2021/22
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Front cover: Princess Elizabeth, 18, removes the spark plugs from the engine of a truck in April 1945. (Image: British Central Office of Information) In October 2013, whilst presenting the very first Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, HM Queen Elizabeth II talked enthusiastically about the STEM field. She told the delegates:
And she should know! Aged 18, during World War II, the then Princess Elizabeth trained as a mechanical engineer whilst serving in the Auxiliary Territorial Service. Her education into the inner workings of the internal combustion engine and automobile repairs clearly gave her valuable skills for life; Queen Elizabeth has the honour of being the only reigning monarch to have changed a puncture on her own car! Science has played an important role during the Queen’s reign and this year, as the nation marks her 70th year on the throne, it is fascinating to consider the scientific revolutions have occurred whilst she has been monarch. More fascinating, perhaps, to even consider what discoveries await us in the next 70 years. In this edition of SPARK! a right royal collection of students from across the school have written articles on aspects of science that they find particularly exciting. Including:
The mysteries of the deep ocean; The role of women in the history of computer science; The secrets in our DNA; Time travel
… and much more besides! 2
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Black got into computer science later than you’d expect. She left home and school when she was 16. When she was 25, she attended a maths access course to get the qualifications she needed to get back into education and onto university. She shared how at this time, she was a single parent and had three kids, lived in a council estate and studied maths at a night school, all of which sounds highly stressful. Despite this, she then went on to study computing at London South Bank University, where she also managed to complete her PhD. It was also where she founded BCSWomen. Black briefly touched on her setting up of BCSWomen, saying “I’d been at a computer conference, where around 90% of the guests were guys, and was freaked out by a man who wouldn’t stop staring at me. I couldn’t help but compare the negative experience to the great time I had at a female-only science conference and decided to create a network just for tech women.”
Anjali Mistry reports on this year’s Dr Luena Hatcher Lecture from Dr Sue Black: Dr Sue Black is a Professor of Computer Science at Durham University, with more than 40 publications behind her, as well as a PhD in software engineering. She’s also a digital skills expert, social entrepreneur, consultant and international keynote speaker, who is passionate about sharing her knowledge about the opportunities within technology. Named in the list of top 50 women in tech in Europe, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Lovie Awards 2018 and awarded an OBE for services to technology in the 2016 Queen’s New Year’s Honours list, Black is one of the key tech leaders in the UK today.
BCSWomen is a subgroup of the British Computer Society and was founded by Black in 1998. BCSWomen provides networking opportunities and support for all BCS professional women working in IT around the world, as well as mentoring and encouraging girls/women to join IT as a career. The group has grown over the last twenty years, and there are currently around 1500 members, all communicating and getting involved by organising events, writing articles, offering/seeking advice, helping on the committee and much more. Overall, they’re getting things done – and as we know, there’s lots to do!
The talk Black’s talk covered her distinguished work over the years, and her experiences, starting off with her background.
I think I can speak on the behalf of the audience in saying that it’s extremely reassuring to know that Black has 4
been able to create an established space in BCS for women, and that they’ve been able to make so much progress.
about this”, she did, and she talked us through the process. First, she set up a blog called Saving Bletchley Park, then created a petition on the 10 Downing Street website asking the Government to save Bletchley Park. She raised public interest by getting on BBC News in 2008, and on the Today Programme on Radio 4, and included prominent people in her campaign, such as Stephen Fry through Twitter. It then started to gather momentum and Bletchley Park got larger and larger amounts of funding, before finally receiving £4.1m from the Heritage Lottery Fund. And so, in 2011, after three years, the Chief Operating Officer of Bletchley Park announced that Bletchley Park was saved.
Black also talked about her social enterprise called #Techmums, which empowers mums and their families through technology. It runs programs and initiatives designed to support mothers to become more confident about the use of technology and covers key areas including app/web design, social media, online safety and coding, to allow them to enter a new career path and gain confidence regarding employment or in setting up their own business. She started her #Techmums charity in 2012 after running children’s coding programmes in schools and spoke about how when she’d been running these programmes “fathers often felt confident enough to support their kids, while hesitant mums took a back-seat and looked apprehensive.”
Black looks back on it as her “proudest accomplishment” and all the events are documented in full in her book, Saving Bletchley Park.
It started off as Black holding 2-hour training sessions in schools and colleges, where over a period of six weeks mums could learn basic IT skills. Now, #Techmums has developed into a 10-week programme that mums attend in-person that run together with partners across the UK. The enterprise is aiming to reach 1 million mums. Black shared a graph showing user attitudes pre and post intervention, and it’s truly outstanding how successful #Techmums has been, in not only teaching mums about key areas in computing, but also in the amount of confidence it has given to the participants, and the number of opportunities it has opened for them. One of the most important experiences Black shared was the saving of Bletchley Park. She mentioned how she first went to Bletchley Park as part of a BCS meeting and told us that more than 10,000 people had worked there, and out of this over 5,000 of them were women, which I was astonished by. She recounts how at the time Bletchley Park was struggling financially, and the overall neglected state of the grounds in general, showing a photo of one of the huts, hut 6, being covered in blue tarpaulin. Black said she remembered thinking, “I’ve got to do something
This process was particularly interesting to hear about and speaks volumes as to the power of social media in bringing people together to support a cause. I personally 5
knew of Alan Turing’s work at Bletchley through the book ‘The Imitation Game: Alan Turing Decoded’ (which I recommend if you enjoy graphic novels) but had no idea of the financial struggles Bletchley Park went through, and so I’m glad to hear that the important historic grounds have been preserved and able to continue in engaging, educating and inspiring people with the crucial work done there in WW2, thanks to Black’s tireless efforts.
particularly coding. I started to code small projects in my own time, and I enjoy how creative you can be. There’s also a level of satisfaction you get when you code something and it works, it feels like you’ve really gotten somewhere.
Overall, Black’s talk was truly inspiring, and even that may be an understatement. It was gratifying to hear about her accomplishments, particularly considering her early background. As well as this, it was interesting to learn about the way Black has become the person she is today, in terms of her various motivations for taking action and the ways in which she went about doing so. Ishani and Margi (in Upper 5) also shared their views;
In terms of being a female doing CS, I did definitely notice the lack of girls in my class last year. By the end of the course, there were only two, including myself, compared to ten boys. However, I don’t think my experience of this the same as Black’s was, since I didn’t have many issues in terms of interacting with the class. A lot of the people I was friends with were in a different CS class, and while I wasn’t friends with any of the people in my class, but I would still be able to chat with them. My old CS teacher was female also and has been a guiding and supporting figure for me. She pointed me to useful resources, had a look at some of my projects, was always there to listen if I had any worries, and convinced me to apply for a computer science scholarship. She’s really inspired me to pursue CS and to have the confidence to be ambitious in it.
