Real Women Talk About Their Careers in Science
A year ago the European Union launched a campaign to attract more young women into the scientific professions. In Europe, women lag behind men in science and engineering, making up only a third of science researchers. But the video the EU made was laughable.
You may recall. It was called, Science: It’s a Girl Thing! and featured three young fashionistas parading around in high heels while a male scientist peers quizzically at them over his microscope.
Along comes science journalist Kerstin Hoppenhaus to set the record straight. Hoppenhaus’s new series for the German science site SciLogs is called Significant Details: Conversations with Women in Science. The interviews are fresh, informative, and accessible.
It’s inspiring to see such a range of women explain their research and walk us through their process for doing it.
A recent interview featured Dr. Kristen Panfilio (above), an American biologist on faculty at the University of Cologne. Panfilio’s work focuses on insect extraembryonic development, which means she studies how insect tissues develop into the bug’s ultimate shape by comparing the process in two insects: the milkweed bug and the red flour beetle.
Each conversation begins with a “significant detail” of the woman’s work. With the wry humor and precision of a true scientist, Panfilio demonstrates how she prepares her favorite tool, a glass stick, by softening the end with a cigarette lighter.
Panfilio’s specific field is evolutionary developmental genetics. Along with her lab assistants she studies how embryonic cells know what role they should play in forming a specific organism shape. How does a bone cell know it’s a bone cell?
The interview is about as much like Science: It’s a Girl Thing! as Meryl Streep is like Lindsay Lohan. This is a real person talking about how she has built her career (she wanted to be an artist when she was a teenager and studied ancient Chinese history at a small liberal arts college) and explaining her highly specialized work.
She also touches on one of the most wonderful things about scientific research: Some of the most exciting moments are when the results don’t align at all with expectations.
Best of all, it’s just one of the wonderful interviews in Hoppenhaus’s series.
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Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Follow her on Twitter @mskaterix and visit her website to learn more.
Read More...
Paul McCartney Talks Beatles & Wings with Stephen Colbert, Performs 6 Songs Live
The Colbert Report opened last night with a segment called “Stephen Colbert’s Tribute to Having Paul McCartney on His Show, Featuring Paul McCartney, With Special Guest Stephen Colbert.” And, for the next 12 minutes, Paul and Stephen covered a lot of ground. Because McCartney has just released material from Wings — a 1976 concert film called Rockshow and a reissue of Wings Over America — the conversation begins with the Wings era: how Macca started all over again; drove to gigs in a van, with no hotel reservations booked; eventually recorded a fine album (Band on the Run) in Nigeria, amidst a cholera outbreak; and began performing live for the first time in years … which led to inevitable questions about the Beatles: why they stopped performing live in 1966, and how their songwriting evolved. It all ends with interviewer and interviewee singing a charming duet of Irving Berlin’s 1936 classic “Cheek to Cheek.” Later, McCartney treated the Colbert crowd to six songs. We’ve embedded a couple of clips below. You can watch the full 60-minute show here.
Listen to What the Man Said
Birthday
via Rolling Stone
Read More...The Greatness of Charles Darwin Explained with Rap Music
Read Open Culture long enough, and sooner or later you’ll encounter “geek rapper” Baba Brinkman, the Canadian MC whose rhyming subjects of choice include evolution, The Canterbury Tales, and British versus Canadian English. Though the hard-reading Brinkman has, it seems, staked out the musical genre of “lit hop” for himself, he’s gained just as much of his distinctive brand of rigorously factual hip-hop notoriety by rapping for the other of what C.P. Snow defined as the “two cultures.” His parallel science rapping career began on a commission from University of Warwick microbiologist and Rough Guide to Evolution author Mark Pallen. Out of all this came “the first peer-reviewed rap” show, The Rap Guide to Evolution, whose development we’ve previously featured.
