The radar signature of the May 31 El Reno tornado. Photo: NWS

In the past two weeks, Oklahoma has seen two massive tornadoes: the Moore tornado and the more recent El Reno tornado, both powerful EF-5 storms that were responsible for many deaths. Saturating the discussion around both storms was a bevy of dramatic close-up footage of the tornadoes as they tore through the landscape. Some of this footage was captured by news agencies and professional storm chasers, but much of it came from amateurs.

During the May 31 El Reno tornado, says National Geographic, when the National Weather Service was calling for people to take shelter, “at least 60 storm chasers stayed on the roads, heading directly toward the tornado itself. Radar imaging posted on Twitter Friday night shows that as the deadly El Reno twister touched down, several cars were precariously close to the tornado core.”

Four storm chasers died during that tornado, three of them experienced veterans, and three others had a close call when their car was tossed 600 feet.

The deaths have sparked a debate over the sensibility and usefulness of what many are describing as a notable increase in recent years of the number of people who are out there chasing storms.

The rise in popularity of storm chasing, said Tim Samaras, who died during the May 31 tornado, to National Geographic, has led to dangerous overcrowding near a big storm.

“We run into [storm chasers] all the time,” he said. “On a big tornado day in Oklahoma, you can have hundreds of storm chasers lined up down the road … We know ahead of time when we chase in Oklahoma, there’s going to be a traffic jam.”

That huge number of people on the roads, says Fox, is making an already dangerous situation even worse:

[T]here are too many people with a cell phone in-hand, simply calling themselves “storm chasers.” They clog roads and endanger legitimate researchers like the three who were killed Friday.

“We’ve known now for four or five years that the congestion has gotten so bad, you don’t have escape routes anymore,” Denzer told FOX 13. “You can’t get away.”

To put the risks of storm chasing in context, you need to think about two things: what a storm chasers’ purpose is and what it takes to achieve that goal. Storm chasers generally fall into two camps: those doing or contributing to scientific research, and those trying to capture video or images for media or news purposes. Well, maybe there’s a third camp: those there to gawk.

“You’ve got the group that are basically thrill seekers. They want to get their videos on YouTube. They want to be tweeted,” Dellegatto said.

Meteorologist and former storm chaser Dan Satterfield writes that the risks people are facing to capture all this footage of a storm are, from a scientific standpoint, unnecessary. Trained storm chasers are extremely useful for helping us understand tornadoes. They capture footage that can help researchers test or confirm their theories over how tornadoes work, and they provide on-the-ground confirmation for what weather forecasters are seeing in radar or satellite views. But to do that kind of work, you don’t need to put yourself in harm’s way.

The news media is overplaying the scientific benefit provided by nearly all of these chasers. Especially the silly ones taking armored vehicles on purpose into a tornado. That may make good TV on The Weather Channel, but it’s of no real scientific benefit. If you want to add to the science, take some calculus and enroll at [Oklahoma University.]

I’m sure Howie Bluestein can still fill a board full of equations to help you understand the real science! Dr. Bluestein measured the highest winds ever recorded on the planet in May 1999 during the first Moore Tornado. He did it from a mile away using a Doppler radar, not a ridiculous looking armored SUV.

There’s also the question of whether the news footage of a tornado is useful, but that’s a different discussion. Here Satterfield wants to point something else out:

I know of NO ONE who makes a real living storm chasing. No one. I do know quite a few meteorologists who make a decent living trying to figure out how these storms develop and how to forecast them better. They had to learn some physics and maths to do that.

More from Smithsonian.com:

How to Understand the Scale of the Oklahoma Tornado

A leatherback sea turtle laying her eggs. Photo: Laurens

Conservationist Jairo Mora Sandoval’s passion for protecting sea turtles likely cost him his life. Sandoval was always outspoken against wildlife poachers and their link to drug trafficking, the New Scientist explains:

In articles published in April in La Nación, Costa Rica’s leading newspaper, Mora Sandoval and other conservationists highlighted the links between drug trafficking and wildlife poaching – including a disturbing trend for crack-addicted poachers to be paid for turtle eggs with drugs.

Turtle eggs are believed by local people to be an aphrodisiac, and retail for about US$1 each….Given that a single nest can contain 80 or more eggs, trading in turtle eggs can be a lucrative sideline for criminals employed by drugs gangs to move their products along the coast.

