Kids publish report in science journal

A group of eight- to-ten-year-olds in England designed a study of how bees see colors, conducted it, and published the report in a prestigious science journal. See the colored-pencil figures. Read the young authors' conclusions that bees can see colors and patterns, and that "Science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before."

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Follow a science writer and editor crafting a book subtitle – a STEM career glimpse

by me, your blogger, Caroline Hatton
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If you love words and science, you can live happily ever after as a science writer.
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Science can transport me into whole new worlds. So can reading. But when I write, I have the power to take readers into another world.
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Capturing science book ideas

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Most science writers are scientists who love writing (like me) or writers who love science.
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Science writers must be capable of learning about at least one area of science, and they must write well enough to make it clear and infect readers with passion.
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I have two science degrees: a pharmacist degree and a Ph.D. (Doctor of Philosophy, a doctoral degree) in Chemistry. As a scientist, I help test athletes for performance-enhancing drugs that are prohibited in sports because using them is cheating, it can be dangerous to health, and it's contrary to the spirit of sport.
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While working at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, I was on the team of scientists that caught three athletes on a prohibited drug. They had won a total of eight medals. We scientists helped officials and lawyers determine that the right thing was for the athletes to return all their medals, so they could be awarded to the rightful winners.
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I'll never forget the night, the instant when the thought flashed through my mind, "Some day, I will write this story for children."
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So I did!
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My article, "The Night Olympic Team," got published in Cricket in the United States, then in The School Magazine in Australia and YES Mag, a children's science magazine in Canada (under the title, "Finding Gold for Canada").
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I spent two years growing the article into a book. When I submitted my book manuscript to editors, the title was The Night Olympic Team and the subtitle was Inside a Drug Scandal.
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For nonfiction books, I like when the title is intriguing and the subtitle crystal clear. That way, the title grabs me and makes me itch with curiosity. But the subtitle had better tell me exactly what the book is about.
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The Night Olympic Team is a title that I had tried to use since the Fall of 2000. My longtime boss, beloved friend and a pioneer of drug testing in sports, Dr. Don Catlin at the UCLA Olympic Lab where I worked, had just come home from the Summer Olympics in Sydney. He had been asked to write a report for a campus newspaper, UCLA Today.
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As his ghost writer, I often created drafts for him--internal university memos, manuscripts for scientists, lawyers or lay readers, international correspondence, and proposed protocols and policies for drug testing in sports. My words jumpstarted his thinking. Can you imagine how much more you could get done if someone drafted your homework for you?
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Sometimes Don Catlin signed the letters I printed for him. Other times he threw out all my words and ideas, and wrote his own piece. Between these extremes, we spent many hours and days of our lives revising, debating, bickering, arguing, or avoiding one another, all for the sake of helping one another and fighting for The Cause--against drugs in sports--to protect the athletes' freedom to compete without taking drugs.
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For UCLA Today, the report I drafted for Don in 2000 began like this:
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The night Olympic team
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The [N]th Olympic Summer Games are over down under. Beneath the exuberance, fanfare and cheer there were discordant notes every time athletes got caught with performance-enhancing drugs in their urine--but we heard so much about positive tests only because the multinational Olympic team at the Sydney laboratory did such a good job finding drugs. The scientists deserve medals, yet the only gold they got came in specimen bottles in the middle of the night.
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When Don read that last sentence, he humphed, "Gross. No one's going to print anything like it." Although he never submitted my draft for publication, eight years later (in 2008), my book was published with something very much like it on the first page. :-)
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As for the subtitle, Inside a Drug Scandal, one Friday afternoon in 2007, three months before my book manuscript was to be declared final and sent to the printer, my editor extraordinaire (that's a French word that means that he's a star), Andy Boyles at Boyds Mills Press, e-mailed me about it.
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His concern was the suggestion that the book might be about "the *latest* drug scandal, whatever that might be years down the road." Prospective buyers night think, "Oh, I just read about that in the Times. No need to buy this book."
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Andy wanted the subtitle to indicate that the book is not only about one scandal, but also about the general effort to quash the use of drugs in sports. He had spent time trying to come up with ideas and shared a long list of possibilities, including:
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THE NIGHT OLYMPIC TEAM
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The lab that fights drugs in sports
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Keeping drugs out of the Games
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Fighting drugs in sports
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The following Monday afternoon, I replied by e-mail:
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How about
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THE NIGHT OLYMPIC TEAM
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fighting to free sports from drugs
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or
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the untold story of a drug scandal
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Andy sent three new ideas, one of which, "Fighting for Drug-Free Games," he acknowledged to be a bit of a tongue-twister. His e-mail ended with "???"
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To avoid missing any possibility, I wrote keywords on paper slips and shuffled them, reading the permutations aloud until I got this:
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Then I went to peck on my keyboard:

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THE NIGHT OLYMPIC TEAM

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Fighting to Keep Drugs Out of the Games

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I liked the ring of it all. It rolled off my tongue easily with no risk of tripping and with a nice, strong beat.