“We thought the talk was spectacular, particularly her initiative to protect Bletchley park due to the important message that it conveyed about women’s contributions to cracking the enigma code. We were extremely inspired by her personal story of how she got into computer science. The talk as a whole furthered our interest in computer science and made us extremely excited for futures in computer science, A Levels and further.” My own relationship with computer science For me, I was initially put off from doing computer science as a GCSE, but when I look back at it, I can’t have imagined doing anything differently. At the time I only really liked creative subjects, I enjoyed English and disliked maths. I’d also not done much computer science before, just ICT. After learning more about it, I decided to take CS GCSE despite it being relatively new to me. This “newness” was brought to light on one of our first CS lessons where we had a look at different pieces of code, and the others around me had at least some idea of what they were looking at, whilst I had none. I got from there to being confident with all the specified theory as well as the required coding in python, all within the first GCSE year. I received the CS award (at my old school), and I got an A* at the end in the GCSE. More importantly though, I came to really enjoy the subject,
I also convinced my friend to take CS for A level and helped her get up to speed on some of the content since she hadn’t taken the GCSE. She’s now the only girl in my old school’s year doing it. Respectively, I’m the only one in my year doing CS for A level too. We’re both enjoying it, and, separately from this, are starkly aware of the gender imbalance.
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A wider look at women in computer science
more women into computer science and in making the industry a lot more supportive of this.
The percentage of women working in computer sciencerelated professions has declined since the 1990s, dropping from 35% to 26% between 1990 and 2013.
Examples of incentives here at Habs include teaching coding from year 7 to get students engaged from an early age, a robotics club to get more students interested in this field and the year 8 CyberFirst Girls competition. Consequently, 68 students here are studying computer science, which is an increase from previous years, and is a substantial figure alone. Plans for the future involve running a #Techmums course at the school, and introducing a more diverse curriculum to talk about more women in tech, such as Katherine Johnson, Anne-Marie Imafidon, Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace and more, to inform students about women in tech.
In 2020, the number of girls choosing to study computer science GCSE was 16,919 – just over 21.4% of total entrants – compared with 61,540 boys. Women taking computer science related degrees in the UK make up just 13% of students. The low numbers are reflected in job roles; the percentage of women employed in tech has barely moved from only 15.7% in 2009 to approximately just 17% today.
As Black pointed out during her talk “if I can do it, so can you!”. I think this is the most important take away. Computer science is a truly exciting field, one that is constantly evolving and important in so many aspects of life, in the healthcare industry, in the travel industry, in the general working and social environment (seen particularly with remote learning/working from home). We get to see the future of technology unfold, and I really hope that you would like to be a part of it, maybe as a GCSE, or a club, or maybe later, as a degree. The most important message is that no one should feel put off from computer science, not because of the lack of women, or your background, or your age, or the foreignness of the subject. It can be done by anyone and Sue Black is testament to that. ///
I think this goes without saying, but these figures are devastatingly low. There is reason to be hopeful, however. According to the Association of University Women, in order to change the imbalance, educators and parents can work together to help females maintain their confidence and curiosity in STEM subjects. Men can help to create a more inclusive workplace, and professional women (and those outside the gender binary too) already in the field can become mentors. This is why people like Sue Black and their work is so important. More and more attention is being given to the gender imbalance seen in this field, and with it, more and more incentives are being introduced to get
Did you know? On Tuesday 29 March 2022, Habs Girls hosted the MBDA robot rumble competition. Nine teams of 74 students from eight different schools battled it out on the VEX robotics competition field to secure a place at the National competition in Telford in April. There were several matches during the day. Our Lower 5 team worked brilliantly together to drive and code their robot and made it to the semi-finals but sadly flipped their robot upside down in their last match. /// 7
Have you ever wondered what types of strange creatures live in the deep blue ocean?
floor, so animals have had to adapt to be able to see. For example, the angler fish has a structure which is a sort of rod that comes out from its body and hangs in front of its face. This structure has evolved from the spines of the fish's dorsal fin, and the end of this structure contains large numbers of bioluminescent bacteria, which causes it to glow, giving the angler fish its own source of light. The angler fish uses this structure to lure prey, but other creatures use bioluminescence in other ways, such as the lanternfish and the flashlight fish. The lanternfish uses bioluminescence to protect themselves from predators. Unlike the angler fish, lanternfish use bioluminescence to light their whole bodies. Flashlight fish use bioluminescence to communicate with other flashlight fish and confuse predators. Flashlight fish have pouches of bioluminescent bacteria under their eyes, so when they want to turn on the light, they lower the folds of skin below each eye.
Along the ocean floor there are roughly 300,000,000 species. For example, on July 28th in 2021, researchers with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), spotted a new species called the Blood-red jellyfish, as they were using a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) at a depth of around 2,300 feet (700 meters) just off the coast of Newport, Rhode Island.
In 2021, many other new species of deep-sea creatures were discovered, such as the shape-shifting whalefish, and the glass octopus. But although we have already discovered so many of these unique creatures, there is still an estimated 100,000 to 10 million left undiscovered. As you now know, so many different species of creatures thrive in the depths of the ocean, you may not know that the the conditions of the ocean can be very harsh. The creatures have had to adapt and evolve to survive. In the deeper parts of the ocean, light hardly reaches the sea
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These are just some examples of animals that have adapted to use bioluminescence against the darkness in the deepest parts of the ocean. How much light gets to the deeper depths of the ocean is only one of the factors that make living in the sea hard. Another factor is pressure. Water is 800 times heavier than air, and as pressure = force x area, the greater the force (weight), the greater the pressure. If you dive 32 feet underwater, the amount of pressure exerted is the same amount as our atmosphere, so double that is twice the amount of pressure you feel when standing up. Should you go underwater 5000m, the pressure would be approximately 500 atmospheres, 500 times the pressure you feel now. The Mariana Trench is the deepest place in the ocean, it is 11,034 meters deep, almost 7 miles, and its pressure is greater than 1100 atmospheres. If the pressure on the sea floor is so great, how do the sea creatures survive there? The creatures have adapted to survive the pressure. For example, the Mariana Snailfish, which live at the bottom of the Mariana Trench and can survive more than 1100 atmospheres of pressure, as I mentioned earlier. In order to survive under the sea, the Mariana snailfish has some unique characteristics in its anatomy and genetics that help it do this. First of all, the fish have gaps in their skulls, and first author Kun Wang, from the Northwestern Polytechnical University, says this “may help the internal and external pressures to be balanced.”
This means that this gap helps the pressure to balance and without it, their skull would be crushed due to the pressure. Another trait they have, is that their bones are made mainly from cartilage. This is caused by a mutation in the primary gene which is responsible for calcification (the buildup of calcium to harden the bones). This mutation causes the gene to become partially nonfunctional. So the bones cannot harden and calcify. Kun Wang says this makes their bones more flexible and more likely to withstand the pressure. The high pressure underwater can also break down proteins, which are needed to live, so the Mariana Snailfish has a clever solution to this. They have high levels of a substance called trimethylamine N-oxide (TMAO), which is used to stabilise proteins. Most animals have one copy of these gene, but the Mariana snailfish have 5! Finally, the Mariana snailfish has had to adapt to be able to move chemicals into and out of cells, as this can be difficult at these high pressures. It’s solution to this is, the Mariana snailfish simply produces high numbers of the proteins necessary to transport these substances. Another creature that has adapted to the high pressure on the sea bed is the blob fish. Many people already know this creature as it looks quite strange, and well, blobby, but on the sea floor it’s blobby-ness helps it survive! It doesn’t have many bones, as if it did, it would be crushed under the immense pressure.