Sandoval was found dead on Friday, his body discarded on a beach he used to patrol for baby leatherback turtles with the non-profit conservation group Widecast, the New Scientist reports. Sandoval had been bound, beaten and shot point-blank through the head. The Huffington Post elaborates:

Mora Sandoval, 26, had been patrolling the beach along with four other female volunteers Thursday night when masked men kidnapped them. The women escaped their attackers and went to police, [Widecast director Didiher] Chacon said.

Authorities and colleagues suspect his murder was carried out by drug traffickers working around the Costa Rican beach where Sandoval carried out his turtle research. This isn’t just a problem in Costa Rica: 2011 and 2012 saw a significant increase in the number of environmental scientists and activists murdered over the wildlife or habitats they sought to protect, Yale’s Environment 360 reports.

Most likely, drug dealers got tired of dealing with Sandoval’s efforts to protect the turtles and call attention to their illegal activities. In March 2012, traffickers raided a turtle incubation station on the beach and held the workers at gunpoint while they smashed all of the eggs. According to the New Scientist, locals later confirmed that the raid was a warning, though Sandoval did not comply.

Just weeks before his death, More Sandoval was personally threatened at gunpoint, and given a similar warning. “We said, ‘You should get the hell out of there, that’s just too much,’” says Christine Figgener, a friend who works for another turtle conservation project at Ostional, on Costa Rica’s Pacific coast.

Conservationists suspect that the police will lose interest in protecting the beach after the buzz surrounding Sandoval’s death dies down, the New Scientist reports, and they worry that the foreign volunteers who carry out much of the work will stop coming due to safety concerns.

More from Smithsonian.com:

State Department Takes on Illegal Wildlife Trade
Sloths Are Number One on the List of Illegally Traded Pets in Colombia  

Game ball presented to First Lady Betty Ford after a Monday night football game in September of 1975, signed by Deacon Jones. Image: Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum

For a long time, a quarterback’s greatest fear was David “Deacon” Jones. It was Jones who coined the word sack—because he did it so much. On Monday, Jones passed away of natural causes at the age of 74.

Since no one was keeping statistics on sacks until 1982, it’s hard to say how many Jones had. The St. Louis Ram’s statistics show Jones with 159 1/2 sacks in his time with them, and 173 1/2 in his entire career. He missed only five games in his fourteen seasons as a pro, and made the Pro Bowl for six straight years, from 1964 to 1970, where his defensive line was deemed “unblockable.” He was the first defensive lineman with 100 solo tackles and was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2002.

While the game is quite different today than it was when Jones played, no one doubts his skill. “The thing we’ve got to remember being players in this era is to really respect the game ‘back when,’ because those guys could really play,” Chris Long of the Rams, told the Associated Press. “Deacon Jones is a perfect example. This whole league and everybody in this game should honor the past and the players who played in that era. Those guys paved the way for us.”

Jones was also impressive off the field. “Deacon Jones was one of the greatest players in NFL history. Off the field, he was a true giant,” said Redskins general manager Bruce Allen. He had parts in acting – appearing on “Bewitched”, “The Brady Bunch” and “The Odd Couple” as well as the movie “Heaven Can Wait” and started a foundation of his own.

Bruce Allen, son of George Allen who coached Jones during his stint with the Los Angeles Rams, put Jones’ legacy this way. “His passion and spirit will continue to inspire those who knew him. He was a cherished member of the Allen family and I will always consider him my big brother.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Football Tech to Protect Players
Primal Screens: How Pro Football Is Amping Up Its Game

Image: Cheetah100

If we were all humane, nature-loving people, we would see a spider in our homes and simply smile, say hello, and let it go on its merry way. But we’re not. Many of us kill the spider. It’s okay; you don’t have to admit to it right now. But the next time you come across an eight-legged visitor that you’d rather not be visit with, here’s the best way to kill it.

There probably is an infinite number of ways to kill a spider. The most common—but certainly not the best—is the “Hulk smash!” method. Find a blunt object, and bring it down upon that poor, unsuspecting arachnid, crushing it to death. The problem with this method, as anyone who’s tried it can attest, is that sometimes the spider doesn’t die. Maybe you miss. Maybe the spider is incredibly strong. Or maybe it scuttled out of the way before you could hit it. Plus, smashing is dangerous for your furniture and your paint job.

