Youth Radio - Topic: Science

New Initiative Hopes To Get Climate Change In Class Curriculums

squevedo — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:26:02 -0600

Climate change is starting to become a problem and I’m not strictly speaking to the melting ice caps or extreme weather—it’s creating a problem for teachers too. The debate about integrating climate change into class curriculums is one that is (no pun intended) starting to heat up. That’s why the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) has launched a new initiative to support the teaching of climate change in classrooms.

The initiative is sure to ruffle some feather but Robert Luhn, Director of Communications at NCSE, says the chances of finding a way to please those on both sides of the debate are slim. “You have to remember that science is not a matter of opinion. Science is about empirical data and what we can prove,” he said, “'Teaching the debate', as it’s often called, is really a smoke screen from deniers. Do you find yourself going into chemistry class and seeing someone teaching alchemy? Of course not. There’s no science behind it. It’s the same reason you don’t find someone teaching creationism and evolution at the same time.”

Luhn also says that not teaching about climate change is an issue, but often times uninformed teaching can pose a problem too. “Those that are [teaching about climate change] might not teaching it well because it’s a complex topic. We need more resources for teachers to really learn about the subject.”

Coming To A Mall Near You, Android Mannequins!

squevedo — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:19:27 -0600

As if mannequins weren’t already creepy enough Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University in conjunction with Takashimiya, a department store in Tokyo, has developed an android mannequin that interacts with shoppers. The android, who as far as I can tell doesn’t really have a name, sits in the display window of a store, staring at her phone and yawning. She apparently is capable of 40 different facial expressions, though in the video she appears to only know how to look bored, creepy, or tired.

Dr Hiroshi Ishiguro has been developing Geminoid android robots for a while. The androids, which are nearly-human looking besides they’re eerily perfect skin and emotionless eyes have appeared at the Ars Electronica Festival and in Denmark. Though the human presence—in other words, the ability to interact like humans—has yet to be developed Ishiguro says he hopes to see these mannequins gain a human touch and maybe eventually make their way to major stores in the U.S at some point.

Check out the video below to see the mannequin in action.

Greg Niemeyer Creates New Music For a New Problem

squevedo — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:41:02 -0600

What does the phrase "emotional science" mean to you? For some, it implies psychology. For Greg Niemeyer, a tenured associate professor in UC Berkeley's department in New Media, "emotional science" means science that stimulates and engages. Niemeyer is also the director of the Data and Democracy Initiative at CITRIS, The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, which looks to utilize technology and science to help individuals makes democratic and conscious decisions about the world around them. Their latest project, Sevenairs, takes the air quality measurements in California and turns them into music.

Turnstyle News: How does this project relate to the work being done by the Data and Democracy Initiative?

Greg Niemeyer: Well, as citizens we have the right to breathe but we also have the right to pollute. And we need to have a lot of information about the quality of air we breathe in order to make meaningful choices about how the air quality affects our health. So if we can think about different ways of looking at, understanding and learning about air quality and voicing our concerns about it we can make better decisions about both our exposure to pollution and sources of pollution and that will make us more free and active citizens.

Turnstyle: Why is music the chosen medium to present this data?

Niemeyer: In this particular project we used music because we wanted to make the experience of data suspenseful. When you look at the Sevenairs website you can see that music is playing and data is scrolling, and you can see how air quality measurement data makes certain sounds happen. So what happens is that you want to see what happens next. That slight element of suspense we find makes people look at the data more closely and they think, “That sound was interesting. I wonder what caused that spike in the air pollution?” It’s supposed to be more engaging than straight-up data would be. So the idea is how can we make looking at air quality fun?

It’s like, how interesting is a thermometer? It goes up and down, up and down. And it’s not very interesting if you turn it into numbers either. But if you say, “Hey, is it colder or hotter than it was yesterday?” Suddenly that’s an interesting piece of information. The same is true for air quality, how can we make it interesting? We can show that it changes dramatically. At the moment it’s a little more dramatic than plain data, and music certainly helps [to show that].

Turnstyle: Are you a musician yourself?

Niemeyer: No, I’m not. I’m just a new media artist. My colleague Chris Chaffe from Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford, is the composer of this piece. We’ve been working together for many years, since 2001, and we’ve dealt with the "musification" of data in that time.