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Many other fish that live in the sea have something called a swim bladder. A swim bladder is a gas filled sac, which most fish that live close to the surface have. It allows the fish to float or sink. When the sac is filled with air, the fish will float to the surface. The blob fish doesn’t have this as it lives just above the sea floor, at depths that can go up to 1200m, and as the pressure is much greater, if it had a swim bladder, it would implode due to the pressure pushing down on it. Instead, the blob fish has evolved to have a gelatinous (blobby) body, with not very much muscle. This allows them to float very easily without expending much energy. Their entire body is only slightly denser than water.
water. But a team, led by roboticist Guorui Li of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, took the anatomy of the Mariana snailfish, specifically the gap in its skull, to help the robot withstand pressure. They spread out the electronics in the robot farther apart than they normally would have, and encased them in silicone to keep them from touching. They also designed the robot to look similar to the snailfish, with two fins that the robot can use to propel itself through the water. (Though actually the fish doesn’t propel itself, it wriggles through the water.) The robot was tested 70 meters deep in a lake, about 3,200 meters deep in the South China Sea, and finally, at the very bottom of the ocean in the Mariana Trench. For the first two trials it was allowed to swim freely, but for the final trial they used the extendable arm of a deep-sea lander to hold the robot while it swam.
This adaptation of their body allows them to hover just above the sea floor, virtually unaffected by the pressure, with an easy food source.
There are so many undiscovered species that live in the ocean, as I said before (100000 - 10 million), but almost every time scientists dive, they find a new species. On average, roughly 150 new species of marine fish are described each year, but this past decade has had the highest discovery rate, with an average of 2000 discoveries each year. So in the future, it can be expected that many more amazing discoveries of life in the deep sea will be made. ///
Many scientific machines were made because of discoveries made about the anatomy of creatures. For example, because scientists learnt about how the anatomy of the Mariana snailfish withstood pressure deep in the ocean, they created a robot that uses the same principles to withstand the pressure. When in the ocean, scientific robots need to be able to take samples of the water, or film things, as well as just move around, and this can prove a challenge as gears and mechanisms can grind against one another under the pressure of the
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Once a star has no fuel left to burn, it can no longer support its mass and collapses. Many scientists have thought to believe that supermassive black holes were made at the same time as the galaxy.
Black holes and wormholes are special types of solutions to Einstein’s equations, arising when the structure of space time is strongly bent by gravity.
What are the different types of black holes?
For example, when matter is extremely dense, the fabric of spacetime can become so curved that not even light can escape. The main difference between a black hole and a wormhole is where they physically end. A wormhole has two open ends which hypothetically connect two different points in time and space. However, black holes come to a point of extreme density called a singularity from which nothing can escape – not even wavelengths of light.
There are four different types of black holes: stellar, intermediate, supermassive and miniature. Stellar mass black holes are formed as described above by the collapse of a large star. Intermediate mass black holes are thought to form when multiple stellar-mass black holes undergo a series of mergers with one another. These mergers frequently happen in crowded areas of galaxies. A supermassive black hole can be found at the centre of a galaxy and consumes stars and smaller black holes in order to obtain its massive size – millions of times larger than the sun. Some scientists have suggested that supermassive black holes were formed out of the collapse of massive clouds of gas during the early stages of the formation of the galaxy. Miniature black holes were formed from rapidly expanding space that squeezed some regions into tiny, dense black holes much smaller than the sun.
What are black holes? Black holes are the strangest objects in the universe. Black holes are not like planets and stars they do not have a surface. Instead, it is a region of space where matter has collapsed in on itself. This catastrophic collapse results in a huge amount of mass being concentrated in an incredibly small area. The gravitational pull of this region is so great that nothing can escape – not even light. Black holes can not be seen, but we know they exist from the way they affect nearby dust, stars and galaxies. As the discs swirl around black holes like a whirlpool, they become extremely hot and give off X-rays. All black holes come in different sizes. Many of them are only a few times bigger than the Sun.
What is a wormhole? A wormhole is a theoretical celestial body through which two separate points in space and time are connected. It’s a theoretical passageway in space-time that would connect a black hole and a white hole. A white hole is the other end of a black hole that has poked through to another part of space-time. To most theorists, wormholes are highly speculative because such a shortcut would, in effect, act as a time machine.
How are black holes made? These ‘stellar-mass’ black holes are formed when the centre of a very big star falls in upon itself, or collapses. When this happens, it causes a supernova. A supernova is an exploding star that blasts part of the star into space. 11
How are wormholes made? simply measuring the emissions of gamma radiation. In theory, gamma rays should be emitted in a single jetstream fashion from a black hole, while the gamma radiation of a wormhole would appear as a giant sphere.
Wormholes are made when a black hole (a region of space where nothing can escape) is connected to a white hole (a theoretical region of space where nothing can enter). When these two celestial bodies join together, they form a brand-new thing: a wormhole.
If a black hole ever collided with a wormhole bigger than itself, the black hole would be trapped in a back-andforth journey between the two openings of the wormhole before eventually getting stuck in the centre of the tunnel.
What are the different types of wormholes? There are two main types of wormholes: Lorentzian wormholes (general relativity) and Euclidean wormholes (particle physics). Lorentzian wormholes are short-cuts through space and time. These wormholes are mainly studied by experts in Einstein gravity. They need large amounts of negative mas to hold them open and stop then from collapsing. Negative mass is not anti-matter, it’s a region where the energy of the universe is less than that of ordinary vacuum.
If a large black hole collided with a smaller wormhole, the black hole would consume the wormhole and the mass energies acquired would most likely result in the creation of a larger black hole. Overall, black holes and wormholes are two of space’s most peculiar and unique phenomena. They both have many similarities and differences, yet scientists today are still questioning the wonders of black holes and wormholes. ///
Euclidean wormholes are even stranger: they live in ‘imaginary time’ and are naturally virtual quantum mechanical processes. These Euclidean wormholes are more complicated, obeying the laws of quantum mechanics and dealing with particle physics more than spacetime dimensions.
What are the differences between a black hole and a wormhole? The most notable difference between a black hole and a wormhole is the final destination the objects drawn inside each. They also differ in their gravitational ability and potential radiation emissions. Inside a black hole all objects end up at one point called the singularity, which they can never be released from. On the other hand, an object that enters a wormhole travels as if through a tunnel and is released through the other end in a different point in time and space. There is also a new theory that suggest a potential way to determine the difference between a black hole and a wormhole by
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Time travel. It’s a familiar concept that we see in Science Fiction all the time: Doctor Who, Back to The Future, Interstellar and many more. The ‘time machine’ that we often see is definitely a fantasy, but the concept of time travel is not.
