Scarlett Johansson gets to reprise her role as superhero/superheroine Agent Natasha Romanoff, also known as “Black Widow”, in a quaint little independent film called Marvel’s The Avengers that made its premier in the United States a couple weeks ago.  Agent Romanoff is a reformed freelance assassin who now works for S.H.E.I.L.D., the international espionage and military law-enforcement division that has taken up the task of responding to the fact that life on little, lonely planet Earth is not the only intelligence in the hostile Universe.  When the human race is compromised and S.H.E.I.L.D. Director Nick Fury is pushed to the brink of desperation, Black Widow is the first Avenger that he calls to assemble.  Spoilers for the movie beyond this point as well as a mild trigger warning.  It’s a good movie, go check it out if you haven’t already.  Read Katie’s review.  You don’t have to take my word for it.

I. There’s No “I” in “Avengers”

Black Widow’s opening scene has her tied to a chair in the attic of a decrepit warehouse, barefoot, wearing a little black dress and dark nylons.  An older man stands over her and slaps her face.  The man is some kind of corrupt Russian general that Black Widow has run afoul of and he is interrogating her for information.

Watching men take advantage of a woman’s defenselessness in fictional media is a pet peeve of mine.  This most likely stems from overexposure to Lifetime Original Movies in my early teens.  My middle school’s health class consisted mostly of these made-for-television morality fables about what happens to young people, but mostly young women, who were too careless or too vulnerable in social situations.  The slap was something I recognized as a tool used to remind a woman that she should mind her place as a lesser human being.  I remember sitting in the dark theater, anger boiling up as I thought oh, this is typical.  The one female Avenger is introduced to us when she’s in a moment of vulnerability.  She’s going to need somebody to save her.

Then S.H.E.I.L.D. calls the Russian interrogator on his cell phone.  The phone is handed to Black Widow and she holds it between her chin and her shoulder.  Words are exchanged.  A frown crosses her face and her smudged brow wrinkles.  The Russian interrogator moves to take the phone back and Black Widow kicks him square in the crotch.  They have neglected to tape her ankles to the legs of the chair, so she jumps up and proceeds to beat her captors off as they rush to restrain her.  She flips over in the air and lands on her back.  I watch as the chair splits into about five pieces, one of which winds up stuck in the gut of the third Russian henchman.  When the fighting stops, Black Widow picks up the phone, picks up her pair of black high heels, and walks away, leaving the Russian interrogator helpless and dangling by his leg from a chain suspended in the ceiling.

I’m having a little trouble taking this all in because I can’t really believe what I’m seeing.  She wasn’t tied up anymore.  She had taken care of the situation.  Nothing bad had happened to her.  Nothing bad was ever going to happen to her because she was never in danger in the first place.

I had somehow gone into the theater not knowing that this movie was directed by the person responsible for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer television show.  If I had, I would have probably seen the fight scene in the above Youtube video coming.  Joss Whedon’s previous work writing shows like Buffy, Firefly, and Dollhouse shows his strength in balancing large ensemble and depicting strong, well-rounded female characters.  Both strengths play out exceptionally well with a superhero movie like The Avengers.

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Scarlett Johansson voices her own thoughts about her character’s introduction:

“One of the most exciting thing about [The Avengers] is that in my opening scene the first thing you see is my character getting punched in the face. Everybody’s like, ‘Damn, it’s nice to see a girl get the sh-t kicked out of her—’”

This is a notable role for Johansson in that it has her performing at a highly physical level.  Black Widow is a superhero.  She can shake off a punch like a dog shakes off rainwater.  Her set of skills include an arsenal of martial arts, training in numerous specialized weapons, marksmanship, and ballet.  If you blink, you’ll miss when she brandishes her bracelets/gloves in the movie that fire off a debatable 30,000 volts of electricity and uses them to fry some alien brains.  She is a force to be reckoned with in one-on-anyone(-except-maybe-the-Hulk) combat.

This is not Natasha Romanoff: The Movie, though.  It’s not even Tony Stark: A Portrait of Genius or Bruce Banner: We’re Trying Really Hard Not to Mess Him Up This Time, but those two are more recognizable characters.  When the camera pans around the Avengers to do its commercial-ready 360 shot, a casual viewer can be forgiven for glancing right over the two short, small humans in the group who wear mostly black and have yet to star in their own feature films.  The Hulk is big and green.  Captain America wears patriotic spandex.  Thor is a god with flowing blond locks and a red cape.  Iron Man’s entire body is powered by the nuclear night light he uses to plug up the gaping hole in his chest.   Black Widow made a cameo to introduce the concept of S.H.E.I.L.D. in Iron Man 2 and Clint Barton/Hawkeye pointed his bow and arrow at Thor, in Thor, for all of two-and-a-half minutes.  The Avengers is the first time that Black Widow and Hawkeye really get to shine in their own scenes.  Romanoff, along with Steve Rogers, plays straight and sensible to Bruce Banner, Thor, and Tony Stark’s weird characters and Barton provides the empathetic eyes that the audience looks through to watch Loki’s schemes.  During the movie’s climax, both Black Widow and Hawkeye take their share of combat and civilian-wrangling duty.

