Things I've Learned: Pumpkinsteins, Cecilia Payne, and Disney

This week passed by so quickly, I feel as if I've just written a "things I've learned this week" post. Here are five things that I've learned in the past seven days -- hopefully a couple are new and interesting to you!

1. Pumpkinsteins -- Tony Dighera of Cinagro Farms in California has grown 5500 pumpkins in Frankenstein molds and is selling them for $75 a piece. Apparently it took him four years and cost half a million dollars to perfect the technique. He says that next year he plans to incorporate marble eyes and will also create skull-shaped pumpkins.

   

   Pumpkinsteins and molds
   (Photo: Monica Almeida/The New York Time; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ worldnews/northamerica/usa/11159846/Farmer-in-California-grows-62-pumpkinstein-pumpkins.html)

2. Cecilia Payne (1900 - 1979) -- Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) was a British astonomer and astrophysicist. Discouraged by the limited opportunities available for female scientists in the UK, she moved to Massachusetts in 1923 to attend astronomy graduate school at Harvard. In 1925 she wrote "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy", relating the spectral classes of stars to their temperatures and describing their helium and hydrogen compositions.

   

   Cecilia Payne
   (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACecilia_Helena_Payne_Gaposchkin_(1900-1979)_(2).jpg)

   From Cecilia Payne to Annie Jump Cannon and the rest of "Pickering's Women" (employed by astronomer Edward C. Pickering to map and define every star in the sky) I was surprised that I had never heard of these female scientists who blazed a trail for others to follow into the male-dominated scientific community of the day. I'm looking forward to reading Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections.

   

   The "Harvard Computers" or "Pickering's Women", mapping out the stars
   (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AAstronomer_Edward_Charles_Pickering's_Harvard_computers.jpg)

3. correcting calcium for low albumin -- In the blood, calcium binds to albumin and only the unbound (free or ionized) calcium is biologically active. The "calcium" blood test measures the total amount of calcium in the blood. In hypoalbuminemia there is less calcium bound to albumin and therefore more floating around in its free active form, so a correction must be added to the calcium lab value to represent this increase in free active calcium. Taking 40 g/L as the average normal albumin level, the correction formula (using units of mmol/L and g/L) is
   
4. B24 Liberator bombers -- Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand presents a well-researched snapshot of life on a WWII B24 crew. These "flying boxcars" were heavy aircraft used to deploy bombs and machine gun rounds. The nose piece of each was customized with the plane's name and an (often lewd) picture. I'm reading with hideous fascination about the missions of these "flying coffins" (so nicknamed because they were difficult to bail from and often caught fire).

   

   B24 with all of its gunning nooks
   

   (http://www.littlestar.com/brock/crewcnfg.htm)

5. On this date in 1923... the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio was founded by Walt and Roy Disney. Its name has evolved into The Walt Disney Company, or simply Disney. Its first film? The 1923 silent black-and-white 12.5-minute Alice's Wonderland: