M.J. Rose

What an incredible slice of history!

Meet The ‘Rocket Girls,’ The Women Who Charted The Course To Space

Heard on All Things Considered

The women of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

“In the 1940s, an elite team of mathematicians and scientists started working on a project that would carry the U.S. into space, then on to the moon and Mars. They would eventually become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (or JPL), but here’s what made them so unusual: Many of the people who charted the course to space exploration were women.

Nathalia Holt tells their story in her new book, Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars. Holt tells NPR’s Ari Shapiro that the women worked as “computers.”

“In a time before the digital devices that we’re used to today, it was humans that were doing the calculations,” she says. “And so you needed these teams of people — many of whom were women, especially during World War II — and they were responsible for the math.”

Barbara Paulson was one of those women. She tells Shapiro that while her sisters were preparing to be secretaries, she took a different path. She says, “I had had quite a bit of math in high school. … I know my mother certainly wanted us all to graduate from college, but why I veered off into this … I can’t remember. … But I did, and it helped me get the job that I did get at JPL.”…

For the rest, and to listen to the story, click here for NPR.

Sleuthing, ancient library-style:

From New Scientist,

Lead ink from scrolls may unlock library destroyed by Vesuvius

This 3000-year-old scroll survived Vesuvius’s eruption
Brent Seales/Lexington Herald-Leader/MCT via Getty

“Lead often gets a bad press. But its discovery in ancient Graeco-Roman ink could make it easier to read an early form of publishing – precious scrolls buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Some 800 scrolls, part of the classical world’s best-surviving library, have tantalised scholars since they were unearthed in a villa in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum in 1752. About 200 are in such a delicate state that they have never been read.

Unrolling the charred scrolls can destroy them, so people have been X-raying the bundles in the hopes of discerning the writing inside. But progress has been slow – it is difficult to detect the difference between the letters and the papyrus they are written on.

Now physicist Vito Mocella of the Italian National Research Council and his colleagues have revealed lead in the ink on two Herculaneum papyri fragments held in the Institute of France in Paris.
The presence of lead means that imaging techniques could be recalibrated to pick up the metal, something at which X-rays excel….”

For the rest, click here.