mirrors opposite each other and the time it takes one particle of light to go from one mirror to the other and back makes the clock tick. Put one of these clocks on earth and the other on a speeding spaceship with your friend. For your friend the clock appears to tick normally for them but from your perspective the light doesn’t seem to just travel up and down vertically (as it would for the stationary clock) but move in a more zigzag like pattern because the spaceship is moving. Thus, the light has to travel a longer distance to get from one mirror to the other mirror and so the clock ticks slower than the clock on earth. Compared to a usual tick tock the clock on the spaceship is more of a tiiiiick toooock. See below a similar example of this but instead of a clock on a spaceship the clock is on a moving skateboard. Another example of time dilation actually happening is in the large hadron collider where protons are propelled around the collider at 99.999999% the speed of light and at that speed, time passes 7000 times more slowly for the protons than the scientists watching the protons go round the large hadron collider. This is time dilation and through time dilation Einstein proved that time is relative and that time travel into the future is possible. Before you try running really fast in hope of achieving to time travel you should know that
Although time travel is likely one of the weirdest concepts humans have thought of it’s not a fantasy at all, but there is still an immense gap between knowing how it could work and putting it into practice. Time travel can easily be disregarded as a fiction but when science is applied to it you will realise that we see time travel in practice frequently. Here are some suggested theories as to how time travel could work: 1) The easiest way most likely to time travel is by going really really fast. According to Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity, time is relative depending on how fast you are moving. ‘The faster you move through space the slower you move though time’ according to Astrophysicist Paul Sutter. When you measure the tick tock on a speeding spaceship compared to a stationary clock on earth the moving clock will appear to tick slower than the stationary clock. This strange effect is called time dilation and it works because light has a constant speed. Imagine a light clock which works using two
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although you will experience time slower relative to a stationary person the difference will be minuscule. However, if you were on a spaceship going near the speed of light away from the Earth and you stay in orbit for year you would age at the same rate as if you were still on earth, by a year from your perspective , but when you returned, the earth may have aged hundreds of years because time ticked slower for you than for the people on Earth.
ticking. The lower one ticked slower because it feels a slightly stronger gravity. Einstein proposed that massive objects can physically bend space and time and that a gravitational field is really a curving of space and time. Therefore, the stronger the gravity the more ‘spacetime’ is warped and the slower time itself proceeds. GPS satellites also experience time at a rate slightly faster than 1 second per second as gravity is weaker where the satellites are. This is called gravitational time dilation, but if you wanted to time travel further than just one second into the future you would need to find an object with much stronger gravitational fields, such as a black hole. Black holes would be perfect for time travel it’s just that they sort of demolish and spaghettify(extremely elongates) anything that passes its event horizon. However, even if you just hung around the event horizon without being swallowed time would slow down for you. Imagine that you spent three days at the event horizon, what felt like three days for you was actually three hundred years back on earth
2) Another way we could time travel is using gravity. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity the stronger the gravity you feel the slower time moves for you. So yes, your head is a bit older than your feet as your feet experience time more slowly due to stronger gravity. It’s weird to think about but gravity does warp time and this had been proven. In 2010, physicists at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) placed two atomic clocks on shelves, one 33 centimetres above the other, and measured the difference in their rate of
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because the gravitational force of the black hole had slowed down time for you relative to people back on Earth. Once you had returned back to Earth you would be in the future.
be able to achieve this. But how exactly does a wormhole make you travel into the past? Professor Brian Greene says that if you manipulate the two openings of a wormhole you could create a passage not only through different points in space but different points in time as well. For example, keep one opening of the wormhole on earth and put the other opening onto a spaceship at a high speed orbiting the galaxy. Using knowledge from earlier we know that this results in time dilation, the trip could only take a few days as seen and felt but several years was felt and seen back on Earth. The result of this is a bit like an actual time machine, very different to the usual sci-fi ones however. If you go through the opening of the wormhole that was on Earth and exit through the spaceship opening you will go back in time several years according to Nobel prize winner Dr Kip Thorne because the spaceship wormhole was experiencing time much slower than on Earth. With such a machine you could go back in time and meet your younger self, see the dinosaurs or change the past. However, there is a speculation that changing the past is far too dangerous; what would happen if you went to the past and killed your ancestor? Which is why Stephen Hawkins has made a law called The Chronology Protection Conjuncture which prevents anyone from being able to change the past. Therefore, although it is theoretically possible to go back in time using a wormhole you would not be able to change the past and this is still a fairly new concept and is likely to be a fantasy for now but who knows maybe in the future…
3) So far we have seen methods of travelling into the future but not into the past. Many scientists think that time travel into the future is hard enough let alone into time travel into the past; there is one way it could work but its only theoretical. Wormholes. Wormholes are often used as a concept in sci-fi movies and you could say that this method of time travel is a fantasy for now. The concept of a wormhole originated from Einstein’s theory of relativity. Wormholes are a theoretical tunnel in space time believed to connect different parts of our Universe, think of it like a little shortcut through space. Wormholes although theoretical the laws of physics say it could exist. In fact many physicists, including Stephen Hawking, believe wormholes are constantly popping in and out of existence but only at the quantum scale, far smaller than atoms. In order to time travel through them we would have to inflate it large enough so humans could travel through which would require lots of energy. However according to the laws of physics the tunnel will implode and collapse inwards before you could even enter. To prevent this collapse we would need matter with negative energy which produces anti-gravity and holds the wormhole open. Although negative energy has been made in small amounts before our technology is still far from being able to hold a wormhole open long enough for a human to travel through. Despite this, technology will hopefully one day
4) Another method of time travel into the past is using a Tipler cylinder. U.S astronomer Frank Tipler has a simple recipe for a time machine, take a material 10 times the mass of the sun, squeeze it together and roll it into a long thin super dense cylinder a bit like a black hole that has passed through a spaghetti machine. Then spin the cylinder a few billion revolutions per minute and Tipler predicted if you put a spaceship on a carefully plotted spiral course around the cylinder the spaceship would find itself on a ‘closed time like curve’. It would 15
emerge thousands even billions of years from its starting point and possibly several galaxies away according to Dr David Lewis. However, for the mathematics to work the cylinder would have to be infinitely long which is not possible, but who knows maybe some super advanced aliens in another galaxy already have loads of these cylinders. If such a cylinder could be constructed however, this suggests an compelling way of travelling into the past.
that time travel is more than just machines and fiction and that we actually see time travel effects in practice all the time through GPS satellites, the Large Hadron Collider and even when looking up at the night sky. Time travel is indeed a super science. ///
Some of these ideas of time travel may seem far fetched but scientists has proved that time dilation and gravitational time dilation do exist. Through the brilliant minds of Einstein, Frank Tipler, Kip throne and many other physicists time travel is becoming increasingly more hopeful, and although we are still very very far away from achieving time travel, it is not a fantasy, science has proved it. Although, the wormhole and Tipler cylinder theories are only a concept many scientists will still consider them to be super science even if our present technology can’t prove it. Overall, hopefully this article has shown you
FUN FACT! Did you know that we actually look into the past when we look up at the night sky? The light from the sun we see actually left the sun eight minutes and twenty seconds ago which means we are seeing the sun as it was eight minutes and 20 seconds ago in the past. The bright star Sirius is 8.6 light years away. That means the light hitting your eye tonight has been traveling for 8.6 years. Put another way: When you look at Sirius tonight, you see it as it was 8.6 years ago. All the stars we see at night are from the past, in a way it’s sort of like you are travelling back in time when you look into the night sky. What we see in the sky is a reflection of the universe’s past, many of the stars you see may not even be there anymore.