Above, you’ll find the music video for “Artifical Selection,” one song from The Rap Guide to Evolution. “Artificial selection, it starts with a question,” Brinkman raps. “How did people ever get cows, chickens and pigs / And other animals and plants to act so domestic? / We took them from the wild and we bred them, brethren.” He explores the topic further, touching on Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species, the inadvertent usage of evolution by early farmers and livestock breeders, domestic aphids kept by ant colonies, and even the natural selection inherent in the MC’s development of his performance techniques. On Brinkman’s official site, the video comes with tags like “Heredity,” “Lamarkism,” and “Unity of Common Descent.” How many rap videos could credibly do the same?
Related Content:
Baba Brinkman: The Rap Guide to Evolution
What’s Your English? British v. Canadian Rap Battle
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Download 60 Free History Courses from Great Universities
The History section of our big Free Online Courses collection just went through another update, and it now features 60 courses. Some courses (like those featured below) focus on broad time periods and themes. Others take a look at more specialized topics that will keep you engaged for hours. All lectures were taped right in the classrooms of great universities:
- Ancient Greek History — YouTube — iTunes Audio — iTunes Video- Download Course – Donald Kagan, Yale
- China: Traditions and Transformations – Multiple Formats – Peter K. Bol & William Kirby, Harvard
- European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present - YouTube - iTunes Video — Web — Thomas Lacquer, UC Berkeley
- History of the World to 1500 CE – YouTube - iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
- History of the World Since 1500 CE – YouTube — iTunes Video – Richard Bulliet, Columbia University
- The Western Tradition (Video) – YouTube – Eugen Weber, UCLA
- US History: From Civil War to Present — iTunes Audio — Web — Jennifer Burns, UC Berkeley
As you can see, the courses listed here are generally available via YouTube, iTunes, or the web. And they’re all listed in our meta collection of 700 Free Online Courses. Other key disciplines found in the collection include Philosophy, Literature, Physics, Computer Science and beyond.
Find us on Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus and we’ll make it easy to share intelligent media with your friends!
Read More...The Original 1940s Superman Cartoon: Watch 17 Classic Episodes Free Online
On the eve of yet another Superman movie reboot—coming tomorrow with all the usual summer hit fanfare and noise—take a moment before gorging yourself on popcorn and extravagant CGI spectacles to reflect on the character’s enduringly simple origins. After all, this month marks the 75th anniversary of this most iconic of American superheroes, who first appeared in the June 1938 Action Comics #1. The brainchild of Cleveland high school students Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (so memorably fictionalized in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Superman is what Neil Gaiman calls an archetypal “primal thing,” a character who can be reinvented every decade while still remaining unmistakably himself.
Witness, for example, the first appearance of Superman on the big screen in the 1941 Fleischer cartoon (top), Superman (or The Mad Scientist)—the first in a series of seventeen shorts. On the heels of the first non-print adaptation of the character—the Adventures of Superman radio drama (listen below)—the cartoon series shows us the original Siegel and Shuster hero, a rough-and-tumble space alien raised in an orphanage, not by the kindly Kents in rural America.
You’ll notice however, that Superman’s resume—more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings… etc.—hasn’t changed a bit. But some of the character’s attributes and origins were considerably softened after DC Comics editor Whitney Ellsworth instituted a code of superhero ethics (many years before the Comics Code Authority stepped in to censor the whole industry).
You can learn even more about Superman’s origins from his creators themselves, interviewed in the clip above for the 1981 BBC documentary Superman: The Comic Strip Hero. Siegel reveals how the idea for Superman came to him during one restless night in which he composed all of the basic script for the character, “an entirely new concept.” The very next day, Shuster sat down at his drawing board and Superman’s look emerged fully-formed. Both creators and their heirs have won and lost high-profile lawsuits over rights to their characters. But legal wrangling over compensation aside, there’s no denying that their mad eureka moment left an indelible cultural legacy no updated film, logo, or controversy can diminish.
