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Day 5 of #spacetober_challenge by is space station, so I am sharing a tiny linocut print I made of the track of the ISS across the night sky.
#linocut #printmaking #spaceArt #sciArt #mastoArt
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Ele Willoughby, PhD
@minouette@spore.social
mastodon 4.7.3Artist, printmaker and marine geophysicist.
Settler in Tkaronto (she/her)
2682 Followers
471 Following
50 Posts
Joined December 16, 2022
Boosted by @trending@homestead.social
Today is the feast day of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), here surrounded by plants & a mineral she touted as medical treatments, her invented alphabet & model of the universe. One of my most popular prints!
Her writings preserve not only her own knowledge & theories but the nature of institutional medicine & folk healing of her day (which she deftly combined). While she might be best remembered today as a composer of 70 Gregorian chants & musical dramas (& as a Catholic saint, 🧵1/
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Day 23 #SciArtSeptember prompt is copper so I am sharing my #linocut of the first woman to earn a doctorate in science, physicist and professor Laura Maria Caterina Bassi Veratti (née, & known throughout her life as Bassi, 1711-1778). I’ve shown her surrounded by the sort of state-of-the-art instrumentation she would have used in her lab to investigate electricity: an electrical machine, conductors, an aurora flask, a 🧵
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4436745646
#printmaking #womenInSTEM #histsci #physics
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Raccoon Greetings for Raccoon Appreciation Day! This is a portrait of a former neighbour who showed up at my back door like this, to enquire as to where I had moved the compost bin. So I took his photo and made a print.
Toronto belongs to the raccoons. They just let us live here because we have good snacks.
#Raccoon 🦝 #linocut #printmaking #wildlife #Toronto 🇨🇦
Happy birthday to amateur pioneering American scientist, inventor & women’s rights advocate Eunice Newton Foote (1819-1888) who did the earliest experiments to show the insulating effect of certain gases & correctly concluded that increasing carbon dioxide levels would affect atmospheric temperature and climate, which we now call the Greenhouse Effect. This discovery was often attributed to later studies by male scientists. 🧵
#linocut #printmaking #womenInSTEM #HistSci #climateScience
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Anthorite can be found in lunar & cometary rocks, but Sphalerite gets my vote with cool optical/electrical properties & its role in art history as main zinc ore. Zn has been used in brass & bronze for centuries. Since the 18th century it was used to make ZnO pigments & etching, plates. 🧵1/2 #MinCup26 #scicomm #artHistory #minerals
Happy birthday to trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (1932 – 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers, optimizing programs and parallel computing. She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the Turing Prize.
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https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1086564033
#printmaking #womenInSTEM #histSTM #computing #mathematician #sciart #compsci
Happy birthday to pharmaceutical #chemist Alice Ball (1892-1916) who developed 1st effective treatment for #leprosy. Though her life was cut tragically short, her research saved 1000s from exile & painful, ineffective lifelong treatment for leprosy, & she was a trailblazer for both women & Black scientists.
Ball studied #chemistry at UW earning a BSc & 2nd degree in pharmacy 2 years later. 🧵
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/578429732
#printmaking #sciart #BlackInSTEM #womenInSTEM #histsci
It’s World Whale and Dolphin Day to celebrate these fabulous marine mammals and raise awareness about threats like pollution, climate change and illegal hunting.
Here are my humpback, orca and blue whale linocuts.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/780785898
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #whale
Happy birthday to Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1921-2011) medical physicist & Nobel laureate for radioimmunoassay for measuring concentrations of molecules in blood.
Born to an immigrant Jewish family in the Bronx she went to Hunter College, tuition-free, their 1st physics major & graduated with honours by 19. WWII meant the chance for grad school for woman. At U of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, she was only woman amongst 400 in engineering. 🧵
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4463578733
#womenInSTEM #histsci #physics
Happy birthday to #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery that angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! The Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.
