I missed “Talk of the Nation: Science Friday” last week [1]. This turns out to have been unfortunate. Two excellent stories aired that day. The first confirmed a personal belief of mine, and the second opened my eyes wider to the world of science and women.
The first story was about airplane air quality. Turns out that the sickening, slick, itchy, congested feeling I have getting off the plane after four hours **is** caused by bad air quality. As Dr. Charles Weschler noted, in single-aisle jets the airlines tend to not install catalyzers needed to scrub ozone from the air. The ozone, which is a core component of smog (and is already bad for you), reacts with skin and hair oils on passengers, lemon-scented hands wipes, and other chemicals to form a wide variety of nasty things: formaldehyde, acetone, and a series of carbon-rich molecules known to irritate sinuses. Large, multi-aisle planes have these scrubbers, which is why I guess I tended to feel better after getting off those jets. I recently lamented to Jodi that I wished somebody would do an updated study of airplane air. Thank-you, science!
The second hour was entirely spent discussing women and girls and their interest in mathematics. It was a very dense conversation with the many guests about this topic, and it helped to remind me why early, positive experiences with science and math are important in shaping kids so that they keep an interest in those topics.
The second hour also made me reflect on something that quietly annoyed me about “The Big Bang Theory”: there were no female scientists, and the only female in the show was treated as an object of beauty and exhibited (in the pilot at least), no real substance except that she found her neighbors’ interest in physics non-threatening. I guess we’ll have to see how the characters develop. Certainly, this is in radical distinction from a show like “Numb3rs”, where we find a female assistant professor of mathematics and astronomy, and a female math department chair.
[1] http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Sep/hour1_092107.html
http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2007/Sep/hour2_092107.html
