The woman who infected her 3-year-old daughter with smallpox... for science

Hello, friends! Bit late this week so let’s get straight to- ooh, what’s this?

🚨🚨🚨 News just in: Northern Lights *tonight* 🚨🚨 🚨

After last night’s spectacular display*, the Northern Lights (the Northern-frickin’-Lights!) are expected to put on another show tonight in the UK.

According to the BBC, weather conditions will again be ideal, but you’ll need to wait for it to get dark (about half 10 tonight). So right after Eurovision, consider tuning into the sky and watching streams of charged particles from the Sun colliding with the Earth’s atmosphere to breathtaking effect.

*Yeah, I missed it.

This week’s kicks

(Note: Prices for events exclude booking fees where they apply.)

For those who like their science in the flesh (and in imperial units), the Pint of Science Festival is back from Monday to Wednesday, seeing lots of lovely scientists head to pubs all over the country to share their research with a nicely hydrated audience.

See what Pint of Science events are happening near you.

Right. What’s on the slate this week?

Monday 13 May

🦫 Beavers in Dorset, online event held by the Royal Geographical Society, 19.00, free: Stephen Oliver, who manages the Dorset Beaver Project, tells us how a pair of beavers have been getting on since their introduction to a site in 2021 and explains how the creatures can play a vital role in river ecology.

🧠 Creating brain organoids to uncover what makes us human, hybrid event held by the University of Cambridge, 19.30, free: Dr Madeline Lancaster explains how we can explore the complexities of the human brain – including how things go wrong in conditions such as schizophrenia – by using simple models called organoids.

Tuesday 14 May

🪄 How to prove 1=0, and other maths illusions, hybrid event held by Gresham College, 13.00, free: Professor Sarah Hart presents some mathematical illusions – showing “proofs” that 1=0 and that fractions don’t exist, for example – and the common logical slips they reveal.

🫁 AI, smartphones and lung health: breathless with excitement, online event held by UCL’s Faculty of Medical Sciences, 17.00, free: Professor John Hurst and Dr Luke Hale discuss how smartphone sensors and AI can recognise real-time breathing and lung function, and improve the care of people living with lung health problems.

🐄 Throwback, 1796: Edward Jenner administers the first ever vaccination against smallpox. Jenner developed the vaccine after observing that milkmaids who had been exposed to the milder cowpox did not get the disease.

 ⚕️ It’s a massive win for Team Human – vaccines have saved more lives than any other medical invention in history. Smallpox had been one of the deadliest diseases for centuries, but was declared eradicated in 1980.

💪 Read the story of how aristocrat Lady Mary Wortley Montagu introduced another form of inoculation against smallpox to Europe 75 years before Jenner’s vaccine.

👶 After observing the practice in the Ottoman Empire, she thought she’d give it a go at home. Her first patient? Her three-year-old daughter.

Wednesday 15 May

👠 Throwback, 1940: First ever nylon stockings hit US stores, sell out in most locations by lunch.

📖 Read the story of nylon’s development, which arrived after manufacturer DuPont decided to focus on “discovering new scientific facts”, the “nylon riots” that erupted as supply could not meet demand for the miracle stockings that would not run, and the tragic case of the material’s inventor.

Thursday 16 May

🦔 Check in on your local hedgehogs: Hedgehogs have been waking from hibernation from early spring, but those with outside space might hear a few snuffles and grunts from the creatures over the next few weeks – it’s mating season, or “the rut”.

🎥 Non-garden havers don’t have to be left out of hedgehog-watching – when night falls, tune into the goings-on of some hedgehogs in a garden in Norwich on this livestream, or see if any have been spotted near you in this interactive hedgehog map.

🍆 Or… watch Sir Dave tempting one of the hogsters in his garden with a plate of mince, followed by some spiky nookie.

Friday 17 May

🔍 Peering beneath the ice: observing the ocean under Antarctica’s floating ice shelves, hybrid event held by the University of Oxford’s Department of Earth Sciences, 12.00, free: Dr Peter Davis of the British Antarctic Survey presents their team’s work observing the boundary between Antarctic ice shelves and the ocean through hot water drilled holes.

Saturday 18 May

👃 Let in a lungful of lilacs’ perfume: With spring in full swing, look out for the pretty flowers of Syringa vulgaris with their almost heart-shaped leaves in parks and hedgerows (or front gardens) and breathe in their obscenely sweet scent.

🐝 Plants use their fragrance as a means of communication, to both attract pollinators and repel predators. Those pollinated by bees and butterflies let out their scent during the day, while those pollinated by moths and bats are pumping it out at night.

Sunday 19 May

☄️ Throwback, 1910: Earth passes through tail of Halley’s comet, avoids apocalypse. On this day in 1910, Earthlings enjoyed the auroral display produced as the planet sailed through the comet’s 24-million-mile-long tail.

😱 While the event passed with little more than a nice light show, thanks to the astronomer and science author Camille Flammarion, there had been fears the comet’s tail would leave a dangerous gas in the atmosphere and “possibly snuff out all life on the planet”.

🤑 Mercifully, opportunists were on hand to put fears at bay with the sale of “anti-comet pills”.

We need answers

A couple of weeks ago I asked:

This was a particularly nerdy one.

The sequence represents metric prefixes in ascending order (pico-, nano-, micro-, milli-, nothing needed for 1, kilo-, mega-, giga-, and tera-), going up in powers of three.

Etymology alert: The first four, which make your base unit smaller (e.g. a mm is 1/1,000 of a metre) are based on Latin, and the last four, which make your base unit bigger (e.g. a GB is 1,000,000,000 bytes), are based on Greek.

Until next week...

Which London landmark is known among cabbies as ‘Dead Zoo’?

Answer comes next week. See you then! x