Science Cheerleader

Really doesn’t have much to do with the dino sculpture my son created, next to the THANG  on our family’s fireplace matel. But I bet Carl Zimmer has a guess. I recall the time I brought this heavy THANG into HIS office at Discover. Back when HE had a windowed office and I did not. Cut me a break, HE was 28, I was still young…and, oh yeah, there was that AAAS award he won for “God-like writers under the age of 30″.

I asked, genuflecting upon entering his office, as we all did: “Carl, what do you think this is? My father-in-law found it in a local, Long Beach Island, NJ, fishing shop.”

HE said: “Looks like a Mastodon tooth, maybe a molar. Probably a young one because it’s not worn down too far. You should take this to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philly, near where you live,  and I bet they can tell you more.”

So I did. I pulled the THANG out of my baby’s diaper bag, and asked the resident paleontologist: “What do you think this THANG is?”

He replied: “WHERE DID YOU GET THAT? DID YOU STEAL THAT?!”

I spent the next hour ’splainin’ the situation. Hey, Carl, back then, they never heard of YOU. The best thing I had going for me was the real baby in the real baby stroller…and two, twenty dollar bills.

But I digress.

I never did learn more about the origins of this tooth. Who knows more about this tooth? Closest to the tooth-truth earns a Tshirt. And now that I FINALLY have some street-cred with the National Academy of Sciences, I know I can find the answer there if you all fail.

This morning, the BBC reports the British Library will interview and record 200 scientists to form a permanent record of the way British science has been practiced.

“This is going to be enormously valuable to future historians because people no longer write letters or prepare archives,” said Sir Nicholas Goodison, chairman of National Life Stories, in an interview with the BBC. “E-mail is very difficult to archive and is mostly deleted by the people that write them.”

In fact, a study prompting this project found that at least nine British Nobel winners have died in the past 10 years “leaving little or no archive of their work”.

This archive will focus on four themes: inventions, climate change, biomedicine and cosmology, and an advisory board will help select the scientists to be interviewed. According to the BBC report, selected scientists and engineers will be interviewed about their “childhood, education, influences, relationships and frustrations to build up a picture of how science has been practiced”.

(Thanks to @mardixon for sharing this with us.)

I had so much fun doing Science Cheers with 1,500 kids at a Temple University basketball game yesterday. Those kids were awesome! Thanks for the invite, Temple and thanks for the assistance Hootie and Temple cheerleaders! Stepping on campus brought back a flood of wonderful memories. Goooo Owls! I’ll post the video shortly. I’ll be in San Francisco, L.A., Jacksonville, Washington, D.C., and NYC in the coming months. If you’d like me to get some Science Cheers going at a location near you, just email me at Darlene@sciencecheerleader.com
“LET’S go, SCI-ence,” clap, clap, clap-clap-clap! “4, 3, 2, 1, Science is for EVERYONE!”

Thanks, John, for sharing this from Utne.com, “a digest of independent ideas and alternative culture. Not right, not left, but forward thinking. Most interested in creating a conversation about everything from the environment to the economy, politics to pop culture.”   (Or “poop culture” in this case!)

From Utne.com:

Offices around the world struggle for good uses for all the computer paper they waste every day. One company has a solution: Turn it into toilet paper. A company called Oriental is marketing a machine called White Goat that shreds old office paper and converts it directly into ready-to-use toilet paper. Watch a video of it below:

This is Regina, our latest addition to our collection of Sexy Scientists and Engineers. Sure, she cheered for the Washington Redskins but she’s also held a beating heart. True story (read on).

Regina graduated from college with a major in Molecular Biology and a minor in Chemistry. She won a scholarship from the National Institutes of Health to spend summers doing biomed research at Stanford and Yale. She was a Molecular Biologist at the National Institutes of Health researching the genes that cause rare skin diseases (she found a few and had papers published in Nature Genetics, Human Genetics and The Journal of Dermatological Science).  Then she went to law school at Georgetown University while she was a Redskins cheerleader (Georgetown rescheduled her final exams so she could participate in the swimsuit calendar photo shoot!)   Also during law school she competed in a few pageants and was 1st Runner-up to Miss D.C. USA. Oh, she’s licensed to practice law in the District of Columbia as well as the United States Supreme Court. She worked as a patent attorney until science called her back to medical school. She earned an M.D. and took up a surgery internship in Texas and now she’s putting it all together by earning a LL.M., an advanced law degree she plans to someday apply to a career in health law as in-house council at a hospital. She’s also an adjunct professor teaching anatomy and physiology to nursing students and has her sights set on competing in pageants and trying out for another professional team this year.

I had a chance to interview Regina. (Thanks to Laura Eilers at Going Pro Entertaining for letting me know about Regina! Laura and I are coproducing a Stage Show at the USA Science and Engineering Festival in October in Washington, D.C. Watch Pro Cheerleaders-turned-Scientists perform on stage then chat with them in the Science Cheerleader exhibit and learn how they bridge two seemingly different worlds.)
Regina, tell us what turned you onto science.  I have been interested in science as long as I can remember.  When I was 4 I would dig around in the backyard looking for worms and insects and then bring them in and look at them under a microscope I got as a Christmas present.  My grandmother was also a nurse so that also gave me the inspiration to pursue a science related career.

