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Skip ahead to 1:01 it’s not letting me embed it at that point

Very Important. The last five minutes of this panel, it’s asked if genetic differences might explain why there are fewer women in science. Watch Neil Degrasse Tyson explain very quickly and succinctly that it’s about society and expectations and the people in power.

Also the old white dude asking the question? Former president of Harvard and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers

(via upworthy)

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
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Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)
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Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, stuck fast, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of delivering a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner at the right moment in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result — eventually, astoundingly, and all too briefly — in you.

Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything (via thedragoninmygarage)