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The Human Genome Project is the world’s largest collaborative biological project that was created in order to find the precise specification of the chromosomal locations and molecular compositions of the 50,000-100,000 genes and other regulatory elements of the human genome.
aid development of early diagnosis techniques and treatment. There is also a plethora of other complex illnesses, such as cancers and psychiatric disorders, that require locating and analysing the coordinated action and structure of groups of genes.
Not only was the Human Genome Project one of the first “Big Science” projects in the biological field, it was also one of the first to focus on developing a resource over performing scientific experiments. After its launch in 1987, the project had great success and was deemed essentially complete in 2003 when 85% of the sequence was known. However, work on it continued and in 2021 the level ‘complete genome’ was reached with only 0.3% left unknown, which in January 2022 was finally discovered.
The sequencing of our genome is an integral part of our intellectual heritage and has large promises of medical advancement and increased economic competitiveness. Little was understood of the human genome (only one thousandth of the entire sequence) which made this an important resource to create as it forms the basis of most human biology studies due to DNAs relationship with protein synthesis and disease.
How was the Human Genome Project created?
In Alexander’s Pope’s Essay on Man, he wrote:
‘Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
What is the human genome?
The proper study of Mankind is Man’
The structure and production of 50,000 different proteins that carry out life’s processes is encoded in a linear sequence of roughly 6 billion pairs of bases strung out over 22 pairs of autosomal chromosomes and the two sex chromosomes present in each diploid cell. The chromosomes in a fertilised egg determine the timing and details of foetal development as the sequencing of our genetic code is incredibly important during this stage. Unrelated humans differ from each other by just one base in a thousand which is ten times less than we differ genetically from our closest ancestor. With this in mind, there are four thousand diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that are caused by a mutation in a single gene and are encoded for at birth. Mapping and sequencing these genes has been advantageous as it has allowed us to understand how they differ from their normal counterparts, in order to
…which emphasises the long-standing need of ‘Mankind’ to understand ourselves in order to forward our biological research. This explains how the sequencing of the genome is beneficial as a catalyst for scientific discoveries as it forms the ‘blueprint for life’ (Charles DeLisi, 1988). This also raises interesting philosophical questions around our need for information and answers as a species and how this has fuelled our evolution and rapid scientific growth. Proposals to sequence the human genome date back to 1985 when Robert Sinsheimer (Chancellor of the University of Southern Carolina) organized a workshop on this topic. However, it was not until Mark Bitensky (the Division Leader of Life Sciences at Los Alamos) organized an international workshop in Santa Fe in 1986, that bought together scientific leaders from industry, 17
academia and the national laboratories to assess the technical feasibility of sequencing the human genome by the end of the century and the probable cost and the benefits of this. This caused significant excitement within the scientific community and was said to have felt like the rare moments in the early phase of major new ventures such as space exploration. The Office of Health and Environmental Research then planned a program consisting of two phases that would need to be carried out in order to sequence the entire genome. It was predicted that if they continued sequencing the genome at the rate that they had previously been going at, they wouldn’t finish the project until the 28th century meaning phase one had to incorporate the increase in speed and cost-effectiveness of sequencing. By spending four to seven years developing the computational methods required for data management and analysis, they planned to increase map resolution by two orders of magnitude, which would make the sequencing process much more efficient. Phase two consisted of the actual sequencing of the human genome and it was understood that this stage would be dependent on progress made in phase one which, after further development of this plan, was begun in 1987.
small science will become obsolete. This is because Big Science requires large sums of money meaning that with tight government budgets if one area gains, another loses and therefore cottage industry science will be driven out, along with the creativity and freedom involved in small science projects. The argument against the Human Genome Project as Big Science was reinforced by its logistical requirements, as it required large, interdisciplinary teams of scientists that not many universities could accommodate so needed to take place at the DOE laboratories at a time when the US national budget was being reduced, meaning traditionally supported and successful programs may have been threatened. Also, people believed that the absence of the complete sequence was not limiting the pace of biological progress. However, we can see from the many discoveries that occurred after the essentially complete sequencing in 2003 that this line of argument was not valid and that the Human Genome Project is one of the most important scientific projects in recent history.
Arguments around Big Science The Human Genome Project created a much bigger debate around the merits of Big Science versus cottage industry science as it was predicted to cost three billion US dollars. Big Science is scientific research that is expensive and involves large teams of scientists and the cottage industry refers to small-scale, decentralized manufacturing businesses often operated out of a home rather than a purpose-built facility. The reason behind apprehension around Big Science projects, such as the Human Genome Project, is the worry that eventually
Despite apprehension, the great success of the Human Genome project and promise of new drug discovery that could help save millions of lives, makes it a groundbreaking resource for understanding ourselves and has the potential to fuel future biological discoveries for centuries to come. ///
FUN FACT! The human genome is so long that if you read out one letter of the sequence every second, 24 hours a day, it would take 100 years to recite the whole length!
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The human brain plays a more than crucial role in all aspects of physiology, controlling balance, movement, thoughts, emotions, organ function, coordination, speech, hearing, nerves and much more. As a result, the brain is a focal point of research into many conditions.
commercialised, allowing firms to steal people's memories and extort them, and some fear this may happen as soon as 2038. Companies may be able to buy memory boosting implants and collect and manipulate memories in ten years. Furthermore, because the brain is such a complicated organ with so much, we do not understand there are many opportunities for mistakes to occur. Researchers at the university of Zurich, for example, studied nine cases of Parkinsons disease patients last year. Who had received brain implants to control their tremors. The implants improved their symptoms but had an unexpected side effect: while they were all previously good swimmers, they could now no longer swim. At least one nearly drowned when he jumped in the water and suddenly discovered the problem.
Scientists are making progress with understanding the brain, with implications for medicine, artificial intelligence, education and philosophy. An interesting and potentially controversial area of research surrounding our brain is the use of brain implants. Brain implants are used to activate the neurological system in specific ways. This has the potential to engage the senses, increase physical function and boost memory. Unlike pacemakers, dental crowns, and implantable insulin pumps, neuroprostehtics (technologies that repair or supplement the minds powers and capacities with electronics injected directly into the nervous system) alter our perception of the world and how we move through it.
The technology “raises a range of unique ethical, legal and societal questions,” the Paris-based organisation’s governing council said in statement. While it can be applied for good, to treat mental illness or understand the mind better, it can also have malign uses, such as invading privacy or controlling human behaviour.
Deep brain stimulation, DBS, is a term used to describe what brain implants do one they are implanted. Electrodes are implanted into specific parts of the brain based on the condition and symptoms the brain implants are intended to improve, and electrical impulses are sent that bypass damaged tissue and regulate any abnormal impulses.
Overall scientists have already demonstrated the positive impact of brain implants and how they can be used to treat and improve a wide range of conditions and there are many signs of a promising future in their application. However, this is still a possibility of the misuse of this technology.
The use of DBS is reserved for people who are unable to control their symptoms with medication. Scientists have demonstrated that treatments for Parkinson's disease dystonia, epilepsy and obsessive-compulsive disorder can improve symptoms. Furthermore, using brain implants to increase memory can help people with Alzheimer's disease improve their cognitive abilities.