Some suggest killing the spider with fire. This is how Smarter Every Day dealt with an unwelcome Brown Recluse spider:

He explains the logic this way:

Burning a very small spider with an exoskeleton increases the pressure inside, and makes it explode… killing it instantly. It’s the quickest way to dispatch it that I could think of. I had the same thoughts…. which is why I burned it with fire.

The downside to the fire trick is that it’s messy. Plus, it could set your house on fire.

What about drowning the spider? That’s pretty cruel: it can take spiders over an hour to drown.

No, the best way to kill a spider, says Real Clear Science, is not with fire or water, but with ice. Dr. Jerome Rovner, a professor at Ohio State and a member of the American Arachnological Society, told RCS’s Newton blog:

Catch [the spider] in an empty pill vial of appropriate size (or a baby-food-size jar), snap the cap on, and put it in the refrigerator freezer overnight. Getting cold is a normal experience of all spiders during winter, so it doesn’t seem cruel to knock them out by lowering their body temperature. The next day, pour enough rubbing alcohol in the container to submerge the frozen spider to insure that it will not recover from being frozen. The now dead spider and alcohol can then be poured into the toilet and flushed away.

So if you have to kill the spider, do it kindly and gently—in the freezer.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Urbanization Is Supersizing Spiders
Spider Builds Fake Spider Decoy

The first scanning tunneling microscope ever made. Image: Pieter Kuiper

Heinrich Rohrer, winner of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics, passed away last week at the age of 79. Rohrer is widely regarded as one of the founding scientists of the nanotechnology field.

In his Nobel Prize announcement, the Nobel Prize committee called out “his fundamental work in electron optics and for the design of the first electron microscope.” The electron microscope is what let scientists see viruses and IBM make this little animation. Here’s Physics World on how the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) works:

An STM creates an image of the surface of a sample by scanning an atomically sharp tip over its surface. The tip is held less than one nanometre from the surface and a voltage is applied so that electrons can undergo quantum-mechanical tunnelling between tip and surface. The tunnelling current is strongly dependent on the tip–surface separation and this is used in a feedback loop to keep the tip the same distance from the surface. An image is obtained by scanning the tip across the surface to create a topographical map in which individual atoms can be seen.

The patent for the STM has a bit more detail on how the process works. The New York Times writes that it wasn’t originally clear that Rohrer’s research would go anywhere at all:

The scientists’ colleagues at I.B.M. were skeptical of the project. As Dr. Rohrer recalled, “They all said, ‘You are completely crazy — but if it works you’ll get the Nobel Prize.’ ”

For inventing the STM, Rohrer didn’t just get the Nobel Prize. He was also awarded the German Physics Prize, the Otto Klung Prize, the Hewlett Packard Europhysics Prize, the King Faisal Prize and the Cresson Medal. His invention also got him inducted into the U.S. National Inventors Hall of Fame. That’s because the STM allows scientists to look at the arrangement of the atoms on a surface and move atoms around. Seeing this atomic level and being able to study and manipulate it allowed scientists to develop modern forms of nanotechnology.

Rohrer was born in Buchs, Switzerland, on June 6th, 1933, half an hour after his twin sister. Rohrer wasn’t planning on going into physics, he writes in his autobiography:

My finding to physics was rather accidental. My natural bent was towards classical languages and natural sciences, and only when I had to register at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) in autumn 1951, did I decide in favor of physics.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Medicine Goes Small
Can Nanotechnology Save Lives?

The Kepler satellite’s first photo, captured on April 8, 2009. Photo: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech

It’s been just over four years since NASA’s exoplanet-hunting Kepler satellite switched on and began staring unwaveringly at the same patch of the universe, watching for the subtle dips of light caused by a far-off planet passing in front of its star. Where the ancient Greeks knew of five planets besides our own Kepler gave us thousands. Extrapolations from this tiny patch of sky gave us hints of billions more.