Let’s make a quick list of the things that Black Widow contributes to the plot:

1. Confronts Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Hulk, and convinces him to return with her to S.H.E.I.L.D. headquarters.  At this point, all that is known about Banner is that he turns into a near-indestructible monster when subjected to the slightest amount of stress or provocation.

2. Provides back-up for Captain America, with Iron Man, in his first confrontation with Loki that also results in Loki’s capture.

3. Deceives an imprisoned Loki, you know, the Norse god of deceit, and tricks him into letting a key element of his plan slip.  She also gains some insight on the hypnotized Hawkeye’s current condition.

4. Confronts Hawkeye in the middle of his assault on S.H.E.I.L.D.’s flying aircraft carrier (that Wikipedia tells me is called a Helicarrier) and punches him in the face enough times to break Loki’s mind control spell, taking away one of Loki’s most powerful pawns and bringing him back to S.H.E.I.L.D.’s side.

5. Gives Hawkeye emotional support during his hypnosis detoxification, allowing him to jump back into battle against Loki as an Avenger less than twelve hours later.

6. Abducts a S.H.E.I.L.D. jet with Captain America and Hawkeye.

7. Stands with Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, and Hawkeye on the streets of New York City and battles the waves of alien monsters that are pouring down from the Tesseract’s gaping dimension portal above Stark Tower.  She holds her own against the aliens by using her pistols, the built-in tasers on her gloves, stealing and using the aliens’ own weapons against them, and breaking their necks.  She also lends some witty banter to her fellow fighters and helps rescue civilians.

8. Decides to switch focus from combat melee on the ground to closing the portal above Stark Tower.  She figures out a way to reach the Tesseract, without an aerial assist from either Iron Man or Thor, by hijacking an alien sky-bike.  Her efforts also draw Loki’s attention, allowing for Hawkeye to shoot Loki with an exploding arrow and send him hurtling into Stark Tower, where the Hulk is waiting to fight him.

9. Uses Loki’s staff to close the Tesseract portal and has just the right timing to allow Iron Man to fall back through after he guides a nuke into the alien mother ship.  The day is saved.  When the post-victory Avengers confront an exhausted Loki, Black Widow is the one who mocks him by holding his staff.

Did I say a quick list?  What I meant to say is that Black Widow carries about 17% of the plot in this movie.  She constitutes a solid one-sixth of the Avengers team.  She even picks up some of the slack left by Hawkeye while he’s serving Loki.

At IndieWire, writer Ian Grey has a detailed roundup of movie reviews that suffer from what he calls a “blanket amnesia” of Black Widow’s character, or even presence, in the movie.  It’s odd that reviewers are quick to sticker her as a prop, or “token sexy female” as Grey states in the words of The Globe and Mail‘s review, when she breaks the mold by appearing as an equal to each male character in terms of her presence and representation.

“You ever have one of those days when you just don’t feel appreciated?”

(image from IMDb.com)

Let’s look at the definition of “teamwork”:

team•work (noun)
: work done by several associates with each doing a part but all subordinating personal prominence to the efficiency of the whole

Source: Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary

The Avengers are a team.  Each member contributes something to the pot and one character’s talent makes up for another character’s weakness.  Tony Stark might be an ordinary human being whose strength is directly proportional to the weapons he creates, but that’s okay because the Hulk has enough brute force to make up for everyone’s more-or-less human statures.  Nick Fury emphasizes this point more than once.  He’s probably got a small presentation about it somewhere.  He’s studied Romanoff and Barton just as carefully as he has Rogers, Banner, Thor, and Stark.  Each character has a tiny nugget of greatness nestled deep inside them that leads them to accomplish great things when given the right push.  Black Widow, with her strength, intelligence, and creativity, is no exception.

II. Notes From the Wardrobe Department

Something caught my attention while I was doing research for this article.  I wanted to go back and refresh my memory of Scarlett Johanssen’s performance in Iron Man 2, so I browsed the internet for photos and clips.  I was surprised to find that there’s a notable difference between how Black Widow is presented in the promotional material for Iron Man 2 and how she is presented in promotional material for The Avengers.

