Obsessing about weight, worrying about physical flaws, or just aspiring to take a perfect selfie isn't just a "girl thing." Negativity about our body image has no gender boundaries and, increasingly, research shows it’s an issue for boys, too.

One mom shares the story of her 12-year-old son who stopped eating his packed school lunch. After he lost weight and seemed out of sorts, she discovered he had restricted his eating because he wanted "six-pack" abs. Another mother recalls when her 15-year-old son began lifting weights for football and became preoccupied with his muscles. 

So what do you do when your adolescent son is worried about being too skinny? Or when your high school teen frets about not being “ripped” enough?

“[Boys] learn early on that men who have big muscles are more celebrated in our society then those who are skinny or small," says Robin Silverman, body-image expert and author of "Good Girls Don’t Get Fat." 

A recent survey finds that one in three boys says social media makes them feel more self-conscious about their appearance and more than 50 percent of teen boys said they had complained about their appearance in the past month. Meanwhile,  a recent study found the fear of being too skinny may put teen boys at risk for depression or steroid use. 

“Body image is traditionally thought of as a female problem and this creates an additional issue, which is that more boys are not speaking up about it, more parents aren’t talking to their boys about it,” says Silverman.  

Silverman says body image issues affect boys as young as preschool age, when they start to learn that appearance matters and that people judge others by it.

Whether it's Superman, Spiderman or Thor, boys are influenced by every muscled cartoon hero they see. Even their Halloween costumes are heavily padded with neoprene “muscles” in the arms, chest and abs. And as boys grow and puberty strikes, the images and messages only get louder and more pervasive, not only from what they see on TV or in the pro athletes they admire, but in what their peers say.

The terms ‘fat’ and ‘thin’ are not just descriptors of weight and size, they become descriptors of character, says Silverman. “A boy who is skinny is associated with being weak or small or maybe they are teased and called a ‘girl.’ A boy who is fat is associated with being lazy or unsuccessful."

“All they want is to be associated with good terms—so people will think better of them,” says Silverman.

A 2012 study published in the journal Pediatrics found that 40 percent of 2,793 Minneapolis-St. Paul middle and high school boys surveyed exercised regularly with the goal of bulking up by using products like steroids and protein powders. Researchers found that two-thirds of those boys were willing to change their eating and exercise habits in order to be more toned and muscular, which they viewed as the ideal.  

Carolyn Savage, a mom of five and former teacher and elementary school principal in Toledo, Ohio, says she has seen body issues play out in a very detrimental way in the classroom. “Size is so important in the social pecking order of young boys,” she says.

With her oldest two sons, who are both teens, Savage says that while they both have lean builds and have always been active athletes, they became more conscious about their appearances in middle school with the onset of puberty.

Savage describes her boys as “lucky" in that they both joined a sport—distance running—that suits their body type. “I don’t think they’ve ever looked at themselves as being different or resented their body type…they look like all of the other distance runners.”

However, she does remember when her oldest son Drew, a 19-year-old college freshman, who is 6 feet tall and 137 pounds, realized at age 10 that he should quit baseball. “We asked him why and I remember him flexing his biceps and making a joke about how he was probably never going to have the guns to ‘hit it out of the park.’"  

Drew got an athletic scholarship and runs cross country track at Ohio University. “He figured it out,” his mom says.

Silverman suggests parents look for signs in their boys, whether it’s skipping meals or a change in sleeping patterns or exercising to the extreme or behaviorally acting out.

And she adds that ultimately parents—both fathers and mothers —are the biggest body image role models for their sons.

“Teach your kids to eat in a healthy, nutritious manner, in a balanced way on a daily basis. Drink enough water. Blow off stress in productive ways by exercising daily,” she says. “Kids should be taught that if you are doing those things, wherever your body falls [in size or weight] is ok.” 

To help ease the problem, she also suggests raising awareness that everyone has body image issues, not just girls, and using a wider range of body types of men in advertising.

