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Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (via wikimedia commons)

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, when people around the web will write about their favorite women in science and technology. But who was Ada Lovelace?

Ada was born Augusta Ada Byron on December 10, 1815, the daughter of Anne Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. Theirs was a tempestuous relationship and Anne decamped with baby Ada to her parent’s home a month after the birth. Byron soon left the country, and Ada never saw her father again.

Despite growing up in a wealthy family in England, Ada’s childhood was not easy. She was often ill and became bedridden for an entire year after a bout with the measles. And she had to deal with the difficulties of being the daughter of one of the most famous men of the time, one with whom her mother was fighting, even with Byron hundreds of miles away on the European continent. Anne was an overprotective mother who raised her daughter to be as unlike the emotional Byron as possible. Ada was brought up not only to be a proper young lady of her class but also encouraged to follow her interests in science and mathematics.

In 1835 she married William King, Baron King (and later Earl of Lovelace), with whom she would have three children. Ada continued her interest in mathematics and science and met and corresponded with other scientists and mathematicians. One of these was Charles Babbage, who invented what are considered to be the first computers, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine. Babbage asked Ada to translate an Italian mathematician’s memoir analyzing his Analytical Engine (a machine that would perform simple mathematical calculations and be programmed with punchcards), but Ada went beyond completing a simple translation. She wrote her own set of notes about the machine and even included a method for calculating a sequence of Bernoulli numbers; this is now considered to be the first computer program.

But Ada’s true potential in science and mathematics would never be known. Illness continued to plague her as an adult. She took months to recover from the birth of her second child, and she began having what she called heart or rheumatic attacks in the 1840s. By 1851 she was extremely sick with uterine cancer, from which she died at the age of 36 on November 27, 1852. She was laid to rest next to her father in the Byron vault in a church in Nottingham.

Girls in the math classroom, courtesy of Flickr user woodleywonderworks

I suppose, in a way, I should thank the woman who tried to compliment me when I was in high school by saying that I was too pretty for science. What she was really saying was that girls don’t belong in science, and that got me so riled up I’m still ticked off nearly two decades later. But at least she gave me something to write about—and I frequently do (just check out our Women’s History Month coverage).

I’ve often used this example from my own life when arguing with people who don’t believe that any gender bias exists in science. I’ll admit that a single anecdote isn’t evidence (simply a way of humanizing the situation), but I’ve got plenty of real evidence, including the new report, “Why So Few?,” to back me up and explain how, even in the 21st century, women and girls are getting elbowed out from the fields of science and math.

It starts when we’re young. Some elementary school teachers pass on math fear to their female—and only their female—students and unknowingly promote the idea that boys are better than girls in math and science. Math performance suffers. As they grow up, girls are inundated with stereotypes (girls are princesses while boys build things) that tell them that girls have no place in science. It’s easier to avoid taking calculus than buck a system that says you don’t belong there, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that some girls take the easier path. By high school, girls are taking fewer Advanced Placement exams in math, physics, chemistry and computer science, and in college, they’re still vastly outnumbered in physics, engineering and computer science departments.

If a woman makes it through graduate school (which can be even more difficult if she decides to become a parent) and into the work world, there’s a host of problems. She’ll have to be better than her male counterparts: one study of postdoctoral applicants showed that women had to have published 3 more papers in a prestigious journal or 20 more in specialty journals to be judged as worthy as the men. Once hired, she may be the only woman on the faculty (Harvard, for example, just tenured its first female math professor). She’s working in a setting designed around the lives of married men who had wives to take care of things, like raising children. When other researchers write letters of recommendation about her, those letters more likely refer to her compassion and teaching and avoid referring to her achievements and ability. And if she’s successful, she’ll be rated lower on the likability scale, which may sound minor but can have profound effects on evaluations, salary and bonuses.

But if women are getting edged out from math and science, is that bad for just women or is there a larger concern? I would argue for the latter, and I’m not alone. Meg Urry, a Yale University astronomer, wrote last year in Physics & Society (emphasis added):

Many scientists believe that increasing diversity is a matter of social engineering, done for the greater good of society, but requiring a lowering of standards and thus conflicting with excellence. Others understand that there are deep reasons for the dearth of women wholly unrelated to the intrinsic abilities of women scientists which lead to extra obstacles to their success. Once one understands the bias against women in male-dominated fields, one must conclude that diversity in fact enhances excellence. In other words, the playing field is not level, so we have been dipping more deeply into the pool of men than of women, and thus have been unknowingly lowering our standards. Returning to a level playing field (compensating for bias) will therefore raise standards and improve our field. Diversity and excellence are fully aligned.