Turnstyle: One of your projects is called the Tomato Quintet. In that project you used the gases produced by tomatoes during ripening to create music. Another collaboration with Chaffe?

Niemeyer: That’s correct, we worked on that together. Tomatoes produce certain gases such as Ethylene and CO2 while they ripen, while they turn from green to red. The redder they get the more C02 and Ethylene they produce, and we can measure that and turn it into music.

Turnstyle: And what did that sound like? I noticed that the pollution music had sort of an eerie tone.

Niemeyer: The tomatoes produced a kind of salsa music. It was very rhythmic. It was not quite as eerie. There were four channels of music: One was salsa music, one was a kind of crackling sound, one was the sound of wind, and one was the sound of a flute. Those four channels together created quite a musical landscape. It was a little unusual. Sevanairs is just one single take on two channels of data. So there’s one flute and one guitar.

Turnstyle: Is setting the musical tone a conscious decision or does it just come about organically?

Niemeyer: We made those decisions based on what we wanted it to feel like. So we wanted the tomato quintet to be sort of festive and fun. Ideally we wanted the people who came to see the ripening tomatoes to start dancing and produce more carbon dioxide from exhaling, because then the carbon dioxide would get the tomatoes to ripen faster. The whole thing would kind of be like a harvest festival.

In the case of [Sevenairs], we went to several sites in the 35^th parallel that are supposed to be beautiful and are supposed to be full of regenerative properties but we found them all to be somewhat polluted. We sort of missed the pure experience of a clean land and clean air, and we’re not getting that anywhere really. So we’re almost reflecting back on a time—a time that may have never existed—but nevertheless we imagine that time, a time where California was more pure.

Turnstyle: So have you received any feedback from the public or other scientists about the music?

Niemeyer: We’ve done it for a while and the feedback we get sometimes is that people think it’s much more composed and arranged than they think is possible coming from two lines of data. So the flutes, for example, they sound like someone is really playing the flute with a certain type of tambour, with a certain type of vibe to it. People often think that there’s somehow a real person in there playing live.

We also got the feedback that the music does sound a little eerie and sets a certain kind of mood. Some people say it’s a little difficult to listen to because it’s not traditional music. It doesn’t have a beat like most music does or a melody that comes around or any lyrics. But it’s a new kind of music for a new kind of problem, which is how to live more in harmony with these environmental challenges we face.

Turnstyle: Your approach to science seems very playful. Do you consider yourself a rarity in your field in that sense?

Niemeyer: I don’t think I am a rarity as much as I’m sort of just not a scientist. I grew up around a lot of science and I respect science and I know a lot of scientists who I love to talk to. But my discipline is really game design and so I’m curious about, how can we get people who aren’t scientists-by-training to engage in scientific thinking and how can we show that’s it fun? I’m trying to see how I can get people to engage in scientific concepts and scientific reasoning without making it look like a whole bunch of math and a whole bunch of technology and whole bunch of biology but rather the thinking itself, the joy of discovery, the joy of curiosity.

Turnstyle: Were you surprised at all by the data that you collected?

Niemeyer: Yes, yes I was. I always am. It’s so funny because as a traditional scientists you usually have a hypothesis about what you’re looking for and then you try to find an experiment that either confirms or denies the hypothesis versus when we go out and measure stuff it’s more of a matter of general curiosity. Much like a photographer might go out into the world and just takes pictures of things until he or she finds something interesting, we just measure air quality data until we find something interesting.

So this approach with Sevenairs actually comes from a Japanese television station that wanted to do a documentary on what happens along the 35^th parallel. They came to California and asked us if we could do this project with them and so we gave them some tools to measure air quality with and they actually collected the samples in this case and when we got the results back we were very surprised. They went to this Monarch grove which is a Monarch Butterfly reserve and it seems to be very polluted with volatile organic compounds and we have no idea what actually happened there so we have to follow up. It seems like some of these well-known natural reserves aren’t as fresh at all as we think they might be. What I think might have happened in the case of the Monarch Grove is it is a densely forested area with lots of plants, and it so happened that there was a lot of decompositions happening when they went there and a lot of decay, so there were a lot of volatile organic compounds in the air that they seemed to have measured.