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I clicked "Send."

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The phone rang. It was Andy. He wanted to make sure I could live with it.

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Yes!

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My book had a title and a subtitle. It was becoming real.

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This was a milestone in the life of my book, itself a milestone in my life. And it was only the eight-word subtitle of a 6,000-word book! The rest... is another story.

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ABOUT ME, CAROLINE HATTON

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When I'm not working, I love to make miniatures, quilt, hike, backpack, ride horses, or cross-country ski.
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LINKS AND MORE

* Follow a science writer...

...shaping a book.

...using a motivation trick (telling a friend).

...using a motivation trick (keeping a Hope Journal).

...using a motivation trick (finishing projects before starting new ones)

* Read more about The Night Olympic Team.

* Read a paragraph-long description of science writing careers at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center.

* For an overview, read "Science Careers: Science Writer" at ScienceBuddies.org.
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* For another overview, read "A Guide to Careers in Science Writing" by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

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* For a brief overview and paragraph-long profiles of the contributors to the Computing Life website, read "Writing Life" by Emily Carson.

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* For a thrill, read an article and brief summaries about the winners of the science journalism awards of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

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* Read fascinating notes about how award-winning author Caroline Arnold got ideas for her books, such as Global Warming and the Dinosaurs, and about her experiences researching and writing them. She is the author of 150 children's books inspired by her love of nature and by her travels. Many of her books have received awards as science books.

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* Find out how author Sneed B. Collard III researches some of his science books for older younsters.
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* Read about how I do research for science writing, in this interview of mine by another author, Vicki Leon:

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- part 1 about interviewing experts... with more or less success!

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- part 2 about fact-checking

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- part 3 about weaving together the scientist's adventures in life and the science

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* Read a terrific interview of astronomer, teacher, and science writer Alan Hirshfeld (part 1 and part 2) by Vicki Leon.

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* Get some tips for adult, professional beginners.

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* For clear, strong advice to help you become a better science writer, read Chapter 15, "Science and Technology," in the book by William Zinsser, On Writing Well - The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction. It's one of my favorite chapters in one of my favorite books about writing.

* Read about a job broader than just writing, in the article "Science Communication as a Press Officer" by Christine Pulliam, who has a Master's degree in astronomy.

* For an overview of a related career, Technical Writer, read the ScienceBuddies.org page.

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Updated March 29, 2012.

Winter fun – a puzzle

By mid-December, my husband Bill and I plan a cross-country skiing vacation around New Year's Day. We live in California, so we often ski in the Sierra Nevada.
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Here we are east of Yosemite National Park:
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We look for animal tracks such as these:

The wooden stick is one inch long.

Can you guess whose tracks they are?

Click here for a clue and for the answer.

Holiday fun – a test of observation skills

The day after Thanksgiving, my thoughts turn to an ongoing Christmas project.
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It all began several years ago, when I saw small Christmas stockings in a store. I liked how they were decorated in detail, but not the color (pale blue) or the price (several dollars each). Besides, most of the time, seeing something I like makes me itch to craft it myself.
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So I couldn't wait to get home to design and make my own, smaller stockings:
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They are 1-1/4 inch wide. The bright blue and black ones, in my husband's favorite color pair, are for us. The gray and dusty blue ones are for my big brother's family, in colors I've seen them wear.
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The following year, I made six mittens. The year after that, hats. Then scarves, and now shoulder bags:
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Here's the puzzle to test your observations skills: the black and bright blue ornaments follow a pattern, but there are four departures (deviations, details that don't follow the pattern). Can you spot them?

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Click here for clues and the answer.

Math majors who love their jobs

Click on the name to read the person's profile.

Ellen Lentz helps researchers design experiments
to test medicines for animals and people.
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Bjorn Roche launched his own music software company. His software, which he started writing as a hobby, can be used for music recording, editing, mixing, and CD mastering.
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Mike Hughes oversees a greeting card company's people in six states. He also studies the mix of world cultures in each area to adapt the selection of cards to countryside or city stores, party stores or dollar stores.
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Elizabeth Hunt Bradford's job is to dream up clever ways for an airline to run better.

Be a science detective - test of problem-solving skills #1

Adapted with permission from Professor Daryl Cooper, Department of Mathematics, University of California at Santa Barbara.
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Picture 12 balls that look identical. One of the balls is either heavier or lighter than the others. If I give you a balance and allow you to make three weighings, how would you go about discovering which ball is the odd one out, and whether it is heavier or lighter than the others?

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Click here for a clue.

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If you like this puzzle and would like to try more of Daryl's favorites, click here to go to his web page.

Follow a geochemist to Antarctica – a STEM career glimpse

by Jennifer Middleton, B.A. (Bachelor of Arts, Earth and Planetary Science)

If you like outdoor adventures, you might love to be a geochemist.

Geochemists are both geologists and chemists. As geologists, they study the world around them by observing rocks. As chemists, they examine the compounds and elements that things are made of. Geochemists use the compositions of rocks (or fluids, or gases) to understand how Earth systems (such as volcanism or the climate) work now or how they worked in the past.