Figure 1: Black Widow’s portrait from her bio page on the official Iron Man 2 website (left) and her portrait from the official The Avengers website (right)

The most blatant example of this can be seen by comparing the choices in portraits used for Black Widow’s biography on Marvel’s official websites for Iron Man 2 and The Avengers, as shown in Figure 1.  Black Widow takes a semi-relaxing stance in her portrait for Iron Man 2 with her hips and shoulders tilted at an angle and long, lush hair falling in her face.  Her breasts have been highlighted to emphasize their outline and prevent them from blending in with the fabric covering her arms.  In her portrait for The Avengers, Black Widow faces the camera square on, with hips parallel to her shoulders, and her hair is blown back as if she is opposing a strong wind.

Figure 2: Screenshot of Black Widow from the official Iron Man 2 website (left) and screenshot of Black Widow from the official The Avengers website (right)

Two screenshots of Black Widow from the image galleries on Marvel’s official websites for Iron Man 2 and The Avengers are compared in Figure 2.  In the shot of Black Widow from Iron Man 2 walking down a hallway, she is sauntering towards the camera with her head tilted at an angle.  A hint of smugness is apparent in her expression and she could just as easily be trying to seduce the viewer as she could be switching gears to focus on her next target.  In the screenshot from The Avengers, Black Widow stands with her feet firmly planted and her crossed arms put a barrier between herself and the viewer.  Her demeanor is professional and she is paying rapt attention to something or someone.

I’m cherry picking official images from Marvel’s websites, but you can browse the Iron Man 2 gallery yourself and try to find pictures of Scarlett Johansson that match the strength and weight of the poses she takes in the images showcased on The Avengers website.  In Iron Man 2, Black Widow’s soft, feminine characteristics are played up, even in scenes when she is battling other characters or otherwise on the offense.  In The Avengers, Black Widow is still feminine, but she is also allowed to have messy hair and a furrowed brow.  Her Avengers body suit has a lot more heft and support as a functioning, yet lightweight, protective suit and her hair is cut shorter, a more practical style for someone who will be moving around a lot in dangerous situations and combat.  Black Widow’s visual representation in the marketing for The Avengers has by no means been perfect, but this is a significant improvement.  In The Avengers, Black Widow is treated with dignity and respect as a full-fledged superhero character.  She has thoughts and feelings that go with her form-fitting bodysuit and ballerina muscles.  We worry about her when the Hulk rips out of Bruce Banner.  We empathize with her when she visits Hawkeye recovering in the infirmary.  We wonder about her past when Loki picks her brain and if we’re being baited for a prequel that might include a scene set in Budapest.

III. End Credits

After watching The Avengers for the first time, a friend and I overheard a conversation between a young girl and her mother as they were leaving.

“The movie was great,” the girl said. “But I didn’t like how the girl was the only one without any special powers.”

“She does have special powers!” my friend yelled after them.

I don’t think they heard her over the noise in the crowd.  So, Black Widow’s lack of distinguishable weapons did not go unnoticed on the thirteen-year-old female audience.  I don’t know if Black Widow has a memorable enough personality to make a notable mark in superhero history from her performances in this movie and Iron Man 2 alone.  Maybe she could have used a bigger gun or made her special gloves a more prominent part of the ongoing action.  What she really needs is her own movie.  Hawkeye suffers from this problem as well where the audience just isn’t given the courtesy of hammering out the finer character details with a back story.  This might also be true for the Hulk, but his story is more well known and there have already been two films made in recent years outside of The Avengers movie canon.  That being said, the little nuances between the actors make all the difference in a movie like this and The Avengers delivers.  I kind of like how Black Widow takes her place at the Avengers’ table, holding her own alongside a god and a technology-enhanced billionaire with just her strength and her wits.

Guys, I really like punctuation and grammar. I like proper application of language so much that as a university freshman, I volunteered as a copy editor for the school newspaper.  I love when someone recognizes that “Let’s eat Grandma” is not the same as “Let’s eat, Grandma”. The Oxford comma and I are involved.

In all my grammar-geekery, I have developed love for unique punctuation, the little misfits and outliers, the ones that just convey meaning you cannot get out of your commas and semicolons and ellipses. They’re delightfully, wackily whimsical.

In text, the interrobang is most often expressed as ?! or !?