Originally designed to run for three-and-a-half years, Kepler has pushed on. But the satellite’s quest may be at an end. Sad news came out from NASA yesterday that one of the satellite’s reaction wheels, a device that keeps Kepler’s eye steady, has failed. There may still be a way to fix the broken wheel or concoct some other strategy to keep Kepler shooting straight. But without a steady gaze the satellite can no longer carry out its mission.

In the science press, the obituaries are already rolling out. Though many scientific experiments teach us something new about the world, few have been able to so clearly redefine our place in the universe as Kepler. Decades ago, the planets in our solar system were all we knew. Now, we’re practically swimming in them.

Kepler may be down (but not “out”), but that doesn’t mean the discoveries will stop. It will take years to sort through and analyze all the data the mission has already collected. And, follow up research using other satellites on Kepler’s exoplanet “candidates” could still yet unveil the marvels of the universe.

More from Smithsonian.com:

You Can’t Throw a Rock in the Milky Way Without Hitting an Earth-Like Planet
17 Billion Earth-Size Planets! An Astronomer Reflects on the Possibility of Alien Life
What if All 2,299 Exoplanets Orbited One Star?

Photo: Ron Lute

Up on the roof of a government research building in Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the Canadian province that straddles Montana and North Dakota, Barbara Cade-Menun has a tarp filled with poo. Little brown pucks of cow manure that bake in the sun and freeze in the winter, where temperatures regularly drop below 5 degrees.

Cade-Menun and students are tracking how bacteria such as E. coli survive the harsh prairie winters. “[I]f E. coli can survive here, they’ll survive anywhere,” says the CBC. The research has important implications for people living in or downstream of agricultural regions as E. coli in your water can be a very bad thing.

Thirteen years ago this month tragedy struck a small Ontario, Canada, town when E. coli bacteria got into the water system. In Walkerton, Ontario, a town of 5,000 people, 2,300 fell ill suffering from “bloody diarrhea, vomiting, cramps and fever.” Seven people died. Over time, the tragedy was traced to manure spread on a nearby farm that had managed to carry the E. coli bacteria through the ground and into the town’s water system. That, alongside regulatory missteps, caused the preventable disaster—the “most serious case of water contamination in Canadian history.”

Though steps have been taken in the region to prevent similar disasters in the future, there is still much that is unknown about how E. coli moves through a watershed. From her rooftop investigation Cade-Menun found that E. coli are sneaky little bacteria.

Cade-Menun and her colleagues found that when the temperature plummets the frozen manure pucks seem to be bacteria-free. But the bacteria aren’t dead, and when the spring warmth returns so too do the bacteria.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Genetically Modified E. Coli Bacteria Can Now Synthesize Diesel Fuel
Some Microbes Are So Resilient They Can Ride Hurricanes

Image: Rosie O’Beirn

Every so often you hear about the oldest person in the world dying. On April 1st, Elsi Calvert Thompson, America’s oldest person, died at 114. On December 17th, 2012, the 115-year-old Dina Mandredini passed away, handing off the world’s oldest living person title to Besse Cooper. But how often does the world’s oldest person die?

Here’s what that question looks like to a mathematician:

If you live in a country with Ncountry people, a continent with Ncontinent people and a world with Nworld people, during a year and on average, how often will you be notified (if you’re paying attention to your quality tabloid) of the death of the oldest man/woman/person alive of your country/continent/world? (Note that a death will result in at most one notification.)

On Stackexchange, which calls itself “a question and answer site for people studying math at any level,” Marc van Leeuwen tried to answer that question, and with the help from the community, came up with lots of ways to think about it.

Mortality tables from the CDC, for example, give one answer, provided by Chris Taylor. These tables only go up to 100, and since many of the oldest people crack that ceiling, he had to extrapolate a bit, knowing that the oldest person to have ever lived died at 122.

For each age a, the number of people of age a in year t is the fraction of the population aged a−1 at time t−1 who don’t die, i.e.N(t,a) (1−h(a−1))×N(t−1,a−1)

Eventually, he had an answer:

Taking the total number of events, and dividing by the number of years that I run the simulation for, gives an approximate rate. The punchline is that in my simulation, I see 15,234 events in 10,000 years, for an approximate rate of once in every 0.66 years.