As a geochemist, I study the history of Antarctic glaciers by analyzing rock samples from the Dry Valleys of Antarctica.



The Dry Valleys region is a cold desert, so dry that it doesn’t get enough snow to be covered with ice. Have the Dry Valleys always been ice-free, or were they ever covered by ice sheets? Scientists need to understand how the Antarctic ice sheets behaved in the past in order to accurately predict how they will react to global warming. Geochemists are detectives who can decode the clues hidden within the region’s rocks, by measuring isotopes.

Isotopes, such as neon-20 and neon-21, are variations of the same chemical element with different masses. When a rock is exposed, high energy particles from outer space (cosmic radiation) produce special isotopes (cosmogenic nuclides) in the rock. Some (such as neon-21) are stable and always stay in the rock grain in which they are produced. Others (such as beryllium-10) are unstable and radioactively decay over time. A rock covered by thick ice is shielded from cosmic radiation and no new cosmogenic nuclides are produced. Beneath the ice, the number of stable nuclides stays the same, but the number of unstable nuclides goes down as they decay. The proportions of cosmogenic nuclides in a rock reveal whether it was ever covered by a glacier. With enough rock samples, we can find out what an ice sheet looked like millions of years ago.

First, our team needed to go to Antarctica to collect samples (the best part of studying the Earth is that you get to see the world). Because Antarctica is in the southern hemisphere, we did our field work between November and January during the Antarctic summer (otherwise it would be too cold). Just getting to our field site (where we wanted to collect samples) required a long flight in a military plane from New Zealand to McMurdo Station (the major U.S. research station in Antarctica), a short helicopter ride to our campsite in the Dry Valleys, and a short hike to the field site.

Every morning, we woke up in a beautiful landscape all to ourselves. We carried backpacks containing sample collecting gear, extra warm clothes, a thermos of hot water (even in a cold desert we needed to stay hydrated) and plenty of snacks. No flashlights though—the sun never sets during the Antarctic summer!

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At the field site, we sampled the bedrock, not loose rocks such as boulders, which might have been moved from elsewhere. We made sure that the rock could “see” the sky so it had enough cosmogenic nuclides to tell us something about the past. We avoided rocks that were shielded by other rocks. We also wanted rocks made of large grains, because when we analyze them in the lab, we pick the grains one by one with tweezers, so the bigger the better. Finally, we looked for a vulnerable spot (near an edge or a crack) so that it wouldn’t be too hard to break off a chunk.

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This chunk had to be about the size of a grapefruit. Collecting it usually took a few good whacks with a hammer and a well-placed chisel, but sometimes it took me several minutes of rock abuse before the sample was free. Next, I took the GPS coordinates of the sample location and wrote them, along with the sample name (not Bob, but for example, SR-08-007 for the seventh sample taken in Sessrumnir Valley during the 2008 field season), in my field notebook and on a canvas sample bag. I also wrote down the type of rock, the name of the day’s field site, and the amount of shielding from nearby mountains, cliffs or ridges. I needed to keep track of all of this information to interpret the data we would get from analyzing the sample.

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I took photos of the sample and surroundings to remember all of the details months or years later. Finally, I stuffed the sample into the bag and moved on to collect another sample. At the end of the day, I put all of my samples in my pack to carry all 20-30 pounds back to camp. There, we packed our bagged samples together in wooden boxes to be flown back to McMurdo Station, then shipped to the U.S.
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We needed a lot of samples from many different places to develop a good understanding of what the region was like in the past. We spent a month camping around the Dry Valleys and collecting samples.

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We returned to our lab at Harvard University in January 2009. But our samples didn’t leave Antarctica until February, when the sea ice around McMurdo Station got thin enough for a ship to come pick them up. They didn’t arrive at our lab until April 2009. Even then, we had to prepare each sample before the analysis could begin.
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LAB WORK DETAILS: To prepare each sample, I crushed a piece and separated the grains. Under a microscope, I used tweezers to pick out the grains I wanted: only grains of pure quartz from our sandstone samples, because the cosmogenic nuclides we wanted to measure are produced only in quartz. This step took a few hours for each sample. In time I started to enjoy the simple beauty of clear quartz grains at high magnification.

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Next, I soaked the quartz grains in a strong acid solution to remove contaminants from the outside of each grain (this was the only time in my science career when I actually wore a lab coat). Contaminants mess up measurements, giving us the wrong information about what really happened in the Dry Valleys. After the acid soak, I rinsed the grains with purified water (the acid is a contaminant too!), dried them, weighed them, and wrapped them in niobium foil (like aluminum foil, but stronger and more expensive) before loading them into the machine that measures isotopes (the mass spectrometer).
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With the measurements, the mass of the rock grains we put into the machine, and the information we gathered about each sample in the field, we can calculate how much of the cosmogenic nuclides were in each sample and deduce the exposure history of our field site.