None of us really know until it is time to make the choice. Our understanding of the brain is growing rapidly thanks to new tools and technology for studying it. Perhaps the biggest revelation is how much more is left to learn. ///
However, it is unlikely that all uses of brain implants will have beneficial results or be ethical. According to the daily mail, brain implants, which are now used to treat Parkinson's disease, have the potential to become 19
His invention revolutionised the production of patterned cloth, it made it far quicker for unskilled workers to weave cloth. This made the price of cloth plummet so that cloth was affordable to the average consumer. Instead of hand weaving the cloth, the Jacquard loom introduced the idea of interchangeable punch cards. The cards had holes punched into them to tell the loom how to weave the pattern. So when the punch cards were fed into the machine, it could weave more efficiently. The invention of punch cards would go on to become the way of inputting data into computers.
In the 1980s women represented about 35% of computer professionals. Over the last twenty years the percentage has dropped to below 20%.1 What happened? Women have always been in Information Technology (IT). And IT is in all areas of our lives. Yet, as the world has been transformed by computing technology, the number of women working in IT has fallen. This article examines some possible reasons why this may have happened - and what the future holds.
Punch cards, also known as Hollerith cards or IBM cards, were paper cards with holes made by hand or machine to represent computer data and instructions. These cards were put into a card reader which was connected to a computer, and this converted the sequence of holes to digital information.
Information technology is a broad, and international area of work. IT qualifications are recognised around the world, and it’s really easy to work anywhere remotely. The IT community is highly collaborative (they invented ‘open source’ – code that is open for use by anyone without charge) and it is hard to find an area of life that is not underpinned by IT. In turn, new ways of living and working have emerged. The internet of things (IoT) connects different devices for the ultimate consumer experience; data analytics and ‘big data’ (data derived from many sources/devices) gives business new insights into customers; AI (Artificial Intelligence) and deep learning - and cybersecurity.
Early years The origins of modern day computing can be traced back to the Jacquard loom.2 It was created in 1804 by JosephMarie Jacquard who was a French weaver and merchant.
Card maker using a machine to translate pattern onto punch cards c.1950, Science Museum Group
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2
https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/women-intech-the-only-woman-in-the-room/
https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-andstories/jacquardloom#:~:text=The%20Jacquard%20loom%20is%2 0often,the%20design%20of%20early%20computers.
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to reference Babbage. He also wrote of cryptographic ideas, which although had been used since ancient times had relevance to computing: stenography (hiding messages in plain sight) and encryption. Madame Defarge, in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ kept a register of those to be executed, and used a cipher (an algorithm that converts symbols from one alphabet into other symbols) in her knitting, which could be decrypted if you knew the key. Later during the world wars knitting was as an espionage tool – the two basic knitting stitches (knit and purl) can be used like binary, as well as codes like Morse.
Ada Lovelace (1815 -1852)
Women were still in the forefront of computing during the world wars. Alan Turing, considered the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence, set about cracking the German military enciphering Enigma machine. He designed a stored program computer, ACE. Bletchley Park, England was the where the top secret code breakers worked during World War II. They had to break incredibly difficult codes. He was not the only code breaker in Bletchley Park. There were many other women involved, including Joan Clarke, briefly Turing fiancée, although he was unable to go through with the marriage. Overall, about 75% of the workforce at Bletchley were women, with a number involved in complex intellectually demanding work. 3 Their efforts were thought to have saved millions of Alan Turing 1912 - 1954 lives and helped end the war quicker.
Ada Lovelace was a mathematician. She was the daughter of Lord Byron, the infamous English Poet, whose mother encouraged her learning. She became involved in Charles Babbage’s work. Babbage is known as the ‘Father of Computing’ and invented the first mechanical engine, the Difference Engine, although modern computing ideas come from his Analytical Engine, which was programmed using a principle taken directly from Jacquard’s Loom. Lovelace recognised Babbage’s machine had applications beyond calculation. She created the first algorithm for such a machine, making her the world’s first computer programmer. Charles Babbage saw punch cards as a way of instructing algorithms into computers. Punch cards would be put through the computer depending on whether there was a punch, or not. This off and on method is represented by binary code in 0 or 1, and computers still use this method – binary system is perfect electricity flow - off and on. Upon this is build machine code, and in turn programming languages which can be understood by people. Early programming languages were closer to machine code, and required high skill. Later these higher-level languages (closer to natural language and using pre-coded blocks) were faster and easier to learn.
ENIAC was one of the first computers and was built in the United States in 1945. It was the first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. A significant proportion of development and programming was done by six women mathematicians. In the 1940s computing and calculating were seen as women’s work. The women worked so hard that they were called ‘kilogirls’ – working the ‘equivalent to
Among the people who moved in the same social circles as Lovelace and Babbage was Charles Dickins. He knew both, and was inspired by their work which he used in his ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, about the French Revolution. His character, Daniel Doyce in ‘Little Dorrit’, is thought 3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_Bletchley_Park
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thousand hours of computing labour’. These women were known as computers.
be controlled remotely. Lamarr and Antheil received a patent for their work in 1942. Lamarr is reputed to have said:
This is because computers could refer to people who thought mathematically as well as machine computers. Women of colour had to work in segregated stations often working even harder. In 1943 nearly all human ‘computers’ were women. They worked with the bombe computers to crack the enigma code. During this time programming was viewed as an administrative task, and women were ideal employees as they could be paid less. Engineering hardware was mainly a male activity.
‘Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.’
For black computers, there was even greater disparity. When the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, NACA (which became NASA) expanded the amount of women computers, unlike their white counterparts, black computers were asked to do their college passes again even though they passed, and many didn’t receive promotions. Women like Joan Clarke worked to solve the Enigma code, but when she was promoted, there were no roles for a ‘senior female cryptanalyst’.
Grace Hopper
In 1943, Grace Hopper begun to work with computers at the Bureau of Ordnance’s Computation Project. Hopper programmed the Harvard Mark 1 and wrote a 500 page manual for it. Even though her manual was widely published and citied, she didn’t receive due credit. In the 1950s, other women started to work alongside Hopper in UNIVAC where they programmed with the FLOW-MATIC code, which Hopper had created. She and her team created programmes that could write programmes, Sort-Merge generator, and a Report generator. Klara Dan Von Neumann, who was the main programmer for the improved version of ENIAC, MANIAC. Thelma Estrin, a programmer in Israel, created the world’s first large-scale programmable electronic computer, called WEIZEN. By the mid-1960s, as computing entered businesses, it became ‘professional’. Where women had been welcomed as programmers, as it had been seen as a more administrative task, once programming became ‘professional’ and better paid, it began to become male dominated.
Heddy Lamarr was a famous actress in the 1930s and ‘40s , but less well known was that she was also a pioneer who invented the beginnings of Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth systems. She worked with George Antheil on frequency hopping methods for the navy’s torpedoes to 22
Films, like 1993’s Jurassic Park showed IT totally owned by men.
