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"Adopt a Scientist" -- scientists needed!
x-posted to tall sorts of science communities

I'm running a program by AIP/APS/etc in celebration of the World Year of Physics. The program is called Adopt a Scientist and will arrange for high school science students to email-interview real scientists. The hope is that this will expand the students' horizons about what it means to be a scientist.

The catch is, I need scientists. The time commitment is really small (less than a few hours total for the entire fall term), you don't have to leave the comfort of your desk to do it, and the impact on students' perceptions could be really substantial. For the purpose of this program I am looking for scientists at any stage in life (advanced undergrad, grad students, professors, researchers, retirees) in any field of science (physics, biology, engineering, interpreting science to the public...).

If you're interested or have questions please email me at education@aip.org. Thank you!

So I saw this thing on chemecommunity yesterday, and I was thinking of maybe doing it. Plus I just think it would have been cool when I was younger to have had the chance to have been on the high school end of this. So to that end I wrote a little blurb about who I was and what I had done in a sciency sense. It is funny how weird and vaguely impressive this looks when written down; in reality though subjects that do not seem so generally do not get the funding as much. Still I have to say that it makes me kinda glad in a slightly geeky way to have been involved with a bunch of these projects.

I got my undergraduate degree at Simmons College in Chemistry, Math and Physics. There I did research in OLEDs and sensors for manufacturing. Also during this period I worked for Gillette for several years in the Oral-B branch developing toothpaste and teeth whitening products (including the Rembrandt-Oral B whitening strips). After my undergrad I worked for a few months for one of the co-investigators for the 2007 Phoenix Mars Mission. Now I am a graduate student at Tufts University in chemical engineering researching fuel cell catalysts.

Discovery & NASA in the news

If you happen to have a few moments today it might be nice to spend them thinking happy thoughts for the Discovery. It is scheduled to launch at 3:51 EST today as it was given the go ahead last night despite some minor technical snags. They have a fair weather forecast, but given the last mission everyone is obviously holding their breath. I was just thinking about the fact that I don't really remember the Challenger launch, but I did have a teacher in highschool that had a "Nothing can stop the Challenger" poster up in his room which he kept for irony.

Anyways if you are really interested in watching this progress, Australian IT is reporting that Yahoo will be streaming video of the mission. Other than this story I don't see anything to about the mission on the yahoo.com homepage yet, though a briefly search did find me this (yes I know there are links to streaming video, but I was looking for one through yahoo not the nasa site).

Between Deep Impact and the Discovery NASA has been a lot more in the public's eye recently. (Actually there was a Deep Impact float in my home town's fourth of July parade.) I can only hope this will continue, as before that it looked like budget cuts would have even more severely crippled this work.

By the way read on here for a strange story on a Russian woman suing NASA for mental suffering and "deforming her horoscope".

Discovery Postponement

Launch Postponement Press Meeting is scheduled for 4:30. Since they only had a 5 minute window today, a delay means that it will be severel more days before another launch attempt can be done. I have to admit I am feelina little bummed about this whole thing. I will hang around for a few minutes to see if this means EST, but I have to be at the MoS by 5:30 so I won't be able to hang around too long.

EDIT: Basicaly this was a safety call as the redundant systems were not in agreement. Pinpoiinting the exact cause is still underway. Launch is now scheduled for 2:41 EST on July 16th.