The Interrobang

What have you done?!
Why is the cat wearing pajamas?!
Why do we have this thing called an interrobang?!
Well, because sometimes your words require a level of yelled-out-surprise that simply cannot be found in a mere question mark or exclamation point. When you don’t wish to calmly inquire as to why the cat is in a onesie, you use the interrobang.  The word comes from a portmanteau (bludgeoning two words together to make a new one) of the interrogative point, or question mark, and the bang, or exclamation point.

The asterism

The Asterism

So you like the asterisk, right?* What if I said you could have three asterisks all in the same punctuation mark? That’s the asterism, the poor, almost obsolete, asterism. It’s used to indicate where something has been left out, like the elipses. Other fun applications of the asterism involve indicating subchapters and that a work is untitled.

I found the snark!

The Snark

This delightfully whimsical character shares a name with a famous nonsense poem from Lewis Carroll (The Hunting of the Snark : “an impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature”). The snark is used to indicate, well, snark, or ironic statements, by placing it where a period would go. As much as I appreciate the ability to clarify when things are being said in jest, I’m not a fan of this punctuation. I usually misread it as a question mark, and find myself more confused.

The Ampersand

The ampersand has a long and delightful history, even a song to its credit. The shape comes from a mashup of E and T; et is the Latin word for ‘and’. It’s rarely used in writing, except as company names, or to attach the names of authors or spouses. When attaching names, it implies a closer relationship than use of ‘and’. One fun fact? You can use ‘&c.’ as an abbreviation for ‘etc.’

Go forth and punctuate!

* I do too.

Photos via Buzzfeed and Web Designer Depot

Buckle your seat belts, people, because today is about to get more awesome sauce. It’s Awesome Sauce Music Friday.

This week’s song is yet another tune from fantastic Jonathan Coulton. He is the new generation of music star, using the Internet to publicize his work. Most of his music is licensed using Creative Commons, which gives fans of Coulton’s work the freedom to make music videos on YouTube without violating copyright law. (Don’t believe me? Just try searching for his name on YouTube.)

But today’s featured song, “The Princess Who Saved Herself,” is different. Coulton wrote the song for the charity album, “Many Hands,” the proceeds of which go to the Haitian People’s Support Project. So if you like the song, it might be worth actually buying it.

But luckily for us, altruism didn’t stop at least one person from making their own music video of the song. I guess a song about a princess being awesome was too much to resist. Enjoy!

Want more music? Check out Lab Tracks on Mad Art Lab!

Do you have a delightfully nerdy recommendation? Leave them in the comments, or contact us here.

Featured image credit: Mild Mannered Photographer

…and why you shouldn’t need to be told.

Yes, don’t panic, it’s just towel day, the yearly celebration in which the world recognizes the genius of Douglas Adams and his hilarious series of books. Yes, that series of books.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy is a landmark in both science fiction and comedy writing, not to mention just brilliantly written. May I suggest that if you haven’t yet that you read it now.

Okay, have you read it?

Good, welcome back.

Two weeks after the anniversary of the author’s death, in respect for the awesomeness that spilled out of his fingertips like rainbow-grease, we appreciate not only his work, but also how generally amazing towels are.

Not only do towels get wet when they dry, but you can use it as a sweater, as a duvet, as a mattress, for (funnily enough) drying yourself, for a headscarf, as a gas mask and as a whip-like weapon when wet.

It’s understandable then, that Ford Prefect considers the towel to be one of the best, if not the most important technologies man has developed. And of course, were you to travel through great distances in space, spaceships and radiation shield always come secondary (and, I suppose, tertiary) to towels.

In the very real possibility of space travel, and the rather far fetched possibility of clearing the solar system with human passengers, Douglas Adams displayed one of the best running jokes in literary history by praising the scientific value of the towel over the infinite improbability drive, the total perspective vortex and other technological parodies.

It’s not surprising in a way that Douglas Adams took a somewhat contrarian approach to writing science fiction; after all, he made it pretty clear in his non-fiction work that he was, at least what we would call, a skeptic; although I can’t be sure whether he would have been a fan of that label himself. Take a look at ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ for a little more of that side of him.

And as well as his work in science-fiction, we can still attribute the most advanced postulation of the true nature of dark matter to the late author. Physicists, you have yet to come up with a better explanation for mass’ best friend than: the packaging from the boxes of all the equipment used to figure out what dark matter was… I’m paraphrasing because I couldn’t find the quote but I think you get the point.

Now, if I may, I would like to finish up this little tribute with a quote taken straight out of ‘The Salmon of Doubt’ that I think skeptics will probably get a kick out of.