🧵1/
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1393796836
#printmaking #sciart #linocut #mastoArt
I keep underestimating the demand for my Feynman Diagram Bauhaus print, so I made another edition!
This linocut was inspired by the way the exuberant lines and shapes of Bauhaus paintings, like those of Wassily Kandinsky, reminded me Feynman diagrams showing particle reactions on the quantum scale, virtual particles and anti-particles popping out of the vacuum on borrowed mass-energy and of quantum foam. 🧵
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/1143490034
#linocut #printmaking #quantumPhysics #sciart #Bauhaus
Happy World Orca Day! A keystone and indicator species for ocean health and one of my favourites to see when out at sea.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/780785898
#WorldOrcaDay #orca #killerwhale #marinemammal #conservation #linocut #printmaking #mastoArt
I thought I would make a whimsical bumblebee shaped cyanotype filled with leaves from my garden (and the money plant seed pod eyes)!
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4530063012
#cyanotype #botanicalArt #bumblebee #printmaking #leaves
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Happy birthday to autodidact #mathematician Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), shown here with diagrams of cross-sections of 4D polytopes from her publications.
Alicia came to math honestly. Her father Prof George Boole developed Boolean logic, but died when she was 4. Her mother Mary Everest Boole was an autodidact mathematician & innovative math educator, who taught kids math through manipulation of objects.
🧵1/5
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4459151187
#womenInSTEM #histsci #mathematics #geometry #mastoArt
This is my hand-carved and hand-pulled Lino block print of a charming Grimpoteuthis octopus, one of a genus of pelagic cirrate (finned) octopods known as the dumbo octopuses. The fins reminded scientists of ears on the elephant in Disney’s 1941 film Dumbo. Hence their common name dumbo octopuses. Each print is 9.25” by 12.5” on delicate Japanese washi paper.
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#linocut #printmaking #sciart #dumboOctopus #octopus #mastoArt
Linocut moths with cyanotype lilies of the valley! Moths are a hummingbird clearwing moth, Virgin tiger moth and a White underwing moth, all native moths here in Ontario.
#multimedia #printmaking #linocut #cyanotype #moth
Dandelion clocks with their fine fluffy white seed heads are a great subject for a cyanotype. I saw my neighbour was deadheading her alliums and the way the seed heads echoed the shape of the dandelions struck me.
So I found myself doing the perfectly normal thing - digging through my neighbour’s garden waste for art purposes, as you do.
I love their silhouettes in this cyanotype.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4532162223
#cyanotype #printmaking #allium #dandelion #botanicalArt
Happy birthday to #astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921) who set the scale of our Universe. My portrait of Leavitt is printed in silvery lavender ink on Japanese kozo paper. Behind her is a line showing stellar luminosity (capital L with subscript sun-symbol, a circle with a dot) as a function of time (t). She is printed over constellations in gold (Cepheus, Cassiopeia, Draco, Ursa Minor & Andromeda). 🧵1/
#linocut #printmaking #WomenInSTEM #sciart #histsci #astronomy #mastoArt
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She went to Northeastern State Teacher’s College in Tahlequah, Oklahoma and earned a bachelor’s in math by the time she was 20. She taught science and math through the Depression then got her Master’s and put her education to work to try to help Indigenous people and worked as a statistician with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, until she was reassigned as an advisor to girls at the Santa Fe Indian School.