Another person looked to the Gerontology Research Group, who keeps records on the death of the oldest living person. A user named Gwern calculated:

I extracted the final column, death dates, and formatted it and extracted the intervals between the death dates of each person, reasoning that if the Oldest Person In The World who died in 1955 is succeeded by a person who died in 1956, that meant an observer would, in 1955, wait ~1 year for the new Oldest Person to die. The mean interval between deaths turns out to be 1.2 years, but the median wait turns out to be 0.65 years! This seems to be due in large part due to the astounding lifespan of Jeanne Calment, as you will see on the interval graph shortly.

Jean Calment holds that 122-year record. The Gerontology Research Group has images of Jean from age 20 to age 122.

At Stackexchange, a few more people came up with answers, but things seem to settle around one oldest-person death every 0.65 years. Now, obviously, figuring out who the oldest person in the world is, is pretty hard. But since most of us will never hold the title of oldest person in the world, we can at least savor the fact that, for at least a few seconds, we were at one point the youngest.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Besse Cooper, World’s Oldest Person, Passes Away

The skeleton army. Photo: Joe Giardino, YouTube

Producer and animator Ray Harryhausen, who invented a kind of stop motion model animation called ‘dynamation’ and created special effects for classics such as Jason and the Argonauts and One Million Years B.C., died today, NPR reports.

A Facebook page managed by the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation broke the news two hours earlier today that Harryhausen passed away in London at the age of 92. Already, thousands of fans have responded, including the likes of directors Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg and others. James Cameron commented, “I think all of us who are practioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we’re standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray’s contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn’t be who we are.”

George Lucas said simply, “Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars.”

Harryhausen began working in stop motion after seeing and being inspired by King Kong in 1933. He began experimenting with animated short films using stop motion, getting his break in 1949 with Mighty Joe Young. The film took home the Academy Award for Best Special Effects later that year. From there, Harryhausen blazed a career producing and directing visual effects for just under two dozen films. The last movie he made was Clash of the Titans, in 1981.

Here, Harryhausen talks about his work in a 1974 interview:

And here is a collection of Harryhausen’s greatest stop motion animation creations:

And here, one of his most famous scenes – the skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts:

More from Smithsonian.com:

Mining Greek Myths for the Movies: From Harryhausen to Wrath of the Titans 
King Kong Takes on Dinosaurs in Hollywood 

Left: Women’s Media Center, Right: Ms. magazine

Mary Thom, feminist editor, writer and behind-the-scenes activist, died earlier this week in a motorcycle accident in Yonkers. Thom was the editor-in-chief at the Women’s Media Center. The center’s co-founders said:

“We who are Mary’s friends and family haven’t absorbed her loss yet; it’s too sudden,” said Robin Morgan, Gloria Steinem, and Jane Fonda, co-founders of The Women’s Media Center. “Ms. Magazine, the Women’s Media Center, the women’s movement and American journalism have suffered an enormous blow. Mary was and will always be our moral compass and steady heart. Writers from around the world have been able to share their words and ideas because of her. Wherever her friends and colleagues gather, we will always ask the guiding question: What would Mary do?”

Thom might be best known for her role at Ms. magazine, where she joined in 1972 as an editor and where she eventually became the executive editor. As Ms. she pushed the magazine to cover more politics, specifically the actions of lawmakers surrounding things like abortion and birth control—issues that remain at the forefront of women’s rights struggles today. The other editors at Ms. found Thom a refreshing presence, according to the New York Times:

At Ms., she often stayed late into the night reading letters to the editor. “It was incredibly moving and exciting, to just get that kind of response,” Ms. Thom recalled in a 2005 interview. “And no one had expected it.”

Her former colleagues said she brought a pragmatic, self-deprecating viewpoint to the magazine, which some saw as too serious.

Eventually, Thom wrote a book about the history of Ms., and helped to produce an oral history on the congresswoman Bella S. Abzug with the epic title Bella Abzug: How One Tough Broad From the Bronx Fought Jim Crow and Joe McCarthy, Pissed Off Jimmy Carter, Battled for the Rights of Women and Workers, Rallied Against War and for the Planet, and Shook Up Politics Along the Way.

The accident happened on the Saw Mill Parkway in Yonkers, where Thom was riding motorcycle, which many called her one true love. Thom never owned a car, they say, and it was the 1996 Honda Magna 750 that got her where she needed to go, both physically and mentally.