Honestly, we should be including all kinds of people in our advertising, whether it's women, men, transgender people or gender-nonconforming folks. We should have all types of races and shapes in the pages of magazines and on TV. That way we'd know that our bodies are all normal and beautiful, instead of beating ourselves up that we don't all look one — very airbrushed — way.

By Dorie Clark

It’s easy to watch a hotshot young executive – or poet, painter, or filmmaker – and wonder if creativity is the province of the young. (Silicon Valley certainly loves to bet on the 20-something Zuckerbergs of the world.) But Jonah Lehrer, author of the new Imagine: How Creativity Works, doesn’t buy it: “There’s nothing inevitable about a decline of creativity over time,” he said in a recent interview. Instead, any executive can take steps to ensure their ideas stay fresh, vital, and relevant.

Lehrer cites the work of Dean Simonton of the University of California-Davis, who studied peak creativity in a variety of fields and determined that in some professions (such as poetry or physics), the greatest innovation comes early – before age 30. But in other disciplines, such as history, the peak generally comes a full 10-15 years later. Says Lehrer, “It’s because you have to spend a different number of years assimilating information. As a physicist, there are parsimonious rules you can learn pretty quickly, and once you learn those rules, you’re at your peak. But for a historian, there are lots of disconnected facts you have to absorb before you can come up with something new.” Whether the magic age is 30 or 45, however, because most fields showed a decline in creativity over time, some initially concluded that the aging brain inevitably lost its abilities over time.

But, says Lehrer, that’s dead wrong: “What Simonton discovered in recent years is it’s a process of acculturation, and people becoming invested in the status quo. If you’re a painter you fall into a style, you develop your clichés – your shtick. If you’re a scientist, you know how to apply for certain grants from the NIH, and if you’re an entrepreneur, you know how certain ideas work and you stick with them.” So a loss of creativity is actually a symptom of buying into the system and refusing to try new things.

Instead, “If you have to pick one secret to staying creative throughout your entire life,” says Lehrer, “it’s to seek out new problems, and when you feel comfortable and like you know how to do something, do something else.” That approach certainly entails risk – if you’re a serial entrepreneur, it’s a lot easier to get VC funding for a new company in the same vein as your previous successes, and if you’re an artist, it’s a lot easier to convince collectors to buy a piece that features your “signature style.” But taking chances is an essential part of staying vital professionally.

So ask yourself:

• Am I taking on new challenges in my business?
• What habits or clichés do I need to guard against?
• What is one new approach I can try out immediately?
• What new skills should I start learning?

What are your strategies for staying innovative? How do you avoid making the safe choice?

Dance is a beautiful art form, but it’s also a sport…and it takes as much training and physical effort as other sports.  Carina reports that injuries among young dancers are on the rise. Experts at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio offer some tips on how to avoid injuries as well as what to do if you get hurt.

Ballet dancers Brooklyn Mack and Misty Copeland made history last year when they became the first African American pair to perform in the lead roles of Prince Siegfried and the Swan Princess at a major production of Swan Lake.

“Even in 2015 something like this was unheard of, which seems crazy,” says Mack, speaking from the studios of the Washington Ballet Company, where he has been for nine years. “It was a much bigger deal than it should have been.”

The world of ballet has long been criticized for clinging to a centuries-old conservatism, and a lack of diversity persists. “There is a stigma that still pervades ballet culture; an idea that black bodies cannot conform to the constraints and aesthetics of ballet and it has greatly limited the number of opportunities dancers of color have,” the 30-year-old explains. 

But tickets to this particular performance of Swan Lake sold out in minutes. “Everyone who was in that theatre was there with a fervent thirst for change and I could feel a palpable energy and anticipation coming from the audience before the curtain even went up.”

If you find that something that inspires awe in people, then that’s your ticket ​– run with it

When the performance was over and it was time for the curtain call, Mack and Copeland were greeted with a thundering standing ovation.

