WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD: FIRST FEMALE MP IN BRITAIN

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/06/00/3EF8F35100000578-4384314-Pioneer_Viscountess_Astor_the_first_woman_to_sit_in_Parliament_a-a-3_1491433277473.jpg
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/04/06/00/3EF8F35100000578-4384314-Pioneer_Viscountess_Astor_the_first_woman_to_sit_in_Parliament_a-a-3_1491433277473.jpg

Pioneer: Viscountess Astor the first woman to sit in Parliament as an MP, photographed in 1919. At the height of their influence, the Astors were one of the five great American dynasties with the Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Carnegies and Mellons

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4384314/120-years-Girls-Pearls.html#ixzz4dVnsv9pa

Women who changed the world

                     WOMEN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD


https://www.facebook.com/nobelprize/videos/10153429404604103/

Spanish women in science.

"There were women among the beneficiaries of the Board's programs. Thus, in the most important research center of Spain at that time, "Rockefeller", which took the name of the Foundation that had financed its construction, there were 36 women out of a total of 158 researchers, who constituted a brilliant germ of the feminine presence in Spanish science. Unfortunately their careers were truncated with the Spanish civil war (1936-1939). Their stories will begin to be known thanks to the work that Carmen Magallón Portolés initiated with her work Spanish Women Pioneers of the sciences, published in 1999."   (Free translation from article)

http://elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/10/ciencia/1486724300_968930.html?id_externo_rsoc=FB_CChttp://elpais.com/elpais/2017/02/10/ciencia/1486724300_968930.html?id_externo_rsoc=FB_CC

Uta Frith discoveries on autism and dyslexia

"No matter what the IQ of a person with autism – and the spectrum is huge – some degree of social impairment is universal. "The brain is not like a pudding; it is more like an exquisite, traditional engine." People with autism who lack theory of mind are missing the "tiny gadget in the big engine that allows us effortlessly to take into account what another person wishes, believes and thinks".

Theory of mind:  the intuition about what is going on in another person's head.

But she had never been happy with the lack-of-bonding thesis. The counter-proposal, that autism was organic – nature, not nurture – was a dramatic reversal. (Comparably, she would later destigmatise dyslexia, showing it to be separate from environment and intelligence; her work on reading development and spelling has been highly influential.)

Frith talks enthusiastically about advances in neuroscience and what technology has made possible. "We can make things visible with unbelievable precision and look inside neurons to see how information travels. But what I am looking for is macroscopic – the mind." About the autistic mind, she remains "intrigued and mystified as ever I was". But she is nothing if not optimistic. Will we ever understand how the brain works? "Yes," she answers decisively, "by the end of this century."

Extracted from:  

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/feb/24/uta-frith-autism-neuroscience-rational

https://www.theguardian.com/science/audio/2017/feb/01/cross-section-uta-frith-science-weekly-podcast

Maryam Mirzakhani, professor of mathematics at Stanford University. She was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, most prestigious prize in Math.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/aug/13/interview-maryam-mirzakhani-fields-medal-winner-mathematician

Black women scientists: Katherine Johnson

Shaunda Roberson saved to Contributing Factors

"In an age of racism and sexism, Katherine Johnson broke both barriers at NASA. She calculated the trajectory of man’s first trip to the moon, and was such an accurate mathematician that John Glenn asked her to double-check NASA’s computers. To top it off, she did it all as a black woman in the 1950s and ’60s, when women at NASA were not even invited to meetings. And you’ve probably never heard of her."

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/492581277977112064/

http://www.thedailybeast.com/videos/2016/04/07/the-human-computer-behind-the-moon-landing-was-a-black-woman.html

Trailer of Hidden Figures film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK8xHq6dfAo

Gravity: From Aristotle to Einstein, by Erik Gregersen

"This view of why objects fall reigned until the scientific revolution that began in the Renaissance. “Standing on the shoulders of giants” like Kepler and Galileo, Isaac Newton realized that the apple falling to the ground and the Moon orbiting Earth were subject to the same gravitational force. The force was proportional to the mass of the two bodies attracting each other and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. (That is, when two bodies are twice as far apart as they were before, the gravitational attraction is 1/[2×2], or ¼ as strong.) The force operated between everything in the universe and explained the motions of the Moon and the planets very well.

Well, almost. Newtonian gravity had its triumphs. It was used to predict the location of the then unknown planet Neptune. However, for Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, Newton’s law was not quite as accurate in predicting the location of the planet’s perihelion (the point in its orbit where it is the closest to the Sun) as it was for the others. This point seemed to move about the Sun, and the motion vexed astronomers until Einstein introduced his theory of general relativity in 1915, in which gravity is not a force reaching out across the universe but is a bending of space-time around a massive object. The orbits of the planets and the apples falling to the ground follow the shape of space-time."

https://www.britannica.com/story/gravity-from-apples-to-the-universe