The next issue of Ms. will feature more on Thom’s life both at the publication and beyond.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Celebrating 90 Years Since Women Won the Right to Vote
When Did Girls Start Wearing Pink?

In places where malaria thrives, mosquito nets are used to keep the bugs away from people as they sleep. Photo: Matt Handy

In 2010 alone, malaria infected 219 million people, largely in tropical regions in Africa, South and Central America, Asia and the Philippines. That year, the disease, caused by a parasite carried by mosquitos, killed 660,000 people. Objectively, that’s a high number of deaths, but compared to the number of infections, it’s relatively low. Right now, powerful anti-malarial medication protects those millions of infected people. But, says the BBC, a new strain of the parasite has been found in Cambodia that resists the leading class of anti-malarial drugs.

The new strain, first identified in 2008, is resistant to artemisinin, a “frontline drug in the fight against malaria,” the BBC writes. Since it was first discovered, the resistant version of malaria has spread around Southeast Asia. Health organizations are working hard to contain the spread of the drug-resistant variety: if the drugs are rendered ineffective, the consequences could be dire for millions of people.

This isn’t the first anti-malarial to be rendered useless, either. “The history of antimalarial medicine,” says the Mayo Clinic, “has been marked by a constant struggle between evolving drug-resistant parasites and the search for new drug formulations.”

Modern political history is already intertwined with the history of anti-malarial medications, and if drug-resistant strains of malaria continue to spread, they could prompt far-reaching changes. The advent of the first anti-malarial, says Glencoe World History, enabled European imperialism into tropical regions worldwide.

“Before 1850, the fear of disease was a major factor in keeping Europeans from moving into Africa. Especially frightening was malaria, an often fatal disease spread by parasites. …By 1850, European doctors had learned how to treat malaria with quinine, a drug that greatly reduced the death rate from the disease. Quinine is a bitter drug obtained from the bark of the cinchona tree, which is native to the slopes of the Andes in South America.”

Malaria is most common in tropical and sub-tropical regions where the mosquitos that carry the parasite live. Photo: CDC

Cinchona trees were transplanted from South America to India, and a steady supply of the drug enabled Europeans to move across Africa.

“By the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 90 percent of African lands were under the control of the European powers. A drug found in the bark of Latin American trees, which were then grown in Asia, had been used by Europeans to make possible their conquest of Africa.”

Since then, multiple generations of anti-malarial medication have come and gone (and researchers are still announcing promising new leads). But any time a drug-resistant strain like the one in Cambodia develops, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Malaria Kills One Child Every 30 Seconds
Can Mosquitoes Fight Malaria?
A Conservative Estimate For Dengue Fever Infections in India: 37 Million Each Year

Image: Wikimedia

When she was three, Shakuntala Devi’s father noticed that she could memorize the numbers on cards and figure out card tricks. A trapeze artist, Devi’s father brought his daughter to the crowds to wow them with her amazing brain. By age six, Devi was calculating huge numbers in her head to impress visitors. But by the time she reached adulthood, Devi’s mental math would wow not just circus-goers, but computers and mathematicians all over the world.

In 1977, Devi faced off against a computer in a speed calculation race. She won twice. First, by calculating the cube root of 188,132,517. (It’s 573.) The second time, she beat the computer even more impressively. It took Devi 50 seconds to think of the 23rd root of a 201 digit number (91674867692003915809866092758538016248310668014430862240712651642793465704086709659 3279205767480806790022783016354924852380335745316935111903596577547340075681688305 620821016129132845564805780158806771, if you want to work it out for yourself in your head). The computer—a UNIVAC 1108—took a full thirty seconds longer. In 1980, she multiplied 7,686,369,774,870 by 2,465,099,745,779 in 28 seconds.

All this complex math earned Devi the nickname “human computer.” She left behind several books, including Figuring the Joy of Numbers, that teach her methods, but her techniques for simplifying math were never really picked up by mainstream schools.  Her phenomenal calculation skills could also help her tell the day for any date in the last century, and Devi was, in her personal life, quite interested in dates. She doled out astrology predictions and wrote a book called Astrology for You. When asked where she got her human computer-like gifts, Devi answered “God’s gift. A divine quality.”

Devi passed away from respiratory problems at a hospital in Bangalore. She was 83.