It felt great, but then so do all his ballet performances, Mack says. “I was just concentrating on playing the role of Prince Siegfried to perfection first and foremost.” Every dancer is a perfectionist, according to Mack, who believes the biggest challenge to becoming a professional ballet dancer is accepting it will be a sacrifice.

Mack was 12 when he started going to ballet classes. “In order to persuade my mother to finally take me to American Football tryouts I told her that I would be willing to go so far as to take ballet lessons. I figured that she would have no choice but to be moved by my level of resolve and agree.” 

“You can’t have the same type of childhood or adolescence as your friends – it’s a struggle and it requires so much time and a lot of sweat and pain and tears.” Every day he takes on a punishing eight-hour routine. “You need to practice for hours, even when your tendons are screaming at you to stop.” It often means skipping that night out at a club with friends and instead staying in the studio to perfect something ahead of a big performance. 

And it’s a commitment ballet dancers invariably have to make very early on. “It’s a short-lived career and you’re always battling against time to reach perfection, so you need as much of it on your side as possible,” he explains. Most men tend to retire in their late-30s, while women often retire by their mid-40s.

Swan Lake Misty Copeland and Brooklyn Mack in Washington Ballet’s production at the Kennedy Center.

Mack remembers the moment he knew he wanted to be a professional ballet dancer. He was 14 years old, sitting in the back of his mum’s car coming home from ballet practice. “I had just received a scholarship from Kirov Academy of Ballet in Washington DC, and I thought, wow, am I really going to do this? It was a sobering moment.” 

As the academy was a seven-hour drive from his home in South Carolina, it meant packing up and moving there. But he took the plunge and hasn’t looked back.

Growing up, Mack says he had a strong sense of who he was, and steeled himself for ridicule. He didn’t get as much as he expected. “Ballet would often be the butt of a joke, and when I told people I was a ballet dancer I would see their face contort, as if they were having some internal struggle with how and why I, a man and an African American, was a ballet dancer.” As an adult, he finds a lot of people are intrigued and want to know more and he enjoys the positive reception.

There are a number of misconceptions and stereotypes around ballet dancers and what it is to be a professional, he says. The biggest? The first is that people perceive dancing, even at his level, as a hobby. “I tell people I’m a dancer and they still ask, ‘but what do you do?’” The second is that ballet dancers don’t eat and the third is that ballet is a purely physical endeavour and intelligence isn’t an asset many dancers need, or have. “People say things that imply that mentality but I have never met a great ballet dancer who isn’t intelligent.” 

All that choreography, thousands of steps and painstaking timing and precision – not to mention the ability to convey so much emotion, without saying a word – makes being a ballet dancer a challenging career. But the payoff, he says, is immense.

“There is a euphoria when you perform and everything comes together – the music and your entire being,” he explains. “If you are portraying a character in love, for those moments you are in love with whoever you are dancing with because you have such an intimate connection with them.” And there is a connection with the audience, he adds.

It’s a beautiful and unique career but it’s also a fleeting one. “It’s bittersweet and I doubt there is anyone who doesn’t reminisce and miss it once it’s over,” says Mack. “But you still have more than half your life ahead of you when you retire so you can transition into something completely different afterwards.” He already has plans to open a restaurant when he retires.

Mack’s ascent to professional ballet dancer at a world-class company was, clearly, no easy feat. What does he think it takes to get there? “Tenacity and a hell of a lot of internal fortitude,” he replies. You might be a big fish in your local school but the step up to company life, and the criticism you will encounter, can be very humbling, he adds.

“You also need something that sets you apart from other people, something that draws them to you.” It could be an amazing jump or turn. Find what’s unique about you and capitalise on it, he says. “If you find that something that inspires awe in people, then that’s your ticket – run with it.”

Honeybees have thrived for 50 million years. So why have certain colonies started dying in droves in recent decades? Scott tells us about a sad trend that is can affect us all.  Bees are disappearing from their hives.  While experts are not sure why, they share some insight about this very serious problem: Colony Collapse Disorder. 

As presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump get ready for their last debate Wednesday night, Teen Kids News looks at some of the highlights in the history of presidential debates. Political debates have become an integral part of the American election process. In many cases, they represent the best opportunity for voters to see the candidates up close and learn about their opinions on the key issues.

Lincoln-Douglas Debates Set the Bar

While presidential debates are a relatively modern tradition, political debates are not. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas held a series of debates over Illinois’ hotly-contested U.S. Senate seat. The seven debates touched on serious issues of the day ranging from slavery to states’ rights. As Lincoln acknowledged, the issues would continue to be debated long after “these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent.”

The candidates debated in all of Illinois’ seven Congressional districts. In each debate, either Douglas or Lincoln would make an opening address that lasted one hour. The other candidate was then allotted an hour and a half to make his speech. The first speaker then had an additional 30 minutes to make a rebuttal. Although Lincoln went on to lose the election, his debate performance and fierce opposition to slavery helped launch him to national prominence.

Evolution of the Modern Televised Debate

The first nationally televised presidential debate took place on September 26, 1960. An estimated 70 million Americans watched Vice President Richard M. Nixon and U.S. Senator  John F. Kennedy debate live on their TVs.

Nixon went into the debate as the clear favorite to win the presidency, leading by six percentage points in the national polls. On the day of the debate, Nixon re-aggravated an existing knee injury and did not feel well, but refused to cancel the debate or wear stage makeup. Meanwhile, Kennedy prepared heavily for the debate and sported a healthy tan. As a result, he came across looking and sounding better. Viewers who watched the debate on TV declared Kennedy the clear winner, while radio listeners handed the win to Nixon.

While Nixon’s debate performance improved in the next two presidential debates, his campaign never recovered, and Kennedy narrowly won the election.

Not surprisingly, incumbent presidents became hesitant to debate their challengers, fearful that a poor performance could hurt their chances of reelection. In 1976, Gerald Ford became the first sitting president to take part in a televised presidential debate. The decision may have come back to haunt him. After making a debate gaffe about Russian influence over Eastern Europe, he went on to lose to Jimmy Carter.

Going forward, the remaining 2016 presidential debate will likely have a significant impact on the outcome, particularly with so many voters dissatisfied with their choices. There is a lot on the line for both Clinton and Trump, as history teaches us that just one misstep has the potential to seal the fate of a candidate.

 There are lots of recipes you can cook up…without ever turning on a stove.  This week, Chef Johnny Prep shows Nicole how to make a zesty salsa. 

DIRECTIONS

• Tomatoes - Slice off ends, cut in half.
• Garlic - Peel, slice off ends, remove core, cut into quarters and smash it
• Jalapeno - Cut off tops, slice in half length wise. Remove the pith (milky white membrane in the middle) for less heat.
• Cilantro - Slice it off 

With the ingredients prepped, place them into the food processor and run it. The amount of processing is determined by the texture you like your salsa. I prefer smaller pieces and more juices so I run my processor a little on the long side. You will probably have to run the processor a few time to get all the ingredients through so don't over pack it, you will get a much more even texture this way.

Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature on Thursday for work that the Swedish Academy described as “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

He is the first American to win the prize since Toni Morrison in 1993, and a groundbreaking choice by the Nobel committee to select the first literature laureate whose career has primarily been as a musician.

Although long rumored as a contender for the prize, Dylan was far down the list of predicted winners, which included such renown writers as Haruki Murakami and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

The permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Sara Danius, made the announcement in Stockholm. In a televised interview afterward, Danius said that Dylan “embodies the tradition. And for 54 years, he’s been at it, reinventing himself, creating a new identity.” She suggested that people unfamiliar with his work start with “Blonde on Blonde,” his album from 1966.

“Bob Dylan writes poetry for the ear,” she said. “But it’s perfectly fine to read his works as poetry.”

She drew parallels between Dylan’s work and poets as far back as Greek antiquity.