Turnstyle: For those of us, including myself, who can’t tell the difference between a Doppler and a doorbell, can you explain how you went about collecting this data and the significance of Volatile Organic Compounds and Carbon Dioxide? What role do they play in air pollution?

Niemeyer: When it comes to air pollution there are many factors we want to consider. One is combustion. If there’s too much C02 air it can lead to a reduced breathing capacity so we have to breathe more in order to get the air we need. It can make us sleepy and so forth. Volatile Organic Compounds are airborne solvents. You know how if you have a can of glue and you open the lid, there are a lot of Volatile Organic Compounds that come out. Same is true for alcohol, same is true for perfumes or hairspray or methane that is released from the human body or other sources. And all of these can impact us as neurotoxins, they can make us dizzy or drowsy and that is unhealthy.

For us, Carbon Dioxide and Volatile Organic Compounds are indicators of human industrial activity. If there’s a lot of industry, if there’s a lot of pollution coming from cooking or any kind of combustion, we see that in Carbon Dioxide and Volatile Organic Compounds.

Turnstyle: You collected data in downtown Hollywood and on Pismo beach. What did the decision-making process look like when you were choosing locations? Were there any deal-breakers for certain spots?

Niemeyer: Well, deal-breakers, there were some…Deal-breakers as in [the Japanese T.V Station] got in trouble in some places. They got kicked out of Harris Ranch [in Coalinga, California] because the people there didn’t want that data to be available. That was something we found often; some people are very sensitive about air quality and they really don’t want you to tell anyone what the air quality is like. For example, we wanted to do a project in Cairo, Egypt and this was before the revolution. The Egyptian government really didn’t want any air quality data to get out of the country, so they were very upset about [the project] and, in fact, started arresting the people that we worked with there.

Greg Niemeyer hopes to expand the site soon so that anyone can collect and upload data, and hear what it sounds like. To learn more, check out the Sevenairs website.

17-Year-Old Makes Cancer-Killing Nanoparticle

rgee — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:17:15 -0600

Angela Zhang is one teenager who does not need to be told to “Dream big.” 17-year-old Zhang is the winner of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology, and received $100,000 for the nanoparticle that she created.

What’s so special about the nanoparticle? It kills cancer. Her project is called, “Design of Image-guided, Photo-thermal Controlled Drug Releasing Multifuntional Nanosystem for the Treatment of Cancer Stem Cells.” According to Geekosystem, she spent 1,000 hours developing the particle since 2009.

Geek.com says:

Her creation is being heralded as a “Swiss army knife of cancer treatment.” Zhang managed to develop a nanoparticle that can be delivered to the site of a tumor through the drug salinomycin. Once there it kills the cancer stem cells. However, Zhang went further and included both gold and iron-oxide components, which allow for non-invasive imaging of the site through MRI and Photoacoustics.

House Of The Rising Sun Covered By...An Oscilloscope?

squevedo — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 18:14:27 -0600

A lot of my friends think current music is way too reliant on technology instead of good old fashioned musical talent but a new video by bd594 turns that argument on its head.

Bd594 manages to recreate the song “House of the Rising Sun” by The Animals using only the recorded sounds of old computer equipment including an HP Scanjet 3P, Adaptec SCSI card and a computer powered by Ubuntu v9.10 OS, an Atari 800XL with an EiCO Oscilloscope, a Texas instrument Ti-99/4A with a Tektronix Oscilloscope, and a hard-drive powered by a PiC16F84A microcontroller. In the video description he says, “For this video I recorded each instrument separately with a decent stereo mic and I also used a mixer to adjust the audio levels.” He says he used no sampling or effects to create the sound. This video is one of two he’s done using this technique, the other is a cover of Queen's, "Bohemian Rhapsody."

Check out the video below or on bd594’s page on Youtube.

Sleep May Help Brain Recover from Traumatic Emotions

squevedo — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 16:59:04 -0600

A new study suggests that the age-old phrase, “just sleep it off” may actually have some scientific basis.

As reported in the National Geographic article "Why Do We Sleep? To Ease Painful Memories, Study Hints," REM sleep may be a type of built-in stress reliever for the brain, like a giant filter to help us deal with big bad emotions we have during the day.