More from Smithsonian.com:

When Computers Get Brains
A More Human Artificial Brain

Born July 25, 1978, Louise Brown was the first baby born to in vitro fertilization, a technique developed by Robert Edwards and Patrick Steptoe. Photo: Nobel Prize.org

Likely no one on Earth has done as much to bring babies into this world as Robert Edwards, a famed English scientist who died yesterday at age 87.

Edwards, along with his long-time research partner Patrick Steptoe, developed the technique of human in vitro fertilization—a way to artificially fertilize a woman’s eggs while they’re outside of her body. After decades of research, the first baby from in vitro fertilization was born on July 25, 1978. The work earned Edwards a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2010 and went on to change the fates of millions of families who struggled with infertility.

Since Louise Brown was born in 1978, says the Associated Press, the “European Society for Human Reproduction and Embryology estimates about five million babies have been born using the technique, which creates embryos in the laboratory before transferring them into a woman. Experts say about 350,000 babies are born by IVF every year, mostly to people with infertility problems, single people and gay and lesbian couples.”

Edwards’ influence on families’ lives is likely matched by the controversy that surrounded his work.

Edwards and Steptoe, says Martin Johnson for the Guardian, “faced obstacles that would have deterred a less determined pair, for not only was the work demanding clinically and scientifically, but they were given no financial support from UK funding bodies, and were regularly attacked not just by religious leaders and the press but also by most of their scientific and clinical colleagues. As a graduate student of Bob’s, I well remember being ostracised at meetings and in the departmental tearoom for my association with him.”

The technique stirred, and continues to stir controversy in some circles, says Al Jazeera. In the early days of his research, Edwards and Steptoe were “accused of playing God and interfering with nature,” says the AP. Following Edwards’ Nobel Prize win, his research was denounced by the Vatican, and praised by his country: “In 2011, Edwards was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II “for services to human reproductive biology.””

“Like so many pioneers of science,” says the New York Times, “the two men achieved what they did in the face of a skeptical establishment and choruses of critics.”

More from Smithsonian.com:

Iron Lady Margaret Thatcher Dies at Age 87
The Man Who Deserved ’66 Percent of the Credit’ for Cloning Dolly Has Died.
The Man who “Discovered” Cold Fusion Just Passed Away

Image: Clem Evans

In South Africa, one recent robbery broke the blast-open-the-safe, steal-the-gold mold of bank heists. The thieves did break into a safe and steal millions of dollars worth of loot. But they didn’t make off with gold or Picassos. They stole rhino horns—nearly $3 million worth.

The safe contained 66 southern white rhino horns, removed from the animals on the Leshoka Thabang Game Reserve to protect them from poachers who often kill the giant beasts just for their horns. The thieves apparently broke into the reserve’s office and used a blowtorch to open this safe and snag the horns.

Demand for rhino horns, which go into traditional medicine cures for everything from cancer to hangovers, is growing, and right now the going rate (just about $30,000 a pound) is higher than gold’s.

Reuters called Johan van Zyl, the farmer whose safe contained the 66 rhino horns, which weighed almost 100 pounds in total. “In my hands it is worth nothing, but in the hands of the guys who have it now, the horns are worth a lot of money,” he told them.

Part of what’s driving the price up is that rhinos are getting rarer, because they’re being poached so much. The Western Black rhino was poached to extinction just this year. Reuters estimates that last year poachers killed 660 rhinos in South Africa. This year that number could jump to 800. And 75 percent of the rhinos in the world live in South Africa.

To save the dwindling rhino population, some rangers are taking the drastic measure of poisoning rhinos’ horns to deter people from eating them.

And it isn’t only rhinos in the wild which are being attacked for their horns. In July of last year, two men cokes into the Ipswitch Musuem and ripped the horn off a museum specimen. This museum heist wasn’t an isolated event either. Here’s the Guardian:

According to the Metropolitan police, 20 thefts have taken place across Europe in the past six months – in Portugal, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Belgium and Sweden as well as the UK. Scotland Yard and Europol are now advising galleries and collectors to consider locking up their rhino horn collections or keeping them away from public view. Several institutions, including the Natural History Museum and theHorniman Museum in south London, have removed their displays or replaced horns with replicas.