“It’s an extraordinary example of his brilliant way of rhyming and his pictorial thinking,” Danius said. “If you look back, far back, you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to. They were meant to be performed. It’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho. He can be read and should be read. He is a great poet in the grand English tradition. I know the music, and I’ve started to appreciate him much more now. Today, I’m a lover of Bob Dylan.

Dylan will receive an 18-karat gold medal and a check for about $925,000.

Tributes for Dylan — as well as the Nobel’s unconventional choice — came from across the world and spanned from the worlds of politics to letters.

“Dylan is the brilliant inheritor of the bardic tradition. Great choice,” said a Twitter message from British novelist Salman Rushdie. Chile’s president, Michelle Bachelet, called the honor for Dylan a “joy” and recalled “many fond memories from my adolescence are associated with his music.”

Just after 7 a.m., songwriter Rosanne Cash was in her New York home when her husband John ran down the stairs “like an elephant.”

“Dylan won the Nobel Prize,” he shouted.

“No,” said Cash, “that can’t be true.”

Cash, whose legendary late father, Johnny, was a friend and sometime collaborator with Dylan, spent the rest of the morning beaming. She also received a flurry of text messages, everyone from songwriter Marc Cohn to her literary agent.

“The chatter is this pride and that finally he gets recognized in this way that equates songwriting with great literature,” said Cash. “I can’t tell you how many times people have said to me, because I also write prose, ‘Oh, you’re also a real writer.’ It’s so offensive. Like songwriting doesn’t require the same discipline. So the fact that he’s recognized lifts all of our boats.”

But at last one prominent writer, however, took issue with the Nobel selection. Scottish novelist Irvine Welsh, author of “Trainspotting,” decried it as “an ill-conceived nostalgia award” made for “senile, gibbering hippies.”

Dylan, the son of a Minnesota appliance-store owner, began as a folk singer but soon established himself as one of the voices of political protest and cultural reshaping in the 1960s.

Dylan’s songs — driven by his distinctive nasal-twang vocals — are often seen as dense prose poems packed with flamboyant, surreal images. Rolling Stone magazine once called him “the most influential American musician rock and roll has ever produced.”

He first gained notice with ringing protest songs that served as anthems for the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements with such songs as “Masters of War,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” and “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.”

Then he moved on to feverish rock-and-roll drenched in stream-of-consciousness lyrics that evoked the hallucinatory visions of William Blake, the romanticism of Mary Shelley and John Keats and the postmodern pessimism of Allen Ginsberg and other beat poets.

Dylan recalled listening to country music each evening from distant Midwestern stations and taking up the guitar himself at age 10.

He briefly attended the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, where folk music, rather than rock-and-roll, was the abiding musical idiom.

“Picasso had fractured the art world and cracked it wide open,” Dylan once wrote. “He was revolutionary. I wanted to be like that.”

Dylan was described in an ad for his 1962 Columbia Records debut as “a major new figure in American folk music.” As it turned out, the marketing hyperbole sold him short: Dylan revolutionized popular music and became a major cultural force.

Dylan sang at the 1963 March on Washington, the massive civil rights procession presided over by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Later, at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he stunned many fans — and began a new musical direction — by putting aside his acoustic guitar and playing a Fender sunburst Stratocaster electric guitar.

His next albums — “Highway 61 Revisited” and “Blonde on Blonde” — ventured further into the surreal long-form songs and dizzying array of characters that were becoming his trademark. They are considered by many critics to be his creative peak.

When he was in the Los Angeles-formed band The Byrds, Roger McGuinn sang enough Dylan covers to fill two albums, including the band’s chart-topping, 1965 version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Later, he toured with Dylan and played his 12-string Rickenbacker guitar on Dylan’s 1973 hit “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.”

“I always thought working with him was like knowing Shakespeare,” said McGuinn. “Mr. Tambourine Man. The imagery of that. ‘Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free/ Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands.’ It’s beautiful and really poetry.”