When WWII broke out her father suggested she find a technical job in California. 🧵2/
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top-secret think tank. She was the only woman and only Indigenous person and much of her work there remains classified! It included preliminary design concepts for interplanetary travel, crewed and uncrewed space flights and the earliest plans for orbiting satellites. She worked on the Agena rocket, so important to the Apollo moon mission (shown) and was an author of the NASA Flight Handbook Vol. III about flight to Mars and Venus. 🧵4/5
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Lockheed Aircraft hired her as mathematician in 1942, troubleshooting the P-38 Lighting fighter plane (as shown). She knew already that her interest was in interplanetary flight, but didn’t mention it in 1942 for fear that her credibility would be questioned, but she was indeed farsighted. After the war Lockheed sent her to UCLA to study engineering and celestial mechanics. She was one of the 40 engineers selected to start Skunk Works, their Advanced Development Program, an in-house 🧵3/
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She published her 1st major TMV paper in 1955 in Nature. In 1954, she happened to meet Klug on the stairs. She showed him her photo of TMV & he wrote, it sealed his fate. Captivated, he switched to virus research. They began a long & fruitful collaboration.
She died in 1958. The next year, Klug & Finch published the polio virus structure & dedicated it to her memory. 🧵5/5
It’s the season for making some cyanotype in the sun 🌞
#cyanotype #botanicalPrint #lilyOfTheValley #floral #printmaking
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was not nominated.
She also made invaluable contributions across physics, chemistry & biology, working to determining the structure of #RNA, viruses, coal & graphite. Even aside from her role in determining the structure of DNA, her research was a great benefit to society. I wanted to make sure my portrait represented all of this. The pattern on her jacket is based on her publication of structure of non-graphitizing carbon. 🧵3/
Happy birthday #physicist Chien-shiung Wu (1912-1997), who came up with a truly beautiful experiment to test whether the weak force conserves parity (whether beta decay would be the same if reflected in the mirror)! In my print on the left I show Wu in her lab & a schematic diagram of her experiment. On the right I show her reflection, as in the mirror, & the mirror reflection of 🧵
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/83367125
#linocut #sciart #particlePhysics #womenInSTEM #histsci #quantum #mastoArt
I’ve finally completed and made a small series of my print “Our Fate is Tied To That of The Insects” available. People kept asking for the one that is on exhibit. Get your native bee and other pollinator propaganda now!
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4512155120
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #nativeBees #pollinators #mastoArt
One of my cyanotype prints of lily-of-the-valley
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4515367539
#cyanotype #lilyOfTheValley #botanicalPrint #floral #printmaking
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She showed these 2 structures explained the difference between 2 possible products of burning coal: cokes & chars, & how they burn. This research was important to industry. She continued to write papers about the structure of carbon until she died.
After Kings, she was able to start her own research group at Birbeck & begin working on RNA & structure of Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), an RNA virus (her brooch). 🧵4/5
I made some cyanotypes with my son this week. We went for a walk to gather some botanical materials. I wanted to show him how you can paint the photo emulsion on paper in any shape so I made a little cat silhouette and then set it in the sun with some Virginia creeper leaves for a sweet little print.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4530052001
#cyanotype #printmaking #botanicalArt #cat #VirginiaCreeper
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that her contributions are now recognized posthumously, there’s more to her story & the story of DNA. Ironically, the famous Photo 51 produced by Franklin’s grad student Gosling, which Wilkins quietly shared Watson & Crick &cemented their thinking about structure, she had previously presented at a seminar attended by Watson (where he failed to notice). Watson, Crick & Wilkins were awarded the Nobel in 62, after her death. Though prior to the informal rule against posthumous Nobels, Franklin 🧵2
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the $3 million Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her discovery of pulsars & leadership in science. She donated money to the Institute of Physics for PhD scholarships for underrepresented people including women, ethnic minorities & refugee students in physics!
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/178998272
🧵5/5
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The early ideas about plate tectonics were still quite controversial & unpopular. Heezen dismissed this as “girl talk” - though really a vital piece of the plate tectonics puzzle.