In the study, a volunteer group of 34 people were shown 150 images, which ranged from the mundane to the traumatic, and asked to rate their emotional intensity while their brain activity was measured. Half of the group saw the pictures in the morning and then at night with no sleep in between while the others saw them at night and then in the morning after sleeping. The group that slept reported less of an emotional impact seeing the images after sleep than the group that didn’t. According to the article, “MRI scans performed during REM sleep revealed that brain activity fell in the amygdala—the emotion-processing part of the brain—possibly allowing the more rational prefrontal cortex to soften the images' impact.”

Though some experts disagree with the conclusion of the study, it is an interesting step on the journey to figuring out what affect a little shut-eye can have on our minds.

The Psychology of What Makes Teens Thankful

cfoster — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:12:28 -0600

By Rayana Godfrey

Gratitude, research psychologists have found, is an abstract concept. It requires reflecting on not only how another person has done right by you, but also how you might return the favor. Perhaps that’s not something we need experts to tell us, but it’s worth bearing in mind when considering whether gratitude might be beyond the capabilities of the teenage brain.

Take for example the popular YouTube clip “Greatest freak out ever (ORIGINAL VIDEO),” in which a teenage boy goes ballistic in his bedroom after his mom cancels his World of Warcraft account. “I'm going to run away! You'll never see me again! I swear!” he shouts, as he slams himself repeatedly into his bed, tears off his clothes and screeches like someone out of an Exorcist movie.

Personally, my mom would kill me if I ever acted like that. But according to scientific studies, his lack of gratitude makes him pretty normal. In gratitude surveys, the only people who score lower than teenagers are people with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.

“I mean, it's just unavoidable,” said Giacomo Bono, a professor at Cal State Dominguez Hills who studies gratitude among adolescents. Although a lack of gratitude may be inevitable among teens today, Bono rejects the argument that it's just a natural limitation of adolescence. In his view, the environment plays a big role.

“One of the reasons would be the commercial culture that young people are finding themselves in,” he said. “Having to be a consumer is something that young people are starting to do without even understanding it all.”

Luckily for teenagers, Bono said feelings of gratitude – and an awareness of things to be grateful for – can change over time. One of the ways to measure that change is through a survey called the GQ6. It’s a questionnaire with only six statements to rank on a scale of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Statements like, “I have so much in life to be thankful for.” The highest possible score is a 42; most teens score in the upper-twenties.

Measuring Gratitude

Something didn't seem right about those scores. I consider myself a grateful 17 year old, and when I took the survey, I scored a 37 – pretty high no matter what, but much higher than the average for my age group.

And I'm not the only grateful teenager I know. I started asking other people my age if they had anything to be grateful for. They answered easily: family, a job, college scholarships, music, love, and understanding.

I wanted to know how these teens would do on the GQ6. I started handing it out to people I know from work and from my church youth group. Obviously, it's not a random sample. And it's not a big enough group to be considered scientific. But I certainly got some interesting results: the young people I interviewed, particularly those in their late teens, scored much higher in gratitude then teens had in published studies.

“I’m so grateful for everything that God has given me,” Bianca Brooks, 17, told me after filling out the questionnaire. She scored a highest-possible 42. She was happy to elaborate on her gratitude: “I’m grateful for family, friends, fashion, food… Wow, that all begins with F; and funk, music.”

If I had given her this survey a few years ago, however, her score might not have been so high. When she was in middle school, she was “just such a selfish, self-centered person,” she said. “I didn’t really care.” But as she got older, Brooks said she got closer to her religion and her outlook on gratitude changed. Which made me wonder: is it her religion that makes her so grateful?

What Makes Teens Grateful?

I went back over the surveys and was shocked to discover that the highest scoring teenagers I talked to generally said they weren’t religious at all. An example is Salim Boykin, 16, who answered “no” on the questionnaire when asked if he was religious. He had a more practical reason for being grateful: “If you’re not grateful, you’ll go through life either depressed or just sad not really knowing why.

Giacomo Bono says Boykin is already tuned into something his research consistently shows -- that feeling gratitude actually makes people's lives better. They take better care of themselves, and they're nicer to other people.

“What gratitude does is it tunes us into the essentials,” Bono said. And why is it so important to be mindful of what’s important? “It improves people's lives and it improves relationships,” he said.

