coolchicksfromhistory:

Justine Johnstone Wagner (1895-1982) appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies and was a called the most beautiful blonde on Broadway.  She also appeared in a handful of silent films before retiring from acting to attend Columbia University.  At Columbia she was part of the team to develop the first IV drip. Justine was third author after Samuel Hirshberg and Harold T. Hyman on the paper announcing this development in 1931.  Justine later had a personal laboratory built in her cellar where she researched endocrinology, cancer, and syphilis   

explore-blog:

Actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr was once called “the most beautiful woman in the world.” She also gave us the technology that laid the groundwork for Wifi and Bluetooth. 

mangledmetaphor:

Nobel laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini, who died today at the age of 103, was a Jew and a woman in a place and an era where it was difficult to be either. She received her Nobel prize for her discovery of nerve growth factor, much of the work on which she performed, in hiding, in the hills near Turin in Mussolini’s Italy. She obtained the chicken eggs she needed for her research by begging them from farmers, under the pretext of needing them to feed her children (which she didn’t have). In the years before her death, she remained active in many endeavors, including a foundation to mentor young people.

In honor of her passing, Scientific American is making this 1993 profile of her available for the next 30 days.

ikenbot:

Bad-Ass Female Scientists: Lynn Margulis

“
I don’t consider my ideas controversial. I consider them right.”

Biologist Lynn Margulis died on November 22nd. She stood out from her colleagues in that she would have extended evolutionary studies nearly four billion years back in time. Her major work was in cell evolution, in which the great event was the appearance of the eukaryotic, or nucleated, cell — the cell upon which all larger life-forms are based. Nearly forty-five years ago, she argued for its symbiotic origin: that it arose by associations of different kinds of bacteria. Her ideas were generally either ignored or ridiculed when she first proposed them; symbiosis in cell evolution is now considered one of the great scientific breakthroughs.

Margulis was also a champion of the Gaia hypothesis, an idea developed in the 1970s by the free lance British atmospheric chemist James E. Lovelock. The Gaia hypothesis states that the atmosphere and surface sediments of the planet Earth form a self- regulating physiological system — Earth’s surface is alive. The strong version of the hypothesis, which has been widely criticized by the biological establishment, holds that the earth itself is a self-regulating organism; Margulis subscribed to a weaker version, seeing the planet as an integrated self- regulating ecosystem. She was criticized for succumbing to what George Williams called the “God-is good” syndrome, as evidenced by her adoption of metaphors of symbiosis in nature. She was, in turn, an outspoken critic of mainstream evolutionary biologists for what she saw as a failure to adequately consider the importance of chemistry and microbiology in evolution.

I first met her in the late 80’s and in 1994 interviewed her for my book The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1995). Below, in remembrance, please see her chapter, “Gaia is a Tough Bitch”. One of the compelling features of The Third Culture was that I invited each of the participants to comment about the others. In this regard, the end of the following chapter has comments on Margulis and her work by Daniel C. Dennett, the late George C. Williams, W. Daniel Hillis, Lee Smolin, Marvin Minsky, Richard Dawkins, and the late Francisco Varela. Interesting stuff.

As I wrote in the introduction to the first part of the book (Part I: The Evolutionary Idea): “The principal debates are concerned with the mechanism of speciation; whether natural selection operates at the level of the gene, the organism, or the species, or all three; and also with the relative importance of other factors, such as natural catastrophes.” These very public debates were concerned with ideas represented by George C. Williams and Richard Dawkins on one side and Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge on the other side. Not for Lynn Margulis. All the above scientists were wrong because evolutionary studies needed to begin four billion years back in time. And she was not shy about expressing her opinions. Her in-your-face, take-no-prisoners stance was pugnacious and tenacious. She was impossible. She was wonderful. — John Brockman

“Gaia is a tough bitch.” L. Margulis

neurosciencestuff:

Women’s body talk: perception stronger than reality?

How women think their friends feel about their bodies influences their own body concerns, according to a new study by Dr. Louise Wasylkiw and Molly Williamson from Mount Alison University in Canada. Their work, which examines the role of friends in young women’s body concerns, is published online in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.

Research shows that friends influence how girls and women view and judge their own body weight, shape and size. What Wasylkiw and Williamson’s work sheds light on, is how much of a young woman’s body concerns are shaped by her perceptions of peers’ concerns with their own body versus her peers’ actual body concerns.

Read more

fullerenes:

Dr. Paul Richter (1885). Études Cliniques sur la Grande Hystérie ou Hystéro-Épilepsie. 

The bottom image depicts “arc de cercle,” a symptom commonly found in female patients in the 19th and early 20th centuries diagnosed with hysteria. Also called opisthotonus, it involves the hyperextension of the back and neck.

P.S. this online archive from Cornell’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections is really cool.

ikenbot:

Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends”

Side note: This title is actually a bit, no, very misleading. The study does indeed show that men think of romantic or sexually beneficial relationships from friends more often than women, but the conclusions that can be reached in this study could also be a smoking gun showing just how effective our culture is at molding our minds to a gender binary. Which reminds me of the answer I gave someone who had asked about how men should approach women, because my suspicion is that men can be “Just friends” with women, but our culture is so assertive and conditioned to striving for these types of relationships that we easily forget. Plenty of media and outside advertisement subconsciously and most times very obviously altering our behavior to pay more attention to our sexual desires as men and for women to be the “wholesome” weak-links that need us. While women on the other hand are suggested and most times even forced into that image. Sure men will have that natural urge, but these urges alone are not enough to merit this behavior because this urge can be easily controlled, those that can’t control it tend to be those who are more heavily influenced by that gender binary culture and the behavioral patterns that come with it. Just a thought, but read on for the study and make your own conclusions.

Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.

The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status. However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.

I highlighted this part towards the end of the snippet because I wanted to again point out that this may be because of men’s misogynistic mindset that is largely attributed to our traditional culture that has been having trouble with keeping with the times. I believe we [men] are more willing to act because we are given more entitlement and power over women and this gives us an extreme overdose of unnecessary confidence in our sexuality despite how messed up and possessive it is in reality.

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