Law enforcement officials think that these museum heists were all carried out by the same team of criminals, hungry for horns—although most likely the South African safe heist wasn’t related. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) called the rhino hunting situation “bleak” in 2009, and it’s only gotten worse. Until rhino horns stop being worth more than gold, it’s unlikely that the giant beasts, or their horns, will be safe anywhere.

More from Smithsonian.com:

Wildlife Managers Are Poisoning Rhino Horns to Stop People From Eating Them
Defending the Rhino

Margaret Thatcher in 1984 with Ronald Reagan at Camp David. Image: White House Photographic Office

Margaret Thatcher, former Prime Minister of Great Britain, died today at the age of 87. Thatcher, the first woman to lead a Western power, pushed back against socialism in Britain and ushered in a new era of partnerships with Russia.

Thatcher wasn’t exactly an uncontroversial figure. She was fiercely conservative, tough and unwavering in her commitment to her own ideas, earning her the nickname the Iron Lady. “I am not a consensus politician,” she would say. “I am a conviction politician.” Later, she said to her internally warring party “Turn if you like, the lady’s not for turning.”

Some think that this hard-working, hard-headed ethic came from her working class background. Thatcher was born above a shop in Grantham, to a grocer. Early in her career, Thatcher underwent an image overhaul that included changing her voice to be lower. She worked with a speech therapist to lower her register. In Vanity Fair, her biographer chronicles the episode saying, “soon the hectoring tones of the housewife gave way to softer notes and a smoothness that seldom cracked except under extreme provocation on the floor of the House of Commons.”

This sort of commitment and work wasn’t uncommon for Thatcher: if she set out to do something, she did it. And it is that resolve that made Thatcher successful, according to the New York Times:

At home, Lady Thatcher’s political successes were decisive. She broke the power of the labor unions and forced the Labour Party to abandon its commitment to nationalized industry, redefine the role of the welfare state and accept the importance of the free market.

Abroad, she won new esteem for a country that had been in decline since its costly victory in World War II. After leaving office, she was honored as Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven.

Thatcher was one of first Western leaders to work with Mikhail Gorbachev, spurring a slow turn towards working with the former Soviet Union. Thatcher pushed British Petroleum to explore oil deals in Kazakhstan to help Gorbachev, eventually creating a giant oil production facility in Azerbaijan that has pumped thousands of barrels of oil a day for the last seven years.

Of course, these policies weren’t universally praised. During her time, inequality in the U.K. rose, and her own former university, Oxford, refused to grant her an honorary degree, making her the first prime minister educated at Oxford to be denied the honor. Here’s the BBC on the internal Oxford debate:

The principal of Mrs Thatcher’s old college, also supported her nomination. Daphne Park said: “You don’t stop someone becoming a fellow of an academic body because you dislike them.”

But Professor Peter Pulzer, of All Souls, who led the opposition, said: “This is not a radical university, it is not an ideologically motivated university.

“I think we have sent a message to show our very great concern, our very great worry about the way in which educational policy and educational funding are going in this country.

Thatcher didn’t comment on the snub, but her spokesperson said, “If they do not wish to confer the honour, the prime minister is the last person to wish to receive it.”

Eventually, however, Thatcher’s political enemies caught up with her. She fought over poll taxes and over water privatization. She called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. And then, in 1990, she left office.

Here is her last speech to Parliament, made on November 22, 1990.

Of course, no one with such sway stays quiet once officially out of politics. Thatcher is thought to have greatly influenced George H.W. Bush in his decisions about the first Gulf War, telling him it was “no time to go wobbly.” She retired from public life in 2002, after a stroke, and it was another stroke that ultimately claimed her life on Monday.

Thatcher was divisive; she was tough; and she was intense. The New York Times closes its obituary of the Iron Lady with this quote:

“Margaret Thatcher evoked extreme feelings,” wrote Ronald Millar, a playwright and speechwriter for the prime minister. “To some she could do no right, to others no wrong. Indifference was not an option. She could stir almost physical hostility in normally rational people, while she inspired deathless devotion in others.”

And while many disagreed with her policies, most agree that her resolve was admirable and her precedent as a woman in charge opened doors for generations after her.

More from Smithsonian.com:

We Prefer Our Leaders to Have Deep Voices, Even If They Are Women