Tina?

Funny, sexy and apparently time-travelled back to 1925 to punk Life magazine...

Ada Lovelace day 2009

My heroine of science: Maggie Aderin, for her extremely cool work, and her desire to tell the world about it.

I first saw Maggie Aderin on one of Adam Hart-Davis' programmes (a quick Google tells me it was "The Cosmos, a Beginners' Guide") and I was blown away, not just by her knowledge and eloquence, but by the passion she was prepared to show for her subject.

It's an open secret in UK science that public engagement is often seen (at best) as a distraction from "real work." At worst, it is written off as a substitute for being any good at your job. And yet here was a practicing scientist that was prepared to be as ebullient as Adam Hart-Davis: professional enthusiast.

Dr Aderin's CV proves that public engagement and scientific achievement go hand in hand. She has a doctorate from Imperial College and has been a Senior Project Manager at Sira, Managing Director of Science Innovation Ltd and a space scientist at Astrium Ltd, the European Space Company.

Maggie Aderin is my heroine for Ada Lovelace day 2009 for her commitment, not just to her own research, but to the next generation of scientists. As a member of the same generation, I'm happy to have her as a role model too. Happy Ada-day Maggie.

See the full list of Ada Day posts here.

She's mad as hell and she's not going to take it any more...

A non-science Heroine of the day:

On the 27th June, the producer of MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show decided to lead with the story of a certain celebutante's release from chokey. This on the same day that Republican Senator Richard Lugar decided to defy President Bush on the Iraq war. News anchor Mika Brzezinski does not want:



Mika: "I have an apology as well, and that is for our lead story... I didn't choose it... I hate this story and I don't think it should be our lead ... move the prompter, thank you, alright, to the news now."

and later, as the male anchor (the eponymous "Joe"?) concludes his talking points about the senate and the house of representatives pressuring Bush to scale back the troops in Iraq, Mika begins her news rundown with:

"Well, you'd think we'd be leading with that story."

Go Mika!

Heroine Den, part 3

May 18th's heroine: Jackie Cochran, who on this day in 1953 became the first women to break the sound barrier.

Most people have heard of Amelia Earhart - the first person (note person not woman) to fly across the atlantic from Honolulu to Oakland.

Jackie Cochran was another pioneering aviator who, as well as holding a bushel of woman's records was also the first ever pilot to acheive an instruments only ("blind") landing. She still holds more records than any pilot, living or dead, male or female.

Inspired by the British pilot Pauline Gower and her "First Eight", Cochran helped run the ATA. She then returned to the States to run the Women’s Flying Training Detachment, a "women's air army". At the same time, pilot Nancy Harkness Love ran a civillian women's auxilliary, the Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron, to ferry bombers between the factories and the front lines.


The sad coda: by the middle of the 20th century, attitudes were once again becoming reactionary. Cochran's WASP program was wound up and her application to join NASA's spaceflight program as an astronaut was blocked on political grounds. She eventually became one of the Mercury 13 - a group of 13 women tested for their aptitude for spaceflight:

In the end, thirteen women passed the same physical examinations that the Lovelace Foundation had developed for NASA’s astronaut selection process (although the original number of male candidates was much larger, fewer men passed the tests).

(Wikipedia)

The attitudes of male astronauts lead to the dropping of the Mercury 13 however: Jerrie Truhill recalls that

The male astronauts referred to the women as "98 pounds of recreational equipment,"

Source.

Two years later, cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space.

Today's heroines are the women pioneers of aviation, who pushed back the barriers of flight as well as the barriers of society. Future heroines: the female space pioneers fighting the same battles half a century on.

scientiae-carnival

The Heroine Den: Part 2

I've decided to resurrect this series of posts on the unsung heroines of science and tech (if one post so far can be constituted a series) despite the fact that I know it will be Troll-bait.

Aminollah Sabzevari from UBC is hero of the day for his piece in Science Creative Quarterly on the heroines of medical physics. Women are less unsung in Med Phys than they are in other domains (with the exception perhaps of the shoddy seeming treatment of Roaslind Franklyn). But my Auntie in Law (AiL) is a med phys who gets to shop for Linear Accelerators and the like. This post is in part a tribute to Auntie Rosemary - she rocks.

In honour of my AiL, and with thanks to Aminollah Sabzevari, todays Heroines are Marie Curie, Harriet Brooks, and Rosalind Franklin.

I'd also like to add another x-ray crystallography pioneer and Nobel Laureate Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin to the list.

The Heroine Den, part 1

Emilie du Châtelet