Marketing and the Media folk
Rolling Stone magazine began writing about the computer hacker, and the tech company founder, giving them rock-star status. Men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, later Mark Zuckerburg etc. Being male and being a successful tech entrepreneur went together in the public’s mind. The idea a big business could be started by anyone from their bedroom or garage was seductive. Boys had plenty of role models to inspire them – unlike girls. An added issue for women trying to start businesses is that most venture capital companies are run by men. The Harvard Business Review reported that just 2.3% of women-led startups received funding in 2020.4 It’s been found that when a VC firm does have a female decision maker or partner, they are twice as likely to fund women start-ups. The funding dropped for women businesses over the recent pandemic, and it is thought risk aversion led to funding those companies that were ‘familiar’, and these are usually male-led ventures.
By the mid-1970s the personal computer (PC) market began to grow, at first they were kits for hobbyists – who happened mainly to be men. In 1981 IBM introduced its PC. It ran a 16-bit CPU on an 8-bit bus (the Intel 8088), and included at least 16 KB of RAM. 1982 became the ‘year of the Computer’ and a year later there were an estimated 10 million PCs in use in US alone. Marketing people were seeking a market and it seems the most promising demographic to sell to were men and boys. The computer games soon followed. Some early games were more gender-neutral – Pong, Tetris, Centipede…but over time games became more violent, and ‘shoot ‘em up’. Generally, the computer games, like the PCs, were preferred by boys and men. Then along came the film industry and the magazines, which portrayed a male-oriented world. It was around the 1980s that the number of women taking Computer Science as a degree became to plummet, and an overall disengagement began.
Like a Horrible Histories movie pitch sketch, reality which involved many more people than the single tech genius was pushed aside for a great story. The film ‘The Social Network’ in 2010 about the founding of Facebook ignored any prominent women involved, and showed a world where women were portrayed as objects, focussing on the story of a Harvard dropout who can’t get a date so he founds a multi-million-dollar tech company as a way to compensate. The ‘bro’ hood
The film War Games in 1983, shows the key character as a tech genius high school student, David Lightman, who unwittingly hacks into a military supercomputer while searching for new video games. His girlfriend’s role is mainly as a cheerleader.
When I was about 8 years old I attended a week’s robotic tech camp. I was the only girl there except for someone’s sister, who had come along with her brother and later gave up. All the tutors were male. The boys were having fun, and seemed to know what they were doing. By the middle of the week I came home and cried as I was convinced I’d be the only one whose robot would fail, and I didn’t want to go back. The boys would form a ‘huddle’, and I felt excluded. My mum told me that probably only
The image of the quirky, often anti-social, programmer sitting alone in his bedroom was forming.
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https://hbr.org/2021/02/women-led-startups-received-just-2-3of-vc-funding-in-2020
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one or two would really know what they’re doing; so don’t give up and don’t make assumptions. By the end of the week my robot did better on the obstacle course than some others. Making assumptions that we’re not going to be as good, or even fail, can be self-fulfilling.
actually do is due to attempts by technology companies to sell IT products and services. IT salespeople even invented a term, ‘FUD’ (fear, uncertainty and doubt), to encourage these emotions in their customers so they could sell to worried organisations who feared being left behind. This led to a lot of technical jargon, and some strange expressions, like ‘cutting edge’ or ‘bleeding edge’.
When there are a lack of female role models, it can seem like an exclusive male club. I am currently doing a Rover 4x4 club at the Boys’ school. As the boys dominate in numbers, they are going to influence how things are done because they are the majority. This is what happens when girls are in a minority – and in turn, the girls start to give up because it seems like an alien environment, so the situation continues. However, I welcome opportunities to work in mixed gender teams, as this reflects the real world. I have found the Boys’ school to be supportive, as long as you turn up and have something to contribute. It’s important to get started and stay the course. The number of women quitting IT is 45% higher than men.5
Is it all bad news? How bad is the gender disconnect, and what is being done? To research I used various search engines on different proxies around the world. It depends on which country you are in. For example, in the former Soviet block, in order to make ends meet for families, women would go out to work. Technology roles were better paid, and so there were many more women to be found in these occupations. Bulgaria is shown to top the chart.
Jargon
Women represented 46.8% of the postgraduates in IT and computing during the academic year 2014-2015 in India.6
IT as a profession has not been around very long, unlike teaching, law or medicine. Many people don’t really know what technology professionals actually do. They can consider the work to be boring and perhaps for antisocial people who like to hide away in dark corners doing ‘something with computers’. This can make IT appear uninviting. In reality the work covers many different roles, only some are very technical. It can be highly creative (in a logical, disciplined way), and it can be sociable. Part of this problem may have come from the media portrayal of IT occupations, and part from the amount of jargon. As a comparison, people wouldn’t confuse one job in a hospital with another. A surgeon does not do the same thing as an anaesthetist; or a nurse, a physio, a porter, or even the guy who works in the coffee shop. Every job needs a different type of training and has different pay. IT is no different – a full stack developer is not an enterprise architect, or the guy on the helpdesk, the same as a CIO (Chief Information Officer), or a tech entrepreneur. Part of the confusion over what IT people 5
2018 Results from Yandex, a Russian search engine
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https://dataprot.net/statistics/women-in-tech-statistics/
https://go.451research.com/women-in-tech-india-employmenttrends.html
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However, overall the numbers globally are still very low, with similar reasons being given around the world.
bias as those who design technology are often not representative the wider demographic. 10 From voice assistants to facial recognition and AI biases can be seen. Until there is a wider pool of people working in engineering, computing and areas such as AI, inventions and new products are likely to continue to be made in the image of their creators. When I was at primary school in Muswell Hill, London, we were once asked by the teacher what we wanted to do when we grew up. I was the only one in the class who said ‘AI expert’. In a report in 2020, according to Silicon Valley recruiters, only 1% of applicants for AI, and data science roles were women (Global Education Monitoring Report 2020).
Among the reasons given for this are: • • • • •
Lack of mentors. Lack of female role models in the same field. Gender bias and behaviour in the workplace. Unequal growth opportunities The lesser wage for the same position.
These factors are also responsible for the high quit rates among women in STEM jobs - 53% in 2018. Poor worklife balance is part of the reasons given, and lack of childcare provision in some countries. 7
What can be done?
However, there is a lot of support and interest in addressing the gender balance. The percentage of female CIOs in Fortune 500 companies from 1995 to 2020 rose from 6% to 25%. 8 There are lots of support groups and a high profile for encouraging gender balance.9
It’s easier to start with what’s around us here. It’s difficult to get change happening without engagement; and it’s hard to engage without raising awareness of the benefits of change.
We may soon be ‘living’ in the Metaverse – a virtual reality world where ‘real estate’, and designer clothing etc. are already being exchanged for millions of dollars in the shape of non-fungible tokens. Opportunities exist and worlds are (quite literally) being created.
We still think in boxes, where there are ‘science’ minds and ‘arts’ minds. No one used to think this way and had polymathic minds. Computing is so broad, that it is possible to be a creative and ‘arts’ person and still work in a computing-related field. Thinking in siloes misses opportunities for innovation, and new ways of doing things. A book-based subject like History, for example, has been transformed by technology, from technology in archaeology to bringing the past alive for the general public through virtual reality. ///
Since I came to Habs this school year I’ve looked for opportunities, which has taken me across both the schools. I have found there is a difference in the kind of clubs and what is offered in several areas, two of these are computing and engineering. This seems to be demand-led, with the schools offering what most students want. There would be benefits of having a more shared syllabus.