‘If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat. Life is a level of complexity that almost lies outside our vision; it is so far beyond anything we have any means of understanding that we just think of it as a different class of object, a different class of matter; ‘life’, something that had a mysterious essence about it, was God given, and that’s the only explanation we had. The bombshell comes in 1859 when Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species. It takes a long time before we really get to grips with this and begin to understand it, because not only does it seem incredible and thoroughly demeaning to us, but it’s yet another shock to our system to discover that not only are we not the centre of the Universe and we’re not made by anything, but we started out as some kind of slime and got to where we are via being a monkey. It just doesn’t read well.’

Rest in peace you awesome, awesome man.

[image credits: mrquale.com, bbc radio 4, Ashique47 @ Deviant Art]

• It’s hard to use your browser of choice on mobile devices. (via Scientific American)
• Oxford University is trying to put the yeti myth to bed once and for all. (via TG Daily)
• SpaceX readies for a rendezvous with the ISS. (via Physorg.com)
• Montreal police kettle student protesters. (via The Globe and Mail)

Featured image credit: xddorox

Got a link you think we should know about? Contact us here.

This post is part of the Teen Skepchick Interviews series, where TS writers talk with amazing women scientists and skeptics about life, the universe, and everything.

At the first ever Google Global Science Fair, Shree Bose of Forth Worth, Texas, not only won the 17- to 18-year-old category, she won the Grand Prize, which meant a $50,000 Google scholarship, a trip to the Galapagos Islands, a trip to CERN, two LEGO awards, and a subscription to Scientific American for her school. Since then, she’s traveled, given talks, been interviewed all over the media, and met President Obama—twice.

(Just for contrast—the biggest brush with fame I had when I was 17 was meeting someone whose friend’s cousin’s grandma once had Bob Dylan over for dinner. So, yeah . . .)

I caught up with Shree after she’d returned from the Galapagos and just before she headed off to the National Institutes of Health for her summer internship. In this interview, she talks about everything from the research that won the Google Science Fair to the research that, well, didn’t win much of anything besides laughs.

How did she get interested in science, and cancer research specifically? How, as a teenager, did she even have the opportunity to work in a cancer-research lab? What was it like to meet the president, the MythBusters, and Bill Nye? And where is she headed next? Read on.

What project did you win the Google Science Fair with?

In a nutshell, my project was on drug resistance in ovarian cancer. Every year, about 21,000 women all over the United States are diagnosed with ovarian cancer, the fifth leading cause of cancer deaths among women. One of the most common treatment methods, chemotherapy, involves treating patients with high doses of chemicals to kill off cancer cells. Cisplatin is one such drug used often to treat ovarian cancer; however, patients often develop a resistance to the drug and have a recurrence of tumors, which no longer can be treated with the same drug.

My research basically showed a huge difference in what a particular cell protein, AMP kinase, did in resistant cells versus sensitive cells, which suggests that this protein might be doing something in the cells to make them resistant. The research suggests that when a patient becomes resistant, she can be treated with a protein inhibitor and cisplatin, and chemotherapy can be improved. That conclusion is not only huge for future treatment but also for future research, and it was really exciting to work on.

What other applications are there for your discovery and this research?

Knowing that this protein is doing something in the cells to make them resistant may lead to some future research on how to specifically prevent the cells from ever developing the resistance in the first place.

What got you interested in cancer research specifically?

The summer after my freshman year, my grandfather passed away due to cancer, and I just became really determined to do cancer research. I had also just finished freshman-level biology and realized I loved cellular biology, so I started emailing professors in my area, asking to work under their supervision in their labs.

I got rejected by most of the professors I emailed, except for Dr. Alakananda Basu at the UNT Health Science Center in Fort Worth, who allowed me to come in and work under her guidance for two summers. Under her supervision, I did my first project on breast cancer. For the ovarian cancer project, she assigned Savitha Sridharan, a graduate student, to keep track of me.

Have you been well received and taken seriously as a teenager doing research? Have you encountered discrimination as a young woman in science?

I’ve actually been taken pretty seriously as a teenager doing research. I’ve gotten to present my research to NIH directors, and I’m actually interning at the National Institutes of Health this summer, so it’s nice to see that my research is taken seriously and that there are people who believe in my research abilities. I haven’t faced that much discrimination being a woman in science, and I hope that I can be a part of that shift into more young women getting interested in science and engineering.

How important were mentors to your interest and success in science?

I’m so blessed to have had Dr. Basu and Savitha as mentors; from the beginning, they have been patient while constantly challenging me and teaching me. Their guidance has been absolutely invaluable in this entire process, and I can truly say I would not be here if it was not for them. I was very lucky to have such incredible mentors.