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Our results and conclusions will help support or rule out different hypotheses about the past and future of the climate of Antarctica, and help settle current debates among scientists world-wide. So, were the Dry Valleys covered by an ice sheet millions of years ago? If they were covered, when did this happen and for how long? Well, we’re still working on it, but I’ll let you know when I find out.

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ABOUT JENNIFER MIDDLETON
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When Jenny is not working, she loves reading, watching scientifically inaccurate natural disaster movies, and playing outside.

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LINKS
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* Relive Jenny's expedition in Antarctica at her team's blog.

* Read an article about Jenny's mission in Antarctica.

* Read a description of geochemist careers.

* For an overview of geoscientist careers, click on “Listen to the podcast…” at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. It’s an introduction to the required schooling, a day-in-the-life of a geoscientist, and jobs.

* For another overview, read "Geoscientist" at ScienceBuddies.org.

* Link to 23 geoscientist profiles including an astrogeologist, a geophysicist, a hydrologist, a micropaleontologist, and an energy policy program manager.

* Watch the video, Careers for Geoscientists, about opportunities to work on the atmosphere, oceans, and the solid-Earth. Interviews reveal adventures and travels, outdoor work, and use of high tech instruments.

* Watch a video of geochemist Andrew Jacobson sharing how his path into geology took him to the Himalayas. The video is long (28 minutes) and a bit slow, but worth the time if you want to get a feel for life as a geology professional or as a college student.

* Watch a video of geochemist Frank Ramos. Beginning at 14 minutes, you can visit his lab and watch student researchers extract the interesting parts of rocks for analysis. Beginning at 20 minutes and especially from 23:30 to 29 minutes, see a simple explanation of how a mass spectrometer works (the same kind of machine that Jenny Middleton uses).

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* Read about the fascinating moment when an arts major turned into a geologist.

* Read about world-class expert seismologist Lucy Jones, "the Earthquake Lady" her work and career path, beginning at age eight.
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Updated on January 28, 2012

Be a science detective - test of observation skills #7 (part 1 of 2)

If you’re afraid of anything in nature, then skip this one—or at least ask someone who’s not afraid of anything natural to check it out and make sure you can enjoy it too.

Ready?

Are you sure?

Here we go.

In July 2010 while hiking in the Mount Baldy area near Los Angeles,


I walked up this slope to go sit in the shade for a snack.

The rocks ahead looked inviting. But something arrested me. Can you see it below?

Click here for a closer look.

So you think you're a science detective - test of observation skills #6

What do you see (or what do you think you see) after clicking here?

Be a science detective - test of observation skills #5

This video activity is amazing, BUT ONLY IF you ask someone else to give you a hand.

Why? Because clicking on the link below reveals the answer... before it asks the question.

So it spoils the fun, unless you close your eyes and someone else clicks on the link for you, then clicks to start the video for you.

First, turn on the sound on your computer.

Then find a helper willing to

1. wait for you to close your eyes

2. click on the link below

3. REMAIN SILENT

4. see a YouTube video ready to start

5. click on the arrow to start the video

6. tell you to open your eyes

Ready?

CLOSE YOUR EYES before you ask your helper to click on "amazing test of observation skills."

Follow a dentist – a STEM career glimpse

by Minh Tam Dang, DDS (Doctor of Dental Surgery)

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If you like taking care of people, as I do, you might love to be a dentist like me.

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I do a large variety of things at work, including saving teeth and smiles. Like the day a commotion in the waiting room drew me out of my office. Anguished voices talked at the same time.

“Oh, my!”

“He got banged in the mouth."

A teen was pressing a blood-stained tissue on his lips. His father leaned over the receptionist’s counter.

“He broke a tooth right in front.”

I took the wounded boy to the big chair. “Let me look.”

The dental assistant gently rinsed the blood away with a stream of water so I could see. “Only one tooth looks damaged.” It was a top tooth, one of the two middle ones, broken at a slant one third of the way up. “Let’s take an X-ray.”

The dental assistant led the boy to the X-ray cubicle while I walked to my desk to wait for the digital image to appear on my computer screen. I stared at the tooth all over—what was left of it—especially the root, the bone around it, and the middle of the tooth, or pulp chamber, containing the nerve. The break was far enough from the pulp chamber, so there was no need to empty it, then fill it with an artificial material (do a root canal treatment).

Dr. Dang reviewing an X-ray (but not the one in the story)

That was very good news. A live tooth is stronger and sturdier than a dead or fake tooth.

The plan, then, was to cap the broken tooth with a temporary crown and replace it with a permanent crown later.

A crown is hollow, somewhat like a pencil cup. Its outside shape must match the original tooth. Its inside shape must fit the broken tooth—after it’s been prepared by filing it down, to make room for the crown.

First I numbed the tooth and gum with pain killers (anesthetics), by rubbing a numbing gel on the gum, then giving an injection next to the tooth. After a few minutes, I made sure the patient couldn’t feel a thing by testing the gums all around the tooth.