The teens I surveyed all felt like that was true. But according to Bono, they're still not the norm -- for a lot of teenagers, the most important thing is “to acquire a thousand friends on Facebook.”

So why are my results so skewed toward gratitude? Bono said it might be because all the teens I interviewed are part of communities: some are involved with church, others with Youth Radio.

“Where there's a strong sense of community, where young people feel at home, that tends to produce gratitude too,” he said. “When you find something you love, that's a good achievement in life.”

Bono has found in his research that many young people are less grateful because they don't yet know what their purpose is. In other words, my contemporaries probably aren't ungrateful people – they're just still figuring out what to be grateful for.

Casey Miner produced this story.

More Info:

Youth Radio Investigates is an NSF-supported science reporting series in which young journalists collect and analyze original data with professional scientists, and then tell unexpected stories about what they discover. Check out more from Youth Radio’s science desk here.

For more Youth Radio Investigates stories on Turnstyle News, a project of Youth Radio, check out:

In a High School Lab, Glimpses of an Ancient Climate
You Can Lead a Kid to Water
My Brain on Ads

Your Brain on Music: A Musician and Neuroscientist in Conversation

squevedo — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 15:30:10 -0600

CAPTION: Musician, Alex De Grassi (background) and author, Daniel Levitin (foreground) sign books and CD's at Inforum. Photo Credit: Meles Gebru

The Commonwealth Club in San Francisco hosted an Inforum event last week that featured a conversation between Daniel Levitin, author of This Is Your Brain on Music and musician Alex de Grassi, a Grammy Award-nominated Fingerstyle Guitarist.

Levitin, who is also a Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience at McGill University, provided the technical know-how about music and cognitive functions while De Grassi brought years of musical experience as a guitarist. The conversation had something for everyone, neuroscientist or music nerd.

While this was Levitin and De Grassi’s first time formally working together, De Grassi happens to be one of Levitin’s favorite musicians. When he wasn’t bouncing information off of De Grassi, Levitin was requesting he play bits of his favorite songs.

One interesting topic they discussed was about the chemicals the body releases while listening to music. Oxytocin, the same chemical that is found in breast-milk and is also released during sex, is present when people listen to music together. “I’m not saying that listening to music is the same thing as having sex or doing drugs, but our bodies do react in a lot of the same ways to it,” said Levitin.

So while questions like, “Is musical talent genetic?” remained unanswered, the audience got a little more insight into why, for example, it feels good to go to shows.

Meles Gebru also contributed to this post.

Study Shows Lack Of Scientific Thinking In Students

dnewson — Thu, 03 Nov 2011 18:40:22 -0500

In October 2011 a study, conducted by the Lawrence Hall of Science and SRI International of Menlo Park entitled “High Hopes:--Few Opportunities: The Status Elementary Science Education in California,” was released about the state of elementary science education, according to The Mercury News.

There has been much debate in the U.S. on whether or not students should begin studying science as soon as they enter Elementary school. This study shows that California schools spend very little time teaching science compared to math and English. The study also argues this is the reason state test scores in science are low. Science only makes up six percent of a school’s test scores while subjects like English make up 57 %.

Rob Zaccheo of Pioneer High in San Jose who has been teaching for seventeen years, told the Mercury News that the amount of scientific thinking among students has shrunk. He said that while one’s scientific knowledge depends on what they have practiced in the past, many students would tell the teachers to, “just tell me what I need to know to past the test.”

The study shows that the lack of elementary science can affect not only the students, but even the teachers. Studies show that 85% of elementary teachers have received no training in science in the past three years. Holly Jacobson of the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning at WestEd told the Mercury News that mastering science at a young age is beneficial. But Jacobson also stated that at the end of the day there is no time left for subjects like science.

Whether or not science is added to elementary school one thing is for certain, there will be much debate about this topic for a long time. Let’s see what happens next.

Women In Science: The (Low) Numbers Don't Lie

rgee — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 13:43:19 -0500

By Robyn Gee, Turnstyle News

Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and President of the Thiel Foundation announced the first class of 20 Under 20 fellows last week. Each under-20-year-old receives $100,000 to leave school and pursue their visions in science and technology for the next two years.