My brother was also really important in developing my passion from a young age, from explaining how atoms worked when we were both little to constantly inspiring me with everything he does as a scientist and as my older brother.

Have you always been interested in science?

I actually started off as the writing kid of the family. I think my brother constantly explaining concepts to me in a way that made me really interested was what sparked me when I was little. I’ve loved science ever since, and it’s taken me further than I could imagine.

What other science research and projects have you done, formally and informally?

Wooo. This is a long one. Sorry.

My journey with science fairs starts in second grade. There was this program there called Invention Convention, where the teachers told us to come up with a new invention that would somehow benefit the world around us. So I came up with the idea of turning spinach blue to make it more appetizing to little kids who didn’t want to eat their green vegetables. How that would benefit the world, I don’t exactly know, but I do know that my parents bought me a spinach plant and I injected it with blue food coloring and then promptly forgot about it. I left that spinach plant in a cabinet in our house, didn’t water it, and carried this dried, withered spinach plant into class and presented that as my first science project. People laughed at it. But that was my start.

In fourth grade, I realized science was really cool. My older brother, Pinaki Bose, had been doing science fairs with environmental science, and I had the chance to travel with him and my parents to DC to the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge (DCYSC) finals, where he was one of the top 40 national finalists. Since my brother had always been the person who constantly interested me in science, it was incredible to go along with him.

I got to meet the MythBusters and Michael Phelps. I realized that science and science fairs could take me really far if I worked hard and tried my best. My brother was selected as one of the top 40 the next year too, a finalist for two consecutive years—a very rare honor.

With that, I decided that I wanted to stick with science, so in fifth grade, I did another Invention Convention project, about remote-controlled trash cans to help the handicapped who struggled with pushing their bins out to the curb. I built this model by taking the top off a remote-controlled car and putting a model trash can on top, and people could pilot the bin around. That was the first project I won an award with, and right after that I entered middle school.

In middle school, I started doing science fairs instead of Invention Convention. In eighth grade, I worked on an environmental science project about creating a new environmentally friendly, recycled material that could be used in railroad ties and outdoor furniture and such. At the start of freshman year, I entered high school at FWCD and found out that I was selected as one of the top 30 finalists in the Society for Science and Public’s Middle School National Program, for the project I had done as an eighth grader. That was the first time I got to compete representing FWCD, and during the finals competition in Washington DC, I was the student-elected speaker and got to give a speech at the final awards.

That summer, after freshman-level biology with Ms. Hamilton, my grandfather passed away. At that point I had seen the level of work that students my age could already do (being a finalist in the SSP program). I was already interested in biology, and I had a field that I was particularly interested in—cancer. So that’s when I found a mentor in Dr. Alakananda Basu at the UNTHSC.

Was your family supportive of your interest in science?

My parents have always been supportive of my interest in science, whether it was buying me a spinach plant that I could inject with blue food coloring and then eventually kill by not watering, or helping me put together boards and project reports. They’ve been there for all the ups and downs and have picked me up at the lowest points and pushed me higher during the highest. My brother has been my biggest mentor, and I really couldn’t have done anything without him. I’m just very lucky to have such a supportive, loving family.

What was it like meeting President Obama?

AMAZING. I’ve gotten to meet President Obama twice at this point, once when the Google Science Fair winners were invited to the Oval Office and again when I got to present at his White House Science Fair, and each time, I was impressed with how genuinely excited he was to see children and youth doing science. Honestly, when I first turned around and he was opening the door to the Oval Office, I had this moment of “oh my goodness, this is so surreal.” But he knew my name and research, and he was really excited and involved in learning about what we wanted to do in the future. That sort of energy is something I want to see in future presidents.

Is Bill Nye freakishly awesome?

Bill Nye is so freakishly awesome. I grew up watching his shows, and I may have sang his own theme song back to him, but I couldn’t believe I was sitting next to him. The greatest thing was to see how he really was passionate about using the platform of his show to inspire young children in science. Plus, he’s really funny in real life.

Have you gone to see CERN yet?

I haven’t actually taken my trip to CERN yet, but I’m going this summer with my brother and my parents. I believe they have some pretty exciting stuff planned, and since I understand very little about quantum physics and all of the amazing research going on there, I plan to be asking a lot of questions. But I’m so excited to meet researchers in Geneva and hopefully see the LHC!

What was the Galapagos like?

The Galapagos was the most beautiful trip I’ve ever been on. We saw incredible biodiversity—with these species that are present nowhere else in the world, like giant tortoises and blue-footed boobies.