Next, I pictured the prepared tooth in my mind and filed down as needed. The taper and smoothness were very important for the finished product to look good, with no visible line where the crown would meet the natural tooth, just under the gum line. It was like carving a miniature sculpture, except it would not sit in a glass case untouched--it would chomp on food, many times a day for years to come. It would also be seen every time this young man smiled.

I took a mold (impression) of the prepared tooth. I filled a special, small “tray” with a special, soft paste. I squirted softer paste on the tooth to capture the finest details of the edges, so the crown would fit perfectly.

I put the tray in place and asked the patient to bite down. Minutes later, the paste had hardened (set). I took the tray out, sprayed it with disinfectant, and bagged it.

To order the crown, I wrote up the lab slip and asked the lab to make it of porcelain (not porcelain fused to metal or gold). I specified the color closest to that of the other teeth. I held a color chart next to the patient’s teeth and he helped pick the shade.

The lab courier, who comes by every day, picked up the bag and slip. It would take the lab roughly two weeks to make the crown.

Meanwhile, the patient needed a temporary crown. The dental assistant made it, because no pre-made, stock acrylic crown was quite right. She glued it on with temporary cement.

The patient walked out smiling and having silly fun with the numbness, which would disappear within a few hours.

Every team member had to do excellent work to get fine details just right.

As the dentist, I had to prepare the tooth so it would be just the right size and shape. It couldn’t be too thin or it would break. It couldn’t be too thick or else it’s the crown that would be too thin. The filing-down couldn’t come too close to the nerve or the tooth would be sensitive and hurt all the time. The mold could not be distorted, or the crown wouldn’t be the right shape inside and it wouldn’t fit.

The dental assistant faced many similar challenges when putting together a temporary crown.

The lab people used the mold to make a plaster model of the prepared tooth and neighboring teeth, then made a permanent crown on the model. When this crown was ready, it was tried on and final adjustments were made for a perfect fit, before it was cemented in place.

Crowns can last a long time (if their owners take care of their mouths, by brushing twice a day, flossing once a day and seeing a dentist every six months) and that’s something to smile about!

ABOUT MINH TAM DANG

When Tam is not working, she loves arranging flowers, gardening, playing with her two cats (Diddi, also known as “The D,” and Louie), painting with watercolors, quilting, reading and writing Vietnamese poetry, and playing tennis, hiking or riding bikes with family.

LINKS

● Watch this short video overview of dentist careers.

● For a little longer overview of dentist careers, click on “Listen to the podcast…” at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. It’s an introduction to the required schooling, a day-in-the-life of a dentist, salary info, specialties, and the great job market in the years ahead.

● For dentist interviews, click on the names below.

Jennifer Cyriaque

James Tynecki

Stephen Sterlitz

● Watch this 25-minute award-winning career video about “Women in Dental Research.” After a brief history of dentistry, it follows three amazing women. One fought the AIDS epidemic, the second one, a molecular researcher, studies oral disease and cancer, and the third one leads researchers who provide free dental care to children.

Real world math

Watch fun videos on The Futures Channel about all kinds of careers that use math, such as architect, bat scientist, bike designer, exotic animals manager, undersea treasure hunter, and more.

Be a science detective - test of observation skills #4

I like the following mystery photo from Odyssey Magazine, a science magazine for young readers, because if you really exercise your observation skills and imagination, you have a good chance of figuring out what it is.

Click here to try it.

Women Life Scientists Rock

Watch 25-minute award-winning career videos showcasing successful women scientists. Each video follows three amazing women with various backgrounds who discuss the rewards and challenges of their careers and their unique pathways to success.

● Women in Dental Research

● Women Scientists with Disabilities

● Women Are Pathologists

● Women Are Researchers

● Women Are Surgeons

Be a science detective - Test of spatial skills #1

This puzzle is fun because when you find the correct answer, an animation shows you why you were right.

Click here to try it!

LINK

Watch a video about how spatial skills are used by designers, landscape architects, doctors, chemical engineers, pilots, and others professions.

Follow a hospital dietitian – a STEM career glimpse

by Mary Ann Dames, M.S., R.D. (Master of Science, Registered Dietitian)







Self-portrait by Mary Ann Dames




If you like imagining what you could do with food, you might love to be the kind of dietitian I am.

Planning and preparing food has such a powerful impact on our health and energy, it’s a science called dietetics. The professionals in this field are called dietitians or nutritionists. They work for schools, sports teams, companies with food services for employees, and hospitals, to name only a few.
As a hospital dietitian for many years, my job included teaching patients how to make changes in diet in order to improve their health. I also created clever nutrition programs for patients with special dietary needs.

Patients who arrive at the hospital suddenly lose control of their lives. A caring health team takes over. Doctors decide how to treat them. Nurses give them instructions. Others dictate their daily schedule.

Many patients are scared. Most are stressed. Some take it out on something. Guess what they pick on?

You got it—hospital food. It isn’t like what they’re used to. Maybe they don’t eat American food at home. Or they are on a restricted diet. Or the food tastes funny due to the aftereffects of anesthesia or medication.