But interestingly enough, only two of the 24 fellowship winners are women. Jonathan Cain of the Thiel Foundation said they did not take gender or ethnicity into account when considering applications for the fellowship.

Eden Full, one of the female winners, received a Thiel Fellowship to pursue her research into solar energy. At the age of 19, she is "stopping out" of Princeton University to take this opportunity, but has every intention to return to school after the fellowship. She has already re-modeled the traditional rotating solar panel to make it cost-efficient, and deployed her new technology to Kenya. She plans to alter the design and apply for a patent during the fellowship.

Full said when she came to San Francisco for the finalist round of interviews for the fellowship, there were five girls out of 40 finalists. “I did feel that my work wasn’t taken too seriously,” she said. In the back of her mind, there was a fear that she was included for media purposes only to show some diversity. “I’m a minority female in engineering... I don’t mind being the underdog. I would rather have people not take me seriously and then I can go do something amazing. Or maybe not - and if I don’t, then I won’t have let anyone down,” she said.

“I do wish that more women were selected, but If I am the under dog, fine. I’ll use that to my advantage,” said Full.

Laura Deming, also a female fellowship winner, feels completely different about the lack of gender diversity. She is adamant that gender doesn’t matter, and thinks it’s a great sign that there was no affirmative action in the Thiel Fellowship. Deming began doing anti-aging research at the age of 12 at in a lab at UCSF, and matriculated into MIT at the age of 14. At 17, she is dedicated to curing aging.

“Growing up, I knew I wanted to be a biologist. I idolized scientists like Nikola Tesla and Micheal Faraday. But I didn’t know I wanted to focus on curing aging, until one night when I was eight years old. It suddenly hit me that we were all going to die – I and everyone I knew – from a horrible, painful, degenerative disease that nobody could cure. Ever since, I haven’t been able to imagine anything more important, or interesting to work on,” she said.

Female Scientists Weigh In

Alice Popejoy, a Public Policy Fellow from the Association of Women in Science (AWIS) was disappointed, but not surprised by the ratio of men to women in the fellowship pool. She believes that unless the Thiel Foundation makes a concerted effort to reach out to young women, the stereotype will be a self-fulfilling prophecy. “Research has shown that unless women make up at least half the nominee pool for an award, a selection committee is not likely to give it to a woman – for fear that it would be perceived as an act of affirmative action. So any way you look at it, this is an unfortunate situation for young girls,” she said.

Her research at AWIS suggests that our society is more likely to perceive men as risk-takers, and this competition calls for a risk-taker to leave school. “That’s not to say that the young men who received the Thiel awards are undeserving, and indeed the winners seem highly accomplished. However, I was struck by the two young women awardees, one of whom matriculated at MIT by the age of 14…and it left me wondering if the female candidates had to be just that much more amazing to even be considered for the award,” she said.

Jane Stout, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who studies the unconscious bias against women in science and technology was also not surprised to see only two female names on the list, but think it may be a positive move to pull out of school. The winners of the fellowship commit to leaving school to pursue their projects and plans. “To the degree that many academic STEM settings (high school, college) tend to still showcase bias against women, it might not necessarily be a bad thing to remove burgeoning female scientists and innovators from standard academic settings -- especially if traditional academic settings do little to promotes female students' sense of fit.”

However, the visible disparity of women in the winning pool could discourage other women from applying. “Such a fellowship could be alienating for people who already doubt their place in technology and innovation fields (women and other minorities) - particularly because, as the press release indicates, the fellows' peers will be primarily men," said Stout.

But for Deming, none of this matters. She’s had both female and male role models, including Professor Cynthia Kenyon, one of the world’s top anti-aging scientists. Deming wants gender-less attention. And maybe that's the new perspective that science has been waiting for.

Full believes, "You’re going to be miserable if you don’t pursue your passion. College can wait, or you might not need it. Be true to yourself." These two young scientists received $100,000 to make breakthroughs in their field of expertise, so don't tell them they aren't breaking down barriers for women in science.

For more information on women in science and technology fields check out these resources:

- Gender Composition of Academic Disciplines: PhDs in 2009

- National Science Foundation: Breakdown of bachelors degrees, masters degrees, and PhD's in all fields

Support for this content is provided in part by the National Science Foundation.