The Galapagos are special for several reasons. One is that they’re so isolated, a place where humans haven’t had a great impact on the natural environments. Another is the biodiversity. This island chain lies at the crossroads of three currents that carried in a wide variety of species—in fact, there are lots of species here that cannot be found anywhere else in the world.

A third is its scientific history. The Galapagos are where Darwin, during his 19 days on land there, noticed the incredible diversity of species and came up with his theory of natural selection and evolution. After ten days there, I realized all these special things about the Galapagos and decided to add one more—inspiration to keep exploring the amazing things our world has to offer and so much more beyond.

What are your plans for your future as far as science and research?

I have actually committed to Harvard for my undergraduate just recently. After an undergraduate degree, I would love to become a medical researcher by pursuing an M.D.- Ph.D. degree. For me, combining the research aspect of coming up with effective treatments and the clinical aspect of actually treating patients would be absolutely the best of both worlds, and a career path I would really enjoy.

What do you think could help more young women get engaged in and be successful in research in science, math, and engineering?

I think one of the first ways to get young women interested in STEM is to teach the subjects in a way that inspires. I was a panelist in a PBS NewsHour piece recently, and we were talking about why women are so much more involved in biology and environmental science instead of technology and engineering and math, and I think a large part of that is about how women want to be able to have a direct impact. I think the biggest way to get women involved in STEM is to show them that they can have that sort of direct impact.

My first involvement with the skeptic community was subscribing to Skepchick and TS with Google Reader. I’m much more involved now than just checking my RSS feed, but it’s still part of my daily routine.

One of the sites I’ve subscribed to is MoveOn.org. They post a lot of graphics about the economy, politics, social issues, etc from a democratic perspective. Sometimes there are redundancies in their updates, and this particular picture amused me the first time I saw it and gave me pause the second.

Like I said, the first time I saw this, it made me giggle. It seemed righteous and good to have a big, brawny guy on our side, ready to defend this openly gay kid.

On the other hand: this could also be vengeance we’re talking about. It doesn’t explicitly say “If you try to beat this kid up, I will prevent you from doing so, using force if necessary”, although this is what we’d like to assume. “I dare you” is a provocative term, and it sounds like a threat. A threat is aggressive and not just defensive, which I think is unacceptable.

What if he (I assume this person is male, I apologize if that’s presumptuous) did just beat up the bully in response to him tormenting the boy, after the event? Or, what if he defended the boy from the bully and took it too far? If he made an aggressive move, like punching the bully instead of holding him still, what would we think then? What would his fathers think?

While I’d love to be the size of a football player sometimes, even if only to intimidate, it’s still a private desire. I don’t act on my violent impulses because it violates my personal code of ethics, which is explained very neatly here.

In general, I don’t think we should be advocating violence; even defensive violence. We try to prevent LGBT+ kids from being bullied, especially when it’s physical. We declare “safe spaces” for certain groups, or for everybody (schools as violence-free zones). I think it’s hypocritical to punish violent behaviour in some cases and condone it in others, just because we want some vengeance.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for self-defense. If you’re going to be harmed, call for help and/or try to get away. Try to deflect the situation, prevent it from happening, walk away from it before it gets heated. Take a martial arts or boxing class to learn how to protect yourself.  If I’m attacked, I’m going to defend myself, but we should all do what we can to avoid violent conflicts in the first place.

Also: If this kid knew that bullying was taking place, maybe he should have gone to the administration instead of posting threatening notes in another student’s books.

• Post-Fukushima radiation levels in Japan are low. [via BBC News]
• The new, old war on abortion in the UK. [via The Guardian]
• A higher percentage of people of color than white people support same sex marriage. [via Colorlines]
• American Airlines rejects a female passenger because of her pro-choice shirt. [via Feministing] (Language warning for younger readers)

Featured image: A safe-for-work version of a sign that Judy McIntyre, Oklahoma state senator (D), held at a rally.

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Burrhus Frederic Skinner had a plan.

He was going to save the world. And he would do it with a pigeon, a small steel box, and a bag of food pellets.

Skinner was a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Throughout his academic career, he studied behaviourism, a school of psychology that was originally developed in the early 19th century. By Skinner’s time, the field was largely based on the ideas of a Russian scientist called Ivan Pavlov, who, in 1901, was conducting an experiment into the psychology of canine digestion.

Well, it was either that, or cure polio.

Pavlov noticed that rather than just salivating in the presence of food, the dogs would also salivate in the presence of the lab assistant who served their food, and decided to test this. From then on, every time the dogs were fed, a bell was rung. Eventually, the dogs began to associate the sound of the bell with the arrival of food, and would slobber profusely whenever they heard the sound. Based on this, Pavlov concluded that it was possible for living creatures to learn behaviours by associating them with events in their environment.