And I got to hear all about it when I walked in their rooms to do one special part of my job: diet education. Patients who complain aren’t being mean—they want some control back.

I remember a man (I’ll call him Mr. Doe) whose wife paced around or hovered while I tried to give him advice. I was actually glad she was there so that she could hear it too.

I needed to talk Mr. Doe into drinking less alcohol, eating healthier foods, and exercising more. But the first thing he said was, “When I go home, I want to go back to normal.” And he really wanted his two nightly beers.

Mrs. Doe declared that he was going to follow his new diet. She started doing the one thing that wasn’t going to work: nagging him. I said to her, “Although you love him very much, you can’t make him change.” What she could do was to shop wisely to make the appropriate foods available. Then, whatever Mr. Doe ate or drank would be up to him, even if it broke her heart.

When he saw how upset his wife was, his face softened. And when I gave him back some control, he almost smiled.

I said to him, “You don’t need to change your whole diet overnight. Maybe you can think about making one small change.”

He nodded.

Then I told both of them, “It’s a learning process. One step at time—one food at a time, one change in exercise—would be fine.”

And just in case he’d be ready to make one more change, maybe in a week or in a month, I gave them handouts and went over them.

By the time I left his room, Mr. Doe had decided to cut back to one beer a night. He and his wife were reading the handouts and planning what to do as a team.









He was in charge again.



As a dietitian, many days people skills are even more important than scientific knowledge. All the science courses I took help me understand what is happening physically to my patients. But what it comes down to is finding a way to inspire one patient at a time to make one change at a time.

Now that I’m retired, I am fulfilling a dream. I’m giving back to the world through a blog, “Reading, Writing, and Recipes”. If children can learn about food, nutrition, and cooking through my blog and elsewhere, maybe they won’t grow up to be like Mr. Doe, because they will have been leading a healthy lifestyle all along.











Mary Ann Dames, M.S., R.D.

LINKS

● For a quick-and-easy overview of dietitian and nutritionist careers, click on “Listen to the podcast…” at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. It’s an introduction to the required schooling, a day-in-the-life of a dietitian, salary info, where dietitians work, and the favorable job market in the years ahead.

● For another friendly overview, read "Science Careers: Dietitian or Nutritionist" at ScienceBuddies.org.

● For examples of dietitians’ jobs, from personal chef for a movie star to policy-maker in Washington, watch the American Dietetic Association video.

● Read an interview of a dietitian and nutritionist (why she chose her career, her workday, what she likes best and least about work, career goals, hobbies).

● For current trends from the point of view of another dietitian, read the article, “Hospital dietitian's job more than just playing with food.”

● See Robin, a registered dietitian, talk about her job as a pharmaceutical sales representative or "drug rep" in a 5-minute video interview about a typical day, job requirements, and the best and worst parts of the job.

● If you are a teen, and you want to get the most energy out of what you put in your body, this nutrition guide for students and athletes is for you!

Updated August 6, 2011

Engineering career planning resources for girls

A cool site about engineering for middle school girls has the exciting profiles of 141 women engineers!

A guide to engineering for high school girls lets you meet 12 more inspiring women engineers. It also shows why and how to become an engineer.

Be a science detective – Test of observation skills #3 (Part 1 of 3)

Where on earth is this?










Click here for the answer.

An excellent STEM career planning resource

For an overview of a particular STEM career, visit the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. Much of the info is from the government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics website, except shorter and easier to read.

It covers the required schooling, day-in-the-life, salary, job market, and more. For each career, a 10-minute podcast goes over these key points.

Resources for middle school students also include links to Science Centers/Museums, Hands-On Projects (links to contests and programs), Summer Ideas (links to programs and camps), and Precollege Links.

Resources for high school students include The Scoop on Salary.

One page even has links to tons of games!

Be a science detective – Test of observation skills #2 (Part 1 of 4)

One of my favorite hobbies is backpacking. After Labor Day in 2008, my husband and I enjoyed walking by ourselves in Kings Canyon National Park in California, near Bullfrog Lake in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.



The mountains are mostly granite, gray rocks with gray specks, all different shades.

In the next photo, you can see four small rocks on a big rock, and to show the scale, a pair of pine needles (one inch long).



In the next photo, what do you see?


Click there for the answer.

Behind the scenes at the Olympics - A pharmacist’s story

In the previous post, Peter Ambrose showed you exactly how a hospital pharmacist takes care of a patient. Would you like to know how he, as a pharmacist, got a front row seat at the Olympics… for free? Read about his adventures at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing and see his photos at his blog, “My Olympic Journey.”

ABOUT PETER AMBROSE

When Peter is not helping others as a pharmacist, he loves camping, hiking, fishing, planting flowers and vegetables, and working out with weights. He also enjoys watching many sports, especially from the front row at the Olympics!

Follow a hospital pharmacist – a STEM career glimpse

by Peter Ambrose, Pharm.D. (Doctor of Pharmacy)












as told to Caroline Hatton


If you like helping people, you might love to be a pharmacist.