Do you find that being a cheerleader helped or hindered your professional experiences. Were you taken seriously? I don’t think being a cheerleader has hurt my professional experience and I have always included it on my resume.  I can be a very shy person in person so people are often surprised to find out that I was a professional cheerleader.  It helps break the ice and most people find it different and interesting.  When I was in medical school they put my Redskin Cheerleader picture in the admissions catalog.  People do tell me that “I don’t look like a Doctor” which occasionally hurts my feelings (what exactly should a doctor look like?).

How did you balance two seemingly different worlds of science and cheerleading? The balance has been pretty easy for me.  People always tell me that I am the queen of multitasking, I am always doing multiple unrelated things at once.  Although they are seemingly two different worlds, I have learned things from each that help the other.

What are typical reactions you’ve received when people learn about your cheerleading days? They are usually surprised (especially when they see the pictures).  People that know me when I was younger (even in college), know that I was extremely shy.  When I was in my early 20’s I decided to start competing in pageants to help me break out of my shyness and become more comfortable speaking in public.  That is how I got involved with cheerleading.

What were typical reactions when folks learned about your science/law studies, when you were a cheerleader? Actually when I was a cheerleader there were 2 other law students and 1 lawyer on the team.

Tell me a little about your favorite courses you took to prepare for your professional career. My favorite courses would have to be anatomy and health law.

Why science AND law? When I was working at NIH and was trying to figure out what I wanted to do long term as a career my boss would give me articles about alternative science careers.  That is how I became interested in patent law.  There are so many ways that science, medicine and law are entangled and I love being apart of all of these field.

Do you have any advice for middle or high school girls who might feel torn between following one dream (cheerleading or dancing) associated with beauty or following another (science/engineering) usually associated with, well, geeks? My advice to girls would be to do both (follow both dreams) and, although it may be hard, to ignore the negative comments.  Cheerleading, dancing, pageants are all fantastic activities that you can learn so much from (teamwork, public speaking, fitness, etc.).  In addition to that there are so many interesting careers in science, medicine, engineering, etc.  Study hard, but continue to take dance lessons, continue to be a cheerleader or continue to compete in pageants.  Don’t let anyone talk you out of enjoying cheerleading or pageant activities and don’t let anyone talk you out of any career in the sciences.  I am prime example of someone that can be a so called “geek” yet still be a cheerleader, etc. at the same time!

Best “cheerleading” moment? It would have to be a tie between running out of the tunnel for the very first time and being asked to autograph my swimsuit calendar picture for the first time.

Best science moment? The first time I touched a beating heart (it makes you realize how fragile and precious life is).

As if we needed another reason to despise mosquitoes… Thanks, Leila, for sharing this fascinating video with us. It shows the dangers of malaria and how easily it spreads.

This recent article about science and music over at  Jemsite featured the Science Cheerleader AND my sister-in-law, Debbie Cavalier from the hit kids’ music group, Debbie and Friends. Totally made my day!

Here’s the photo that accompanies the article…nope, I’m not in there

John-the-Tourist writes:

When: 4:00 am, February 10th, 2010
Where: My bedroom, about 30 miles west of Chicago, Illinois, USA…

Me: Zzzzz, Snort, Zzzzzz

Earth: RUMBLE, RUMBLE, THUNK!

Me (eyes popping open): What the hell was that?  An earthquake?

My wife, Lynn: Zzzzzz, snort, zzzzz.

Me (internal dialog): Maybe Lynn knocked the  book she was reading out of bed?  Hmmmm, probability of Lynn dropping the book = moderate.  Probability of earthquake near Chicago = low.  Occam’s razor* implies that it was Lynn’s book.**

Me: Zzzzz, Snort, Zzzzzz

Well, we actually did have a 3.8 magnitude trembler west of Chicago.  For those of you who live in areas of the world where there are three earthquakes every day before lunch, this news is rather ho-hum.  However, for those of us living in the Midwest of the USA, an earthquake is a novel event.

At first blush, one would think that Occam’s philosophical whisker-whacker failed, but since I didn’t jump out of bed to verify that a book fell into a gravity well or run to the computer to check the U.S. Geological Survey website, I did not examine the available evidence in order to answer the question at hand.  In other words, my scientific logic was faulty, so Occam slices and dices again.  However, my faulty logic did buy me 2 more hours of sleep.

The earthquake had a slight effect on high energy particle physics at Fermi National Accelerator Lab as reported by Fermilab Today…

Tilt meters strapped to Fermilab’s magnets recorded the vibrations at the laboratory. The earthquake shook the magnets and caused the beam to strike a collimater, losing its store.

Want to be a earth citizen scientist?   Check out Science for Citizen’s entry for “Did you feel it?” which allows you to enter information about your earthquake experience directly to the USGS.

So, what’s shakin’ near Chicago?  The earth, accelerator magnets and bedrooms.

* Occam’s Razor the philosophical concept, not Occam’s Razor, the Science Cheerleader.

** Yes, I actually did have this internal dialog with myself at 4:00 am in the morning.  What can I say?  I’m weird in this way.

Image Credit:  Fermilab Today

Thanks to The Rugbyologist for sending this.