The following is an excerpt of the book Women and Women’s Work, initially published in 2012.

There is general agreement among today’s scientists that the scientific work of women has been historically undervalued. For example, Rosalind Franklin, a British physicist, was responsible for capturing the images that informed our modern understanding of the structures of DNA. \[1\] Her contributions were overshadowed by the work of James Watson and Francis Crick, who relied on her models in assembling their famous double-helix model, but neglected to provide her sufficient credit.

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DNA is a complex molecule composed of nucleotide base pairs which transmits genetic information within living cells.

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The Sagrada Familia has stood, incomplete, as part of the Barcelona skyline since the early phases of its construction in 1882. The project, originally intended to be a cathedral in the gothic style, was begun by the bookseller Joseph Maria Bocabella under the direction of the architect Francisco de Paula del Villar. Del Villar and Bocabella imagined a basilica modeled on the Gothic revival churches Bocabella had seen on trips to Italy. However, Bocabella’s ideal basilica never came to be. In 1883 del Villar resigned from the project, and 30-year old Antoni Gaudi, a young but already well-known architect from Catalonia, took over as lead architect.

Gaudi decided to depart from del Villar’s original Gothic design in favor of a more modern design. The new design was ambitious, featuring eighteen tall spires and four different facades on different sides of the basilica. But work on the new building was slow. Decades passed, and the work was still incomplete. In 1915, Gaudi - now 63 years old - abandoned all other work in favor of dedicating himself to the completion of the monumental church, but progress on the building was still slow. When pressured to speed up work on the monumental building, Gaudi was said to have replied, “My client is not in a hurry.” By the time Gaudi died in 1926, the basilica was only somewhere between 15 and 20 percent complete.

After Gaudi’s death, work stalled between 1936 and 1940 when Civil War broke out in Spain and again as World War II began, leaving the project years behind schedule. During the wars, Catalan anarchists destroyed part of the basilica and the models and designs Gaudi left for the builders, who were forced to reconstruct what plans they could, an arduous and time-consuming process. It took years for the project to get back on track; once it was, it was impossible to know whether additional construction would match Gaudi’s vision.

The Sagrada Familia, one of the most iconic structures in Barcelona, remains unfinished, a constant work-in-progress in the Barcelona skyline. Despite these setbacks, it is open to the public for both religious services and tourism, attracting over three million visitors a year. In fact, tourist entrance fees now pay for annual construction costs. 1

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“Architects estimate that the building is now 70 percent complete and that the structure itself should be finished by 2026, one hundred years after Gaudi’s death."

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The following is an excerpt of an article from Energy & Environmental Science, initially published in 2015.

It wasn’t evident from Stecker’s investigations that “fracking”—shortened from hydraulic fracturing—was correlated with unusual seismic activity. “In assembling our data, we drew from seismometers in the vicinity of more than 400 fracking sites worldwide, including almost 200 in the United States,” Stecker said. \[1\] “We found no significant uptick in seismic activity near fracking sites, much to our surprise,” Stecker said. She also noted, however, that earthquakes aren’t the only potential danger of fracking. “There are claims about groundwater contamination and air pollution that have yet to be sufficiently investigated,” she warned.

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Seismometers are a tool used to measure large underground movements, like those caused by earthquakes and volcanic activity.

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The following is an excerpt from the book J.D. Salinger: Beneath the Stories, initially published in 2006.

Salinger was responsible for, among other works, the collections Franny and Zooey and Nine Stories and the widely acclaimed novel The Catcher and the Rye. \[1\] Despite his notoriety during his lifetime, however, Salinger avoided contact with the outside world whenever possible. His retreat from the public eye began in 1951, soon after the publication of The Catcher in the Rye, and continued until his death in 2010. During those decades, he gave only a handful of interviews, including one published in 1971 usually described as his “last interview.”

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It features Holden Caulfield, a teenager who recounts the story of his expulsion from a Pennsylvania boarding school.

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One of the most influential niche constructors is the earthworm, an organism found almost everywhere on the planet. 1 A scientist only concerned with evolution would predict that, in order to live on land, earthworms would have to significantly change. Earthworms didn’t change their physiology a great amount, however, instead, they changed the soil to make it more like the ocean in order to survive. Land with earthworms is less compacted, is more nutrient rich, and better mixed than land without them – leading to monumental changes in the ecosystem.

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Earthworms were originally aquatic organisms that were ill-equipped to survive on land.

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The following is an excerpt of an article from American Theatre, initially published in 2012.

The modern musical, as enjoyed by millions of yearly theatregoers in New York, London, and across the world, has its foundations in the work of composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Their musical Oklahoma!, premiering on Broadway in 1943, is often cited as the first real entry in the “Golden Age” of musical theater. \[1\] Oklahoma! was celebrated by critics and audiences alike for its libretto, or “book,” which served to weave its songs together into a coherent story. The duo went on to write nearly a dozen more “book” musicals, most of which were critical and commercial successes.

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Previous musicals had typically featured many popular songs with little connection to one another.

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The following is an excerpt of an article from Popular Science, initially published in 2017.

Since their inception, Rorschach inkblots—named after Hermann Rorschach, the Swiss psychoanalyst who invented them—have been known to confuse the visual cortex. We tend to see what we want to see in them. And although their use in psychology has been debunked (whether you see a butterfly or a dancing clown in an image is not a reliable indication of your mental state), why we see different things at all remains a puzzle.

The idea for the new study came about because physicist Richard Taylor is developing bionic eyes to cure blindness in people who have had diseases of the retina. \[1\]

To understand why Rorschach inkblots have this enigmatic effect, Taylor and his team at the University of Oregon took lots of blots and analyzed them to see if they were fractals. Fractals are patterns that repeat themselves across different scales.

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“In order to do that,” said Taylor, “we have to understand what normal vision is doing.”

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With increasing frequency, those who hope to work professionally in computer science are forgoing the traditional route to a career in tech—enrolling at a university in hopes eventually of securing an internship—in favor of a more modern approach. \[1\] Much instructional material for computer science is available for free online, and several websites have emerged offering accelerated courses in coding at a fraction of the cost of a university education. A growing number of those hired by tech giants like Google and Facebook each year have no “formal” background in computer science, but nonetheless perform at or above the level of their college-educated coworkers.

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The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has one of the best computer science programs in the country, offering concentrations in a number of specific technical areas.

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Evolutionary biologists have long believed that Canis lupus familiaris, the modern dog, is a direct evolutionary descendant of Canis lupus, the gray wolf. Recent developments in genomic sequencing have helped substantiate this belief, as the genetic differences which distinguish dogs from wolves can now be catalogued and studied at the smallest possible scale. \[1\] Data extrapolated from genomic sequencing now suggests that dogs were domesticated approximately 15,000 years ago.

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Archaeological evidence has long indicated that dogs, as we know them today, have existed for at least 14,000 years.

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For thousands of years, cooking was considered more of a practice than a science. Much of what chefs and food scientists alike knew about cooking came from conventional wisdom rather than carefully designed research. For individuals who considered cooking to be an art rather than a science, this seemed to be for the best; however, for physicist Nicholas Kurti and chemist Herve This, the lack on empirical knowledge around what we eat was not just an affront to science. It was a challenge. In 1988 the pair coined the term “molecular gastronomy,” which they defined as the investigation of the physical and chemical transformation that ingredients undergo during the course of cooking. They argued that if chefs understood these processes, they could produce dishes improved by the findings. 1

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"The pair’s philosophy came from the Enlightenment thinkers of the 18th century, who believed that everything could be categorized and systematized."

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