You may have been inside your neighborhood pharmacy, and seen people distribute medicines and give advice from behind a counter. Some of them are pharmacy technicians. One of them is the pharmacist in charge. Such a pharmacist, who works in the community, is called something very clever… a community pharmacist!

But did you know that some pharmacists work in hospitals?

They also distribute medicines. They advise not only sick people (patients), but also doctors and nurses. This is because pharmacists are experts about medicines: what they are, how they work, and how best to use them to help people by curing disease or making life better.

Hospital pharmacists do a large variety of tasks. What might be one of those tasks? How exactly would it get done? To find out, let’s follow one pharmacist. She joins a doctor and nurse at the bedside of a patient, a teen athlete in pain.

The nurse takes the athlete’s temperature. He has a high fever. His right leg is red and swollen.

The doctor has examined him, ordered a pain killer, reviewed lab tests results, and identified (diagnosed) the problem as cellulitis (pronounced SELL-u-LIGHT-iss), an infection under the skin. It is caused by bacteria and can spread among athletes.

The boy’s infection is serious, so the doctor decides to treat it with a powerful medicine called an aminoglycoside (pronounced uh-MEE-no-GLY-coe-side) antibiotic. Like most medicines, it has many effects, some wanted, some not. Giving the patient too much may cause him to go deaf or it may damage his kidneys, which must work properly for him to stay alive and healthy. Too little medicine may not keep the infection from endangering his life.

Someone must take responsibility for figuring out how much medicine the nurse should give the patient. The doctor turns to the pharmacist to ask her to make a plan.

The ball is now in the pharmacist’s court. She knows exactly what to do. First, find out how fast the patient’s body will get rid of the medicine—how well his kidneys are working to remove water, waste, and medicines from his body. A special blood test (serum creatinine concentration) can reveal this.

The pharmacist walks to the pharmacy office closest to this patient’s room. At the computer, she pulls up his personal information (chart) and orders the test. She asks the lab staff to call her as soon as the result is known. A lab team member will come take a blood sample from the patient and bring it back to the lab for testing.

After the pharmacist works on other things for a few hours, her pager beeps: the test result is ready! She reads it in the patient’s chart. She can see his age and weight.

Using a math formula in a computer program she wrote and saved before, she figures out how fast the medicine will flow out through the patient’s kidneys—today. Now the pharmacist can calculate how much medicine to give (the dose) to have, in the patient’s body, the maximum amount that will be safe.

She orders exactly how much the nurse must give and how often, for example “50 milligrams every 8 hours intravenously” (injected in a vein). This is not the same as giving twice as much, half as often, which would not be right for this patient.


The pharmacist also orders more lab tests, to measure the amount of medicine in the blood, at its highest (half an hour after the patient received it) and lowest (half an hour before the next dose). She asks the lab team to take the blood samples at specific times.

For days, ten or more if necessary, the pharmacist follows this boy’s treatment. She keeps adjusting the dose, based on blood levels, kidney function, the nurse’s reports, and the doctor’s lead. Her calculations help the treatment work better so the patient can go home several days earlier.

The pharmacist is a key member of the health team. So is the patient, following orders and maintaining a winning attitude.

This may sound like walking a tightrope, hand in hand with the patient. Team work makes it a thrill and a triumph, every step of the way. And this is only one of many things that pharmacists work on with others.

ABOUT PETER AMBROSE

Peter is a hospital pharmacist, a Doctor of Pharmacy, and a Professor of Clinical Pharmacy at the School of Pharmacy of the University of California at San Francisco. As an enthusiastic teacher, he’s shared his wisdom and experience with students as far as his hometown of Long Beach (California), nearby Los Angeles, and Tokyo. As a sports fan, he’s had adventures that not many pharmacists have experienced: follow him behind the scenes at the Olympics.

LINKS

* Watch a video about hospital and health system pharmacists who LOVE their jobs.

* For more about what is uniquely exciting about hospital pharmacists’ careers, how they spend their work time, and what they like best and least, read the first two pages of these survey results.

* About pharmacists

Hospital pharmacists do what Peter described and much more. They tend to find their work life varied, challenging, and satisfying. Community pharmacists spend most of their time helping patients, making a difference one person at a time. Pharmacists can also choose careers in industry or government, research or business, even sports. Pharmacists have among the highest starting salaries of college graduates in the U.S.

* For a quick-and-easy overview of pharmacist careers, click on "Listen to the podcast..." at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. It’s an introduction to the required schooling, a day-in-the-life of a pharmacist, salary info, where pharmacists work, and the fantastic job market in the years ahead.

* For another friendly overview, visit ScienceBuddies.org.

* Is pharmacy right for you? Get help finding the answer at the website, "Pharmacy is Right for Me".

* Watch videos of pharmacist Kate James:

- on why to become a pharmacist (hint: Kate loves science and people)

- on how much money pharmacists make

- on how to become a pharmacist

- on the pros and cons of a pharmacy career

* Read an interview of a research pharmacist (why she chose her career, her workday, what she likes best and least about work, career goals, hobbies). 