In the late 1970s, he stunned admirers again by declaring himself a Christian and releasing three albums of religiously inspired songs. The singing and musicianship were passionate and professional — Dylan earned his first Grammy Award, for best rock male vocal performance — but the harsh, born-again lyrics puzzled and alienated many of his longtime fans.

Musician Peter Case was a kid growing up in Buffalo when his mother brought him a copy of Dylan’s latest record, the 1965 album, “Bringing It All Back Home.”

“It opened me up to Shakespeare and the sound of language and to try to understand it,” says Case, 62. “It opened me up to deep compassion about people.”

“He’s just a giant,” he added. “They had to open a special door for him.”

In 2005, Dylan released a long-awaited memoir, “Chronicles Vol. 1,” which won him more accolades for its candor and originality. He also appeared in director Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home,” a documentary that summed up the triumphs and turmoil of his early years as a performer. In 2008, he was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize for his profound effect on popular music and American culture, “marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

In February 2010, Dylan took the stage at the White House for a concert honoring the music from the 1960s Civil Rights movement. Backed by only a piano, he performed a powerful acoustic rendition of “The Times They Are a-Changin’” as President Obama watched from the front row. Dylan then shook Obama’s hand in their first meeting.

“As composer, interpreter, most of all as lyricist, Dylan has made a revolution,” the late New Yorker critic Ellen Willis once wrote. “He expanded folk idiom into a rich, figurative language, grafted literary and philosophical subtleties onto the protest song, revitalized folk vision by rejecting proletarian and ethnic sentimentality, then all but destroyed pure folk as a contemporary form by merging it with pop.”

Dylan, Willis noted, “imposed his . . . literacy on an illiterate music.”

“Things were changing all the time and a certain song needed to be written,” Dylan said in 1965. “I started writing them because I wanted to sing them. . . . One thing led to another and I just kept on writing my own songs.”

He added that “popular songs are the only art form that describes the temper of the times. . . . That’s where people hang at. It’s not in books. It’s not onstage. It’s not in the galleries.”

“The way Elvis freed your body, Bob freed your mind and showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual,” Bruce Springsteen said upon inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988.

By Betsy Morals

When Ada Lovelace was twelve years old, she wanted to fly. She approached the problem methodically, examining birds and investigating various materials that could serve as wings—feathers, paper, silk. In the course of her research, which began in February, 1828, according to her biographer Betty Alexandra Toole, Ada wrote and illustrated a guide called “Flyology,” to record her findings. She toiled away on this project until her mother reprimanded her for neglecting her studies, which were meant to set her on a rational course, not a fanciful one.

Ada’s mother, Annabella Byron, was the straight-laced counterpoint to her father, Lord Byron, the Romantic poet, who called his wife the “Princess of Parallelograms.” A month after Ada’s birth, Annabella Byron moved their daughter out of their London house, and away from Lord Byron’s influence. When, shortly before his death, he wrote asking about Ada’s upbringing, Annabella had this to report: “Not devoid of imagination, but is chiefly exercised in connection with her mechanical ingenuity.” This was the best she could hope for, having drilled into Ada a discipline for arithmetic, music, and French, according to the biography “A Female Genius,” by James Essinger, which comes out today. Essinger writes that Lady Byron wished to suppress her daughter’s imagination, which she thought to be “dangerous and potentially destructive and coming from the Byrons.”

But Lovelace reconciled the competing poles of her parents’ influence. On January 5, 1841, she asked, “What is Imagination?” Two things, she thought. First, “the combining faculty,” which “seizes points in common, between subjects having no apparent connection,” and then, she wrote, “Imagination is the Discovering Faculty, pre-eminently. It is that which penetrates into the unseen worlds around us, the worlds of Science.”

