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the pine tree on the rocket retweeted
Barbara McClintock almost didn’t go to college. She was a talented student, but her mother believed a degree would harm her chances of marriage and vetoed her plan to study.
Luckily, her father intervened and McClintock was able to attend the Cornell College of Agriculture, where she took the course that would change her life: genetics. It kickstarted her interest in the field of cytogenetics – the study of chromosomes and their genetic expression.
McClintock began to study the mosaic colour patterns of maize at the genetic level. She showed that parts of the corn's genetic code can shift from one place to another within its chromosomes. These so-called 'jumping genes' explain why corn kernels have different colours.
When she presented her findings - which departed from common wisdom - at a symposium, members of the audience were perplexed or hostile. As a result, McClintock stopped publishing and lecturing, but she retained her self-belief.
“I just knew I was right,” she said later. “Anybody who had had that evidence thrown at them with such abandon couldn’t help but come to the conclusions I did about it.”
It took years for the scientific community to come to the same conclusions. McClintock was awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of her work – even if she had to wait 30 years after making the discovery.
Learn more: bit.ly/2I9qCxd
ALT Barbara McClintock wearing graduation attire, including a cap and gown, stands in front of a building.
ALT A vintage microscope is surrounded by several ears of corn, each labeled with tags.
the pine tree on the rocket retweeted
Kirchhoff’s laws ✍️
This are two fundamental accounting rules that ensure electricity is never lost in a circuit. The first law, Kirchhoff’s Current Law, is similar to a plumbing junction: every drop of water, or electric charge, that flows into a pipe connection must flow out through the other branches. Charge cannot build up or disappear at a single point. The second law, Kirchhoff’s Voltage Law, is like a mountain hike that starts and ends at the same base camp. You might climb up steep sections, gaining energy from a battery, and descend down others, using energy in components like resistors. However, your total change in elevation when you return to the start is always zero. Together, these rules show that both physical matter and energy are strictly conserved as electricity moves through a system.
the pine tree on the rocket retweeted
A historian has discovered that a 16th century printing of The Almagest—a highly influential ancient astronomy text—contains extensive annotations from Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who later overthrew that text’s conception of a geocentric cosmos.
Learn more: scim.ag/4rHLWvG @NewsfromScience
the pine tree on the rocket retweeted
The Riemann Hypothesis, proposed by Bernhard Riemann in 1859, is one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics. It concerns the mysterious pattern of prime numbers.
The hypothesis states that all the non-trivial zeros of the Riemann zeta function lie on a specific line in the complex plane.
Although it sounds abstract, it is deeply connected to how prime numbers are distributed.
It is also one of the Millennium Prize Problems, with a prize of $1 million for a correct proof.