* Pharmacist was the second-best-paid job for women in 2011.

Updated January 18, 2012

Top pay for girls

To help pick the right career for you, find out how much money you’re likely to make.

The article, “Best-Paying Jobs For Women,” ranks the ten top-paying jobs for women who worked full time in 2009.

Look at the graph below. It represents those ten top-paying jobs.

Each job is shown as a stack of coins. The more coins, the more pay.

The gold coins are STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, or Math) careers. How many of the top-paying careers for women are STEM careers?

BEST-PAYING JOBS FOR WOMEN


















The STEM career that pays women the most is… pharmacist! And job opportunities for pharmacists are expected to grow faster than for most other careers until at least 2018.

LINKS

● For a quick-and-easy overview of pharmacist careers, click on "Listen to the podcast..." at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center. It’s an introduction to the required schooling, a day-in-the-life of a pharmacist, salary info, where pharmacists work, and the fantastic job market in the years ahead.

● Read an interview of a research pharmacist (why she chose her career, her workday, what she likes best and least about work, career goals, hobbies).

Be a science detective. Test of observation skills #1 (Part 1 of 3)

Sometimes, scientists make discoveries because they spotted something unusual. Therefore, it’s good to practice the ability to recognize both what is familiar and what is unfamiliar.

Try it.

This is the thief who ate my granola bar. Can you name what kind of critter he is?









Click here for the answer.

A STEM Careers Blog. Why now? Why me?

Because in July 2010, I will appear once more at Tech Trek, the math/science camps for 7th-grade girls. Trekkers, it’s for you that I launch this blog now.

I get invited because I’m a scientist. At Tech Trek, I join the Professional Women’s Night, when campers meet women who are math or science professionals, and I make presentations. For this I thank the camp directors, Carol Holzgrafe and Colleen Briner-Schmidt, a science teacher.

As a scientist, I help test athletes for prohibited performance-enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids. I’ve worked at three Olympics.

One year at Tech Trek, Colleen the science teacher asked me whether I’d had to surmount obstacles to become a scientist because I’m a woman; whether as a girl, I was ever discouraged from being a scientist. Were there few women scientists around, if any, when I was young?

No, no, and no! Quite the contrary. My mother was a pharmacist like my father. I knew many women who were pharmacists or medical doctors, and one who was a physics researcher.

Plus, every day on my way to school in Paris (France) where I grew up, I walked past a building…


…with a stone plaque on the wall that said, “Here, Marie Curie discovered radium.”


Marie Curie was a scientist. She discovered radium and polonium, two chemical elements, and studied the kinds of rays of energy or particles they give off, or radioactivity. As a result, our understanding of matter and energy, and science itself changed forever. Marie Curie won two Nobel Prizes for her work.
So I always knew that women could be scientists.

Speaking of role models, Colleen the science teacher knows a boy who, when he was five years old, loved to watch Sesame Street. Astronaut Sally Ride appeared on it. He loved her, and oh he would’ve loved to be an astronaut, but he didn’t think he could, because he thought it was a woman’s job.

Of course, that’s not true, and the boy soon learned this. Astronauts are chosen for what they can do. It doesn’t matter if they’re men or women.

Isn’t it amazing what we think we can or cannot do, what we’re even capable of imagining, depending on what we experience as we grow up?

So I start this blog to help girls and boys unleash their imaginations and potential, by helping them follow STEM professionals at work, do fun activities, and link to valuable resources.

LINKS

● For more on Marie Curie, such as tons of details, photos, and quotes from her autobiographical notes, see “Marie Curie and the science of radioactivity” by the American Institute of Physics - Center for the History of Physics.

● Read a Smithsonian Magazine article on Marie Curie's passion for science, despite the barriers she faced because she was a woman.


● A new play, Radiance: The Passion of Marie Curie, written by the actor and director Alan Alda, debuts November 9, 2011. Read his interview.

● What are some of the careers that match your interests and favorite school subjects? Find out at this career info site. Examples of STEM careers are under Math, Science, Computers, Managing Money, and several other subjects.

● If you are curious about a particular STEM career and would like a quick-and-easy overview, look for that career at the Sloan Career Cornerstone Center and click on "Listen to the podcast..." about it. For example, the Veterinarian podcast offers a rounded overview of the profession, the required schooling, specialties, a day-in-the-life of a veterinarian, salary info, where veterinarians work, and the awesome job market in the years ahead.

Back to blog

Updated November 9, 2011

Why start a STEM Careers Blog?

For girls and boys like you,

● to help answer a question you might ask, about Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) professionals: “What exactly do they do?”

● to go one step beyond what many excellent websites offer (STEM careers overviews, a day-in-the-life of STEM professionals, profiles, interviews) by showing you specific examples of some of the things STEM professionals do and how they do them (click on '"GLIMPSE" in the column on the right)

● to help you

- decide whether a STEM career is right for you

- find your truth

- in one word…

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I dedicate this blog launch to Tech Trek science camp girls.
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Back to blog
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Updated May 27, 2011