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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Washington, DC. Follow him at @jdmagness
Read More...250,000 Artworks from 250 Museums, Now Viewable for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project
Yesterday we featured the National Gallery of Art’s site NGA Images, where you can download 25,000 high-quality digital images of that museum’s works of art. Today, why not have a look at Google Art Project? Though we’ve posted about it before, you’ll want to check out its slick new redesign — not to mention its expanded collection, which now includes more than 250,000 works of art from over 250 museums. TechCrunch’s Frederic Lardenois writes that the latest iteration of Google Art Project’s “improved search tools now make it significantly easier to filter any list of artworks by artist, place, data and related events. [ … ] Some of the most important artworks are also available as gigapixel images. Many museums also allow you to browse their galleries using Google Street View.”
The collections newly added to Google Art Project come from institutions as far- and wide-ranging as Kuwait’s al Sabah Collection, Japan’s Kawabara Memorial DIC Museum of Art, Denmark’s Statens Museum for Kunst, and Australia’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. At the top, we have an image of Sunkwan Kwon’s “A Man in Stripe Shirt Who is Dropping His Head for a Long Time After Phone Call,” made available in the Korean Art Museum Association collection. But don’t look at the image in this post; look at the piece’s entry in Google Art Project, which lets you scroll and zoom as you please. And you will want to zoom, since Kwon’s very large-format photography demands close attention to detail. At such a high resolution, you can pay that attention, looking right into the windows and observing the people behind them. Viewers, as the work’s description says, “should keep having tenacious questions that ask who the characters are, why they show tense expressions on their face and what their situations are.”
Related Content:
The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online
Download Hundreds of Free Art Catalogs from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Free: The Guggenheim Puts 65 Modern Art Books Online
Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
Read More...Hear A Young Bob Dylan Sing 11 Songs and Tell Tall Tales on a 1962 Radio Show
In February of 1962, less than a month before the release of his debut album, an obscure young folk singer named Bob Dylan recorded some songs and an interview for a local New York City radio show called Folksinger’s Choice.
The show was broadcast on WBAI and hosted by Cynthia Gooding, an established folk singer 17 years older than Dylan. As it happened, both Gooding and Dylan were native Minnesotans. Gooding had first met Dylan in Minneapolis in late 1959, not long after he graduated from high school.
As the interview gets rolling, the 20-year-old Dylan wastes little time before launching into some tall tales about his past. He says he moved to Minneapolis from South Dakota, because Minneapolis was “about the only place you didn’t have to go too far to find the Mississippi River.” Before that, he says, he traveled with a carnival, “off and on for about six years.” When Gooding asks whether that might have interfered with his schooling, Dylan doesn’t miss a beat. “Well,” he says, “I skipped a bunch of things, and I didn’t go to school a bunch of years and I skipped this and that.” He says he wrote a song for the “elephant lady” in the carnival and called it “Won’t You Buy A Postcard?” But he quickly adds that he forgot how it went.
- “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle” (Hank Williams/Jimmie Davis)
- “Fixin’ to Die” (Bukka White)
- “Smokestack Lighning” (Howlin’ Wolf)
- “Hard Travelin’ ” (Woody Guthrie)
- “The Death of Emmett Till” (Bob Dylan)
- “Standing on the Highway” (Bob Dylan)
- “Roll on John” (Rufus Crisp)
- “Stealin’ ” (traditional)
- “It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad” (traditional)
- “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (Big Joe Williams)
- “Hard Times in New York Town” (Bob Dylan)
Related content:
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Two Legends Together: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on the Studs Terkel Program, 1963
Read More...Listen to Freddie Mercury’s Wondrous Piano and Vocal Tracks for “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975)
Maybe you liked hearing Freddie Mercury and David Bowie belt out the vocal track for the 1981 hit, ‘Under Pressure.’ Well, here’s another one for you: Freddie Mercury’s piano and vocal tracks for the Queen classic, “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Although the song was released on the 1975 album A Night at the Opera, Freddie Mercury first began working on the epic song during the late 1960s, often using his piano at home.