Now, might sound mundane, but we must remember that science isn’t all glamour and parties.

Sometimes it’s clipboards and dog mouths.

Salivation is an unconscious behaviour, but it was later shown the same principles applied to conscious behaviour as well. These two methods of learning were called classical conditioning, and operant conditioning, respectively.

Skinner, however, went beyond these ideas, and devised a philosophy that he called radical behaviourism.

There are two kinds of people who use the word 'radical'. Scientists are one of them.

Radical behaviourism proposed that all action undertaken by organic beings is pre-determined by our environment, and that there is no such thing as free will.

Skinner’s most famous contribution to this philosophy was the creation of the operant conditioning chamber, or, ‘Skinner Box’. In one experiment, he placed several hungry pigeons inside the chamber, and attached a mechanism that would deliver food pellets to them at random intervals. He found that, over time, the pigeons began to associate whatever unrelated action they had been performing at the time (grooming, pecking, cooing) with the arrival of the food pellet. Subsequently, the pigeons repeated these actions whenever they were hungry, in the hopes of getting more food.

They didn’t, of course. Their actions had absolutely nothing to do with whether they got fed or not. But the pigeons had learned that it did.

Skinner had shown that it was possible to train living beings to undertake actions that were completely irrational, and conferred no actual benefit to them, simply by associating that action with a reward.

In a previous post, I wrote about Freud, and his belief that humanity was governed by secret, unconscious desires. In this way, he is the mirror image of Skinner, who believed that humans were best understood as malleable balls of behaviour, who acted according to external factors in their environment.

However, unlike Freud, Skinner was a Utopian, and believed that it was possible for the science of behavioural control to one day create a society in which all people were able to co-operate peacefully, with conditioning and positive reinforcement taking the place of laws preserved by force. According to his book Beyond Freedom and Dignity, one of Skinner’s life goals was to prevent humanity from destroying itself.

And if that happened to involve shutting more pigeons in boxes, then so be it.

We haven’t quite reached utopia yet, but the ideas furthered by Skinner’s work are still being used today. They feature heavily in the world of videogame design (particularly MMORPGS), and in marketing, where, ironically, Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew, used behaviourist theories of learning to make people associate items such as cigarettes with ideas of luxury and sexual prowess.

More positively, psychotherapy regularly uses a conditioning-derived treatment called Cognitive Behavioural Therapy to help people with conditions such as Anorexia, OCD, or even substance abuse problems.

So, is there anything you’ve ever been conditioned to do?

Would a utopia really be worth it if you had to modify humans without their consent to make it?

And why was anyone studying the psychology of canine digestion in the first place?

Let’s work it out in the comments.

***

Photo courtesy of the National Library of Scotland

My Dad has the dirty habit of sneaking up on me and giving me terrible frights – especially in the dark. Early yesterday morning I was standing in the Kitchen (it was real early so it was still dark) and he snuck up behind me and poked me in the ribs while yelling WHAAAAAAAA! Now I am certain if you think back carefully – regardless of where in the world you live – you will clearly remember hearing him. YEP – It was that loud.

Anyway, when he scared me I got these strange feelings. I couldn’t hear anything but a peculiar long beeping sound in my ears, the muscles in my arms contracted and I started shaking. So after me screaming and shouting something to the effect of “I WILL GET YOU BACK!” I decided to go look up what had actually happened to my body.

It turns out that this is a reflex known as “Fight or Flight”. I am sure that you will be familiar with sayings such as:

• Dude…I nearly $h@t myself
• I scared myself stiff
• I almost wet my pants

The reason is that these things actually can happen if you have a really big fright. In such a situation many things can take place in the body which can include:

• Tunnel vision (loss of peripheral vision)
• Your blood vessels dilate to enable greater muscle strength
• Relaxation of the Bladder
• Paling or flushing, or alternating between both
• Shaking

The release of adrenalin is vital to the Fight or Flight reflex. It is the release of adrenalin into the body that causes the symptoms listed above. There are many more symptoms on Wikipedia. Among these them you will find auditory exclusion which explains the sudden loss of hearing I experienced. All of this happens in order to enable your body to either make a run for it or fight to protect yourself. Your body releasing waste products is really a way of “lightening the load” so that you can move faster.

Considering the fact that I am a South African Champion at kickboxing I recon my Dad better be glad I did not go into fight mode.

Now for the really important part. I am desperate for some ideas on revenge so please leave a comment with your evil plans on how I can get him back. Muahahahahaha!