begged me to remove it.)

Nanobama

John Hart & colleagues, Nanobama

These 3-D portraits are smaller than a grain of salt. Each "nanobama" is a vertical stack of about 150 million carbon nanotubes, unusually strong hollow cylinders about 1/50,000th the width of a human hair.

University of Michigan professor John Hart and his colleagues began by converting Shepard Fairey's iconic red, white and blue poster of Barack Obama to a line drawing. They shrunk the drawing and printed it on a glass plate with a laser. Then they shined ultraviolet light through the glass plate on to a silicon wafer to create a pattern on which to grow the carbon nanotubes.

View more of Hart's nano-art at www.nanobliss.com.

Please touch the exhibits

One of the best things to do in San Francisco, whether you're a child or not, is to visit the Exploratorium. It is the most interesting science museum I've ever seen, perhaps because it subverts the traditional idea of a museum. It's more like a playground combined with an art studio and a workshop where you're allowed to use all the tools. Nothing says "don't touch."

To quote the Exploratorium's Web site, the place is "a collage of hundreds of interactive exhibits in the areas of science, art, and human perception."

You can watch a museum staffer dissect a cow's eye or fertilize sea-urchin eggs. Or draw a picture using a fixed marker pen and a three-foot square pad of paper on a pendulum tray.

Once the boys and I were fascinated by a time-lapse movie showing how the body of a dead bird decays. On this visit, we were spent a lot of time peering under the hood of a car and learning how mechanics diagnose mechanical problems by their sounds.

This playspace invited us to "stack the stars" and figure out how to best arrange them so that there was hardly any space in between. The best part, according to C, was the "tunnels" between the structure and the floor. I had to take his word on that, not being small enough to wriggle through.

(If anyone knows what this shape is called, please comment! I forgot the term. It looks like this stellated dodecahedron.)



The box of magnetic black sand always draws a crowd. It feels almost like stroking a smooth furry animal.













The "Mind" portion of the museum explores how we think and feel. Stand in the middle of a bullseye and look up as directed, and you'll see that a grand piano is hoisted directly overhead, hanging by a single cable. How do you feel about this? Maybe you don't care. Or maybe you feel a little strange, like a target, even though your rational mind knows that you're perfectly safe.

I love watching people approach this exhibit's unusual water fountain. It works as you'd expect, but the water spout is attached to a toilet. The display assures you that this is a brand-new fixture, never used for its apparent purpose. Will you drink from it? (I make a point of doing so whenever I walk by, and every time it requires a tiny bit of mental effort.)

Since you're going to be here for a long visit, it's good to know that you can have a tasty meal or snack. If a young companion demands PB&J or pizza, you can get those. But I enjoyed spicy roasted chicken served with wild rice pilaf and an organic mixed greens salad with a wonderful shiitake-mushroom vinaigrette. And a Haagen-Dazs ice-cream chaser.

This robot is a Big Dog

From the Web site of Boston Dynamics:

This robot was the talk of a science-writers' listserv today. See a video of it in action here:

People describing its movement used words like "eerie" and "creepy." I had the same reaction. Why is that? Is it because the motion of those legs looks too human, or not human enough?

Big Dog is quite graceful, particularly in one part of the video where it picks its way across a rock field. The company's Web site refers to the robot as "the alpha male of the Boston Dynamics family of robots." I guess it wouldn't do to describe a buff, tough robot as "graceful."