Smithsonian.com

Doris Mable Cochran

Though underrepresented in some fields, female scientists are no longer rare. That wasn’t the case for a very long time. Usually when you see historical photos of scientists, there will be only a woman or two among them. The Smithsonian Institution Archives, though, has put together a collection of historical photos of female scientists and published it on its Flickr page.

My favorite is this 1954 photo of Doris Mable Cochran (1898-1968) as she measures a turtle shell. Cochran was a herpetologist here at the Smithsonian Institution. Through the course of her career, she described more than 100 species and published dozens of papers and several books on reptiles and amphibians. To learn more about Cochran, check out this post from The Clutter Museum.

And for more blog posts about women in science, go to findingada.com. More than 1,500 bloggers have pledged to blog about women in science today in honor of Ada Lovelace, daughter of the poet Byron and one of the world’s first computer programmers.

Dust blows over the Mediterranean from Africa

German movie + subtitles + art museum venue = ack. I should have known what I was getting myself into when I attended this selection from the Environmental Film Festival.

Dust as a topic can be interesting (I’ve been fascinated with it since I first read about the theory that Britain’s outbreak of foot and mouth disease could have originated with dust blown from the Sahara), but this movie is really just a topic; it’s not a story. There isn’t much that connects the segments except for the title.

There are some good ideas, but at 90 minutes, the film was twice as long as it should have been. The filmmaker could have focused on his point of how humans are the source of dust, but we continue in a never-ending battle to get rid of it. (There was a very funny segment in which the photographer baits a woman on this point as she cleans her apartment. She’s so cleaning-obsessed that she says she will even regularly take apart her TV to get rid of the dust inside.) There are also bits about the science of dust, such as how dust is involved in the formation of planets, but they get lost in this movie.

Several people got up and left the theater after about an hour. I would have gone with them, except that I didn’t want to go back into the rain so quickly.

(Image courtesy of NASA, created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the MODIS Rapid Response team)

A Great Egret fishing in shallow waters

Voting continues for the Reader’s Choice in Smithsonian magazine’s 6th Annual Photo Contest. This photo, A Great Egret fishing in shallow waters, a finalist in the Natural World category, was taken by Dan Holland in Reelfoot Lake State Park in Tennessee back in July 2007. You can almost hear the splashing water in this scene.

If you have a photograph you’d like to share with the world, enter our 7th Annual Photo Contest.

There are several reports today that an underwater volcano near Tonga has been erupting for days. The pictures, admittedly, are spectacular. But this isn’t rare.

There are dozens of volcanoes around Tonga. The last one known to have erupted was Home Reef in August 2006. Only passengers on a yacht sailing nearby saw that eruption. The NASA satellite Aura also detected sulfur dioxide emissions from the event. But the source of the eruption was originally identified as being from another volcano, Metis Shoal. Home Reef wasn’t identified as the source until months later.

When I wrote about the Home Reef explosion back in 2006, I looked for an expert on that volcano. I assumed, naively, that all volcanoes must be monitored or at least studied. That’s not true, though, and many of the Tongan volcanoes, for example, lack even names.

Having caught this latest explosion in the act, and since it is located fairly close to the Tongan capital of Nuku’alofa, perhaps this volcano, whichever one it is, will be a bit better studied.

The video below is from William Chadwick and his team at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration from when they caught the first ever video recording of an underwater volcano erupting.

The dolphins at SeaWorld Orlando have learned an interesting trick all on their own: they create rings of bubbles and play with them.