Happy birthday #physicist Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), who came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror)! In my print on the left I show Wu in her lab & a schematic diagram of her experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, & the mirror reflection of the experimental set-up & the shocking result, that 🧵1/n #linocut#sciart#womenInSTEM#histsci#MastoArt#quantum
I mustn't let May go by without a nod to my 2009 article on the discovery, during the 19th century, of same-sex copulation among Maybugs (also known as Maybeetles, cockchafers, doodlebugs). Do look out for them at it in your garden! 🌈🌳
Gloria Childress Townsend, eds. Rendering History: Women of ACM-W was just published this past week and is available on the ACM Digital Library. #histsci
Happy birthday to Canadian geneticist Irene Ayako Uchida (1917-2013)! She is shown surrounded by chromosones, with anomalies (pink arrows) due to radiation exposure, based on 1 of her research papers. A strand of DNA is hidden in the image (her watchband).
Uchida didn’t set out to be a scientist. She was studying English literature at UBC, before she was interned with other Canadians of Japanese heritage during WWII. 🧵1/
New edition of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), surrounded by plants and a mineral she touted as medical treatments, her invented alphabet and model of the universe, on lovely ivory Japanese washi paper. Her writings preserve not only her own knowledge and theories but the nature of institutional medicine and folk healing of her day (which she deftly combined). 🧵1/2
Happy birthday #entomologist & scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717)! Her stepdad Jacob Marrel & students trained her as an artist. She began painting insects & plants by 13. She wrote, "I spent my time investigating insects. [...] I realized that other caterpillars produced beautiful butterflies or moths, and that silkworms did the same. This led me to collect all the caterpillars I could find in order to see how they changed".
🧵1/n #printmaking#sciArt#MastoArt#histsci
We also have EXTENDED THE DEADLINE to the ECR summer school focused on academic writing and publishing led by Antti Silvast & Heta Tarkkala as editors of the journal Science & Technology Studies New deadline is April 12th.
No cute bunnies or lambs in my files, I'm afraid. I do, however, have a lot of queer chickens. This is a painting of a hen-cock (c. 1900), a prize fighter, by English artist Herbert Atkinson. 🥚🐥🐔
Happy birthday to one of greatest #mathematicians of all time Emmy Noether (1882-1935), here with her eponymous theorem, the backbone of modern physics. Noether's theorem links any symmetry of a system with a conservation law. In my portrait, I chose to depict a young Emmy in front of a blackboard with a more simple formulation of her theorem & 3 specific applications of it, 🧵1/n
Happy birthday to Canadian medical researcher & #biochemist Maud Menten (1879-1960). Not only was she an author of Michaelis-Menten equation for #enzyme kinetics, she invented the azo-dye coupling for alkaline phosphatase, 1st example of enzyme #histochemistry, still used in imaging of tissues today & she also performed the first #electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin in 1944!
For #InternationalWomensDay my ongoing series of portraits of women in science through history. If you look for them, they’re there. I’m up to 56 now. Here’s to the day when a scientist’s sex is no longer remarkable in any field!
Here's a podcast on New Books Network where I talk about (surprise surprise) my new book, 'Visions of a Digital Nation', and why Margaret Thatcher's 1984 #privatisation of British Telecom was a pivotal moment for both #neoliberalism and #digitalisation.
An extraordinary American astronaut and science communicator for #BlackHistoryMonth: Mae Carol Jemison (born October 17, 1956) is a physician who became the first Black woman to travel in space when she went into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour for NASA, on September 12, 1992. She also has a B.S. in chemical engineering, served in the Peace Corps, is a dancer and choreographer, 🧵1/
#linocut#printmaking#sciArt#astronaut#womenInSTEM#BlackInSTEM#histsci#MastoArt
Just a reminder that, following the Royal Society event in Jan, my article 'Mendel's Closet: Genetics, Eugenics and the Exceptions of Sex in Edwardian Britain' has been made freely available until the end of Feb/LGBTQ+ History Month.
For #PrinterSolstice prompt spectrum: my #linocut of trailblazing American #astronomer Annie Jump Cannon (1863 – 1941) with her stellar classification system which sorted stars based on spectral types, revealing their temperature from hot blue stars to cool red stars: O,B,A, F, G, K & M. Named after the university the Harvard Classification her tremendous contribution was less visible. 🧵1/n