Augusta Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer, and, since 2009, she has been recognized annually on October 15th to highlight the often overlooked contributions of women to math and science. The main event is being held today at Imperial College London, with the début of an anthology of essays, “A Passion for Science: Stories of Discovery and Invention.” “I started to think that one of the biggest parts of the problem was that women in tech are often invisible,” Suw Charman-Anderson, the founder of Ada Lovelace Day, told me. After reading a study in 2006 by the psychologist Penelope Lockwood, who researched the dearth of female role models in the sciences, Charman-Anderson thought that a fête for Lovelace could raise awareness of her noteworthy successors. This year, dozens of celebrations will be thrown around the world, including an “Ada Lovelace Edit-a-thon” at Brown University, where volunteers will ramp up Wikipedia entries for female scientists.

Looming in the background of these festivities are findings, announced last month by the Census Bureau, that the share of women working in stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) has decreased over the past couple of decades; this is due largely to the fact that women account for a smaller proportion of those employed in computing. In 1990, women held thirty-four per cent of stem jobs; in 2011, it was twenty-seven per cent. Valerie Aurora, the executive director of the Ada Initiative, a nonprofit organization that arranges conferences and training programs to elevate women working in math and science, is participating in the first ever Ada Lovelace conference this week, at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. “Lovelace is an unusual example of a woman for her time because she was not only allowed to learn mathematics but encouraged to learn mathematics,” Aurora said. “She shows what women can do when given a chance.”

Lovelace’s opportunity came when she met Charles Babbage, the renowned mathematician who would become her friend and mentor. On June 5, 1833, she attended a flamboyant party brimming with London socialites, to whom she was making her début at the age of seventeen. There was Babbage, a widower in his forties, who spoke excitedly of an invention he called the “Difference Machine,” a tower of numbered wheels that could make reliable calculations with the turn of a handle. A few days later, Lady Byron took Ada to his home at 1 Dorset Street to see him demonstrate the device in his drawing room. Ada, intrigued by the incomplete prototype, struck up a correspondence with Babbage about its potential, and her own mathematical studies. The letters between them span from June 10, 1835, to August 12, 1852; he told her about his plans, and she wrote to him of her ambition. “I think your taste for mathematics is so decided that it ought not to be checked,” Babbage wrote to her in 1839.

When Babbage began devising a new project, the “Analytical Engine”—sketched out as a hulking machine with thousands of cogwheels that could perform more functions with greater accuracy—Lovelace served as its key interpreter. On a trip to Turin to promote his work, which required considerable financial support, Babbage met a mathematician named Luigi Federico Menabrea, who agreed to write a paper on the machine. It was published in a Swiss academic journal in October, 1842, at about eight thousand words. Lovelace translated it from the French, and added her own notes. Her version came in at twenty thousand words. “The notes of the Countess of Lovelace extend to about three times the length of the original memoir,” Babbage wrote later. “Their author has entered fully into almost all the very difficult and abstract questions connected with the subject.”

Her translation, along with her notes, was published in 1843, and represent her greatest contribution to computer science: she described with clarity how Babbage’s device would work, illuminating its foundations in the Jacquard loom. Just as Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s silk-weaving machine could automatically create images using a chain of punched cards, so too could Babbage’s system—the engine, Lovelace explained, weaved algebraic patterns. She also wrote how it might perform a particular calculation: Note G, as it is known, set out a detailed plan for the punched cards to weave a long sequence of Bernoulli numbers, and is considered to be the first computer program. “The science of operations, as derived from mathematics more especially, is a science of itself, and has its own abstract truth and value,” Lovelace wrote. Essinger interprets this line in his biography, writing, “Ada is here seeking to do nothing less than invent the science of computing, and separate it from the science of mathematics. What she calls ‘the science of operations’ is indeed in effect computing.”

Beyond that, Lovelace articulated, as not even Babbage could, the poetic significance of his machine. She wrote:

This science constitutes the language through which alone we can adequately express the great facts of the natural world, and those unceasing changes of mutual relationship which, visibly or invisibly, consciously or unconsciously to our immediate physical perceptions, are interminably going on in the agencies of the creation we live amidst.

She continues:

A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. Thus not only the mental and the material, but the theoretical and the practical in the mathematical world, are brought into more intimate and effective connection with each other.

Years later, scholars would dispute that Lovelace actually wrote the notