Bi-Weekly Round Up 20 January

We know everyone is busy and there is a ton of information around the web that you may have missed. Luckily for you, we are here to the rescue! Every two weeks, we will be diligently combing through all the noise out there and highlighting stories about women and STEM from the web that we think you should know about.

2016 Roundup

2016 was quite a year! Here are some of the biggest stories and highlights for women in STEM:

Hidden Figures is about a group of African-American women who worked at NASA in the space program and helped send the first American into space. This important movie is currently #1 at the box office and is already inspiring a new generation of girls in STEM.  Have you seen it?

Lab Girl, Hope Jahren’s memoir about her career as a scientist and passionate love for plants, was published in April and was a New York Times bestseller. A really great success story about being a woman in STEM.

The CRISPR technology, which Emmanuelle Charpentier was a key inventor among others, was tested this year in human cells. This amazing discovery has great potential to change medicine, and will be a big story in 2017.  

An important year for women in space! In a year where thelatest class of NASA astronauts are women, more history is being made: Astronaut Jeanette Epps will be the first African-American to board the International Space Station!

You can check out this infographic from TechDay to see a review of the year for women in Tech!

What did you think were the big stories in 2016 for women in STEM?
 
Other #WomenInSTEM news..

Vera Rubin, an astrophysicist who discovered dark matter, died. She was passionate about astronomy her whole life, and was an advocate for women in sciences. Her scientific contributions are of great significance, and some believe even that she should have won the Nobel prize.

Karlie Kloss, a supermodel who is usually on the covers of magazines, graces Fortune magazine this week in her role as the founder of Kode With Klossy, a scholarship program to encourage young girls to learn to code. Karlie herself is learning to code, andthe article talks about the interesting story of how she became interested by following her ‘nerdy passions’.

Another interesting article from Fortune talks about how a degree in STEM for women can be an important asset in the business world and for future female leaders.

Check out this inspiring story about Mireille Kamariza, a grad student at Stanford who is finding a way to detect tuberculosis faster and more accurately. She comes from Burundi, where she personally knew many people who had tuberculosis, and never saw a woman work as a scientist.

While it may seem to many like an obvious fact that there are less women than men in tech, apparently it does  depends on your gender - men are more likely to think that the lack of women is largely due to the fact that less women are entering the tech field.

And finally, to end on a fun note: the Magic School Bus is back! The reboot of the show will appear on Netflix. The Magic School Bus got many kids interested in science, and hopefully a new generation will also see science as cool. As Ms. Frizzle said, "Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy."
 
Have a great week!

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