We need to ensure different voices are heard. By not being represented in the field of IT women are letting their their opportunity to shape the new world be handed to others. Already there have been cases of engineered
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https://techjury.net/blog/women-in-technology-statistics/ 8 https://www.statista.com/statistics/311958/fortune-500-femalecio/
https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/how-do-weget-more-women-in-tech/ 10 https://blogs.iu.edu/womenandtech/2021/02/06/biases-in-thedesign-of-everyday-things/
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Finding inspirational women role models help. There are many women role models alive today…
Dame Stephanie Shirley Steve Shirley was born Vera Buchthal, the daughter of a Jewish judge who was to lose his position under the Nazi regime. She was driven by a desire to give back something to society and founded an all-woman software company which pioneered remote working for women enabling them to participate in IT while managing a work-life balance. Back when she started her company in the 1960s women couldn’t open a bank account in their own name. She soon found that her business letters were not taken seriously when she signed herself as Stephanie, a woman’s name. So she shortened her name to ‘Steve’ so it looked like a man. Her company was to become valued at $3 billion dollars, making 70 of her staff millionaires. She has poured tens of millions of her own money into charitable work for autism.
Regina Honu Regina Honu is a Ghanian software developer, social entrepreneur and founder of Soronko Solutions, a software development company in Ghana. She opened the Soronko Academy, the first coding and Humancentered design school for young people in West Africa. She has received many awards for her contribution to tech in Africa, and been named by CNN as one of the 12 inspirational women of STEM. Her movement ‘Tech Needs Girls’ has trained many thousands of girls.
Prof. Sue Black, OBE Dr Sue Black left home, and her education, at 16 years old. Married at 20, she escaped an abusive relationship taking her three children to a woman’s refuge. Finding herself as a single mother, she began a maths access course. She has been active in campaigning to restore Bletchley Park, writing a book in 2015 called ‘Saving Bletchley Park’ which became the fastest crowdfunded book of all time.
Kathleen Yu One of the younger female entrepreneurs is Kathleen Yu, the founder of rumarocket.com, located in the Philippines. At the age of 23, Yu dreamt of starting up a tech company. Yu began her startup using artificial intelligence and machine learning for talent recruiting into the tech space. Her talent management platform Rumarocket, founded in 2013, has successfully earned a net worth of over $8 million supporting clients across the globe. She started her first business at the age of 13. She is also an associate professor at the University of Toronto.
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Bacteria is a type of microorganism (prokaryotic cell) that when first thought of people assume that all they do is cause diseases like Tuberculosis, Bacterial Meningitis, Salmonella and Ring Rot in plants. Although these are severe diseases, in this article, I will present to you the wonders of bacteria, not only in the small areas of our body but also in the entire ecosystem. In our bodies, these are millions of commensal bacteria and can also be found in certain foods like yogurt and tablets like probiotics. Commensal bacteria provide the host cells with sufficient amount of essential nutrients, as well as metabolise indigestible compounds in the large intestine, from large fibres to useful vitamins. In the case of stimulating the immune system they provide competition and defend themselves against the colonisation of pathogenic cells. Bacteria can be found on the skin, inside the nose, the throat, in the mouth, in the gut and in the reproductive organs; these microorganisms colonise the body. The microbiota found on the skin help immune cells to fight against pathogens, alongside the primary, physical barrier of the skin itself. There are also “nasal microbiomes” that can protect our sinus path against chronic sinus inflammation; the main bacteria that does this is called Lactobacillus and is found continuously along our airways. The last major benefit bacteria have on our human physiology is the important role it plays in our digestive system, specifically the intestines. The bacterium species of Lactobacilli, mentioned before, as well as the species of Bifidobacteria can help seal gaps between intestinal cells and also prevent leaky gut syndrome. These few examples of bacteria, with a brief encounter of how their actions affect the human body, should allow us to see the wonders of bacteria helping our bodies.
Furthermore, we live in a very complex environment that is stabilised by 3 main ecological systems. 2 out of the 3 cycles involve bacteria, to ensure the cycle is completed efficiently. Firstly bacteria is seen in the carbon cycle as they are used as decomposers: the carbon in dead and decaying animals and plants is broken down by decomposers; carbon is then released as the decomposers respire, whilst breaking down this matter. The carbon released can then continuously be used by plants, in photosynthesis, and the cycle continues. Now, with the nitrogen cycle there are several types of prokaryotic cells involved. 78% of the atmospheric air consists of nitrogen. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria convert this nitrogen gas, N2 into ammonia, NH3, which can be taken up by plants and used to make organic molecules. The ammonia is passed onto animals as they consume the plants. Nitrifying bacteria then convert the ammonia to nitrates, NO3- and nitrites, NO2-, which are nutritious 27
substances. Next, denitrifying bacteria convert these nitrates back to nitrogen gas, which gets released back into the atmosphere and the cycle continues. Once again, without bacteria, the environment we live in wouldn’t function and therefore bacteria is another beneficial (micro)organism to us. As well as bacteria being extremely useful for our world, it has also played an impact on mine and other people’s lives through the use of Botulinum Toxin, also known as Botox. Botulinum Toxin is predominantly produced from the culture of a strain of C. botulinum, where it is then purified by a series of acid precipitations to form a crystalline complex containing the Botulinum Toxin and other proteins. Botox is commonly known for reducing the appearance of facial wrinkles, but also treats neck spasms (cervical dystonia), excessive sweating (hyperhidrosis), an overactive bladder and lazy eyes. In my case, Botox is beneficial to my amblyopia condition (lazy eye). For me, my lazy eye was caused by my mother having the Toxoplasmosis infection whilst she was pregnant with me, which lead to both my eyes having scars in them. In my right eye, the scar then affected a region in the eye called the macula (which affects central vision, therefore I lost that) and it caused problems with signalling the 3D image seen to the brain, and thus caused a squint and caused my right eye to become lazy.
Botulinum toxin causes a muscle paralysis in my eyes, where the mechanism of this action is by it binding presynaptically to high-affinity sites on the cholinergic nerve terminals (nerve cells where acetylcholine acts a neurotransmitter) and therefore decreases the release of acetylcholine, causing a neuromuscular blocking effect (stops electrical impulses being transmitted via the neurons), and thus there is a paralysis of the muscle causing my right eye to be lazy. Therefore, from this temporary treatment to my amblyopia condition, I am thankful to the microorganisms of bacteria and how they function. Overall, with these few examples starting from the benefits of bacteria in our body to the whole atmosphere, as well affecting individuals, it clear that these prokaryotic cells aren’t all bad and are wonderous microorganisms. ///
Botox is injected into my eyes and treats my lazy eye by causing an alignment to that eye; this treatment is temporary and only lasts 3 months.
Photo of my left eye: scars do not affect the macula
Photo of my right (lazy eye): scars did affect the macula
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Where can you find students building explosive models of volcanoes, fishing for critters in a pond and estimating the area of the playground … it’s the Junior School of course! Here is just a small sample of the fantastic STEM that the Juniors have been up to this year:
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For more information about how you could be involved with the Habs Girls STEM Society, please contact Mr Moore on: jmoore@habsgirls.org.uk 32