Tharp believed rift was real though she hadn’t convinced Heezen. In 1952, they began working on physiographic maps, which really gave a sense of the geology, & were not US Navy classified, so they could publish. A 2nd project involved plotting earthquakes, & Heezen insisted they work at same scale. 🧵3/5
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I designed the typefaces to suggest the meaning of the words. “Parliament” is in a gothic script. “Owls” has an owl eye for ‘o’ and the remaining letters are feathered. The owls are, right to left and top to bottom: the Eastern screech, Northern saw-whet, long-eared, Barred, Great Horned and the American Barn owls.
https://minouette.etsy.com/listing/4337673774
🧵2/2
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #owls #typography #termsOfVenery #screechOwl #GreatHornedOwl #BarnOwl #InternationalOwlAwarenessDay
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Women were still not allowed to participate in research cruises. Before long, Heezen came to LDEO & required so much drafting work that Tharp worked exclusively with him.
She spent months plotting profiles of N Atlantic. The ship tracks were sparse but when Tharp compared several ~ parallel transects she noticed a V-shaped notch in the centre of all profiles. She suspected they coincided because they indicated a rift valley along the ridge crest.🧵2/5
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colleague HD Croft Jr) is impressive and elegant. The diagram was included in books on data visualization and was used in the iconic design of Joy Division’s ‘Unknown Pleasures’ album.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell has gone on to a very distinguished career in astrophysics. She became the first female president of the Institute of Physics and of the Royal Society of Edinburg. She helped set up the UK Athena Swan #womenInSTEM programme. In 2018 she was awarded 🧵4/5
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were her colleagues convinced & this lead to the development of the pulsar model. It is now known PSR B1919+21.
The 1968 paper announcing this discovery in Nature has five authors, lead by Hewish, followed by Bell. In 1974, Hewish won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, along with fellow radioastronomer Martin Ryle). That Jocelyn Bell was not included has been condemned by many leading astronomers.
Not only the discovery, but the presentation of the data (by 🧵3/
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Heezen noticed that ocean earthquake epicentre data also formed long lines - in fact, when one map was placed above the other on a light table the earthquakes formed near continous lines along the Mid-Atlantic ridge right where Tharp had indicated a rift valley. Using earthquake data to extrapolate & plot the rift position they found that the rift extended landward into the Rift Valley of East Africa. Heezen was convinced. 🧵4/5
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She noted some “scruff” on her chart-recorder, & that pulses were regular, occurring every 1.337 seconds. Hewish was initially scornful & insisted regular pulses must be noise from a human made source. He dubbed this object ‘LGM 1’ for “Little Green Men 1”, a playful joke about their uncertainty about what could emit radiation so regularly -obviously it could only be a communication from extraterrestrials haha! After she found other such sources, in different places with different frequencies, 🧵
It’s National Moth Week, July 18-26 to celebrate the beauty, lifecycles and habitat of moths, so I’m reposting my eclipse of moths (the delightful term of venery for a group of moths).
This hand-printed lino block print shows five of the noctural moths of Ontario in front of the moon at a lunar eclipse. The five moths are: the gorgeous green Luna moth (Actias luna), the yellow and purplish-pink Imperial moth (Eacles imperialis), 🧵1/2
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Other prints in my Imaginary Friends of Sciene include;⠀
Maxwell’s Demon, Descartes’ Demon, Laplace’s Demon, Schroedinger’s Cat, The Spherical Cow, Occam’s Razor, Lyell’s Amphibious Beast, and Turtles, all the way down.⠀🧵4/4
June 30 is Asteroid Day to raise awareness of opportunities and risks posed by asteroids, their role in the formation of our solar system, their impact in space resources and importance of protecting Earth from impact. June 30, 1908 an approximately 12-megaton explosion that occurred near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Yeniseysk Governorate (now Krasnoyarsk Krai), Russia, like due to a meteor air burst due to the explosion of a 50 to 60 m stony asteroid - the Tunguska event.
🧵1/2
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Russell used the teapot in arguments against religion but it could be used against any dubious, outrageous claim, offered without proof. He wrote, “nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice.”⠀
⠀🧵3/4
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@dj3ei@mastodon.radio I met her and heard her give a talk about it almost 20 years ago and still remember. She was kind and generous with her time to students and a great speaker!