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Category Archives: APS March Meeting 2013
Five of the best
By Margaret Harris at the APS March Meeting in Baltimore
With so many sessions taking place at the APS March Meeting, finding time to write about them is almost impossible. However, now that I’m waiting for my flight from Baltimore back to the UK, I’ve got all the time in the world – so here’s my list of five conference highlights.
One good sign
By Margaret Harris at the APS March Meeting in Baltimore
“Science remains institutionally sexist. Despite some progress, women scientists are still paid less, promoted less, win fewer grants and are more likely to leave research than similarly qualified men.” The opening lines of Nature’s recent special issue make an arresting – if depressing – summary, so it’s not surprising that Roxanne Hughes chose them to kick off yesterday’s press conference on women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) at the APS March Meeting.
Hughes, an education expert at the US National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, spoke about a study she’d done of 26 women undergraduates. All of them entered university with the intention of studying a STEM subject, and 12 had enrolled in a “living and learning community” that offered specialized mentoring opportunities and the chance to live with other female science students. Such programmes have often been touted as a way of helping women persist in science, but on Hughes’ evidence, this particular one made not a whit of difference, at least in numerical terms. The 12 students in the study who switched to non-STEM fields were evenly split between those who participated and those who didn’t.
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The valley of death
By Margaret Harris at the APS March Meeting in Baltimore
The blast gauge developed at DARPA, held by Robert Colwell.
In industry, the gap between making a scientific discovery and turning it into a practical product is often termed the “valley of death”. Many an idea that seemed promising in the laboratory has failed to become a real application for want of funding, industrial know-how or, usually, some combination of the two.
The Industrial Physics thread of this year’s APS March Meeting – which my colleague Louise Mayor and I are attending this week on behalf of Physics World – includes a number of talks about the “valley of death” problem, and the one that kicked off yesterday’s session really brought home the importance of addressing it. The speaker, Robert Colwell, directs the Microsystems Technology Office at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Better known by its acronym – DARPA – the agency is part of the US Department of Defense, and one of the products that physicists in Colwell’s office have developed is a “blast gauge” for soldiers deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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