I want a level playing field for science for many reasons (I don’t want little girls to be taught to fear math; I’d like my female friends in science to be judged by the same standards my brother, a post-doc, is; I’m tired of hearing that someone was the “first woman” to do anything a guy has already done), but this is really a larger issue. We need to make sure that we aren’t weeding out women from science so that we’re not weeding out people who could be great scientists. How sad would it be to know that we don’t have, say, a cure for cancer or a revolutionary fuel source because a girl or woman was dissuaded from the path that would have taken us there?

Last year, I introduced you to seven threatened cats you may not have heard of. Now here’s one more:

A flat-headed cat caught in a camera trap in Malaysia in March 2009 (from Andreas Wilting et al. via wikimedia commons)

Flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps)
Lives in: Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Thailand
Habitat: tropical forest near rivers, lakes and swamps
Eats: small mammals, birds, amphibians, fish
Physical features: about the size of a house cat, flat head, short tail, webbed paws

The flat-headed cat is one of the least-known kitties in the world. There are, at most, only 2,500 mature individuals left in the wild, and that number is likely decreasing; in 2008, the International Union for Conservation of Nature changed the flat-headed cat’s status from “threatened” to “endangered.”

Southeast Asia has the world’s highest rate of deforestation, and, like many animals there, the flat-headed cat’s main threat is loss of habitat. A new study in PLoS One estimates that 54 to 80 percent of the cat’s suitable habitat has been lost, with much of that turned into cropland or oil palm plantations. (There had been some suggestions that the cats may be able to live and breed on these farms, but the new study argues that there is no evidence that the cats can be found there.) Pollution from gold mining and agriculture, over-fishing of the cats’ prey, and hunting of the cats may also be affecting the species’ population numbers.

Can fish sing? Yes, they can, though I’m not sure about mackerel like the ones above. And they probably don’t sound like anything you’d put on your iPod. But that wasn’t what Alex Tattersall of Charminster, England, was searching for when we went on a dive last September in the Red Sea off Egypt. He was looking for a great photo, and he found one. Tattersall writes:

I saw a large school of these feeding mackerel towards the end of a lovely dive. … I decided then to follow the school and try to isolate some individual fish. As luck would have it, these three subjects moved into this very photogenic position, and seem to be singing just like the three tenors or the barbershop trio.

Tattersall’s photo, Chorus of mackerel, is a finalist in the Natural World category of Smithsonian magazine’s 7th Annual Photo Contest. Vote now for your favorite in the People’s Choice category; you can vote once a day until March 31. Contest winners will be announced in early summer.

Think you’ve got what it takes to win our photo contest? Our 8th Annual Photo Contest is now open. Good luck to all who enter!

And check out the entire collection of Surprising Science’s Pictures of the Week on our Facebook fan page.

It will be years, decades, before humans explore Mars. Until then, we’ll just have to rely on robots and satellites. And talented 3D-animators.

The HiRISE camera has produced thousands of images such as this one, of bedforms in a Martian crater (credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona )

Doug Ellison took advantage of the thousands of images from the HiRISE camera on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter to create the animation above. Ray Villard at Discovery News explains:

Ellison constructed the 3D terrain model from comparison of pairs of NASA Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter HiRISE views taken from slightly different points of view.  Advanced stereo-matching algorithms automatically combined features between the two images, and determined their relative elevations based upon how much they shift with the spacecraft’s perspective offset between orbits. He has set up a YouTube channel called MARS3DdotCOM with other visualizations. (The HiRISE team is now releasing digital terrain models that they produce in-house, so that anybody with 3D rendering software and some skill can try creating this sort of animation.)

The video lacks any music, so you’ll need to add your own soundtrack. How about Gustav Holst’s Mars: Bringer of War from his series, The Planets? Any better suggestions?

(HT: Geeks Are Sexy)