According to the 2011 documentary Queen: The Days of Our Lives (watch it here), Mercury took ideas for three songs and knitted them into one complex operatic ballad. It was long enough (almost six minutes) that it seemed unlikely to get any radio play. The music execs begged Mercury to simplify things, to pare things down, but he didn’t relent. It was all or nothing. And the recording process equaled the complexity of the song. Six different studios were used along the way, with Mercury trying to help the band record the sprawling song he had mapped out in his mind.
The first video above features Mercury’s piano track that forms the backbone of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” On it, Mercury plays a Bechstein concert grand piano, which otherwise appears in the famous video that promoted the song. The second video above features the isolated vocal parts. During the grueling recording sessions, Mercury, Brian May and Roger Taylor spent 10–12 hours each day working on the vocals. And finally, for good measure, we’ve added below a fresh reminder of what a beautiful thing Queen created almost 40 years ago. Filmed just last week, the clip features a crowd of 60,000 singing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” before the start of a Green Day concert in London. I’ll just leave it with that.
World Records: New Photo Exhibit Pays Tribute to the Era of Vinyl Records & Turntables
Just yesterday, The New York Times ran a piece declaring that vinyl is back. Once a casualty of the CD, vinyl records are now selling at a steady clip, and not just to nostalgic sexagenarians. Younger music fans are embracing old-school records, frankly because they deliver a better sound than compressed MP3s. When Daft Punk released its latest album Random Access Memories last month, 19,000 vinyl copies were sold, representing about 6% of overall sales. And that may be a lowball number.
There is, of course, a nostalgic component to the vinyl revival. We fondly reminisce about the days when music had other tangible and aesthetic dimensions. Remember when you could feel the weight of the records, study the cover designs, revel in the liner notes, then slip the discs onto the turntable and watch them spin? Those memories get captured by a new photo exhibit — “World Records” — being held at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Angeles from June 8 to July 13. It features the work of Kai Schaefer, who has photographed over 100 classic albums on an array of turntables. Above, you’ll find a copy of Miles Davis’ jazz classic, Kind of Blue, sitting on a Rekokut B‑12GH. Other favorites of ours include London Calling by The Clash on a B&O Beogram 4004, The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street on a Dual1010, and VU’s The Velvet Underground & Nico on a Thorens TD 124II. You can visit a larger online gallery of photos here.
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Neil Young on the Travesty of MP3s
Neil Young Busts a Music Store for Selling a Bootleg CSNY Album (1971)
Read More...Do You Drink Soda, Pop or Soft Drinks?: 122 Heatmaps Visualize How People Talk in America
Click each map for larger image
Americans use words differently in different regions of the country—a “moot” or “mute” point? There’s a grammatical argument to be made here for sure, but for a simple yes or no answer check out a series of new maps released by statistician Joshua Katz.
The maps are of the continental United States (Alaska and Hawaii are not included for geographical proximity purposes) and they reveal delightfully quirky trends. Some relate to things you might think of yourself: How do you pronounce aunt? (most respondents would say “ant” while those in New England would say “ahnt.”) Other questions get at more obscure (and questionable) regional differences, like drive-through liquor stores.
When most of the people on television sound like they’re from some generic American city with no accent or idioms, it’s easy to lose track of local dialect. How would you pronounce “caramel”? Differently, according to Katz’s maps, if you’re from the Eastern Seaboard than if you’re from the West or Midwest. And “pecan” has at least four different regional pronunciations.
It turns out that many Americans would call a bug that flies around in the summer and has a rear section that lights up a “firefly.” Many would also call it a “lightning bug” and perhaps just as many would use the two words interchangeably.
I’m not sure I’d want to be in either Michigan or New Jersey on the night before Halloween.
Katz is a graduate student at North Carolina State University. He designed the maps to reflect responses to 122 questions about pronunciation and word usage based on research originally conducted by Professor Bert Vaux at Harvard University.
via Kottke
Related Content:
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Speaking in Whistles: The Whistled Language of Oaxaca, Mexico
Steven Pinker Explains the Neuroscience of Swearing (NSFW)
Kate Rix writes about digital media and education. Visit to see more of her work or follow her on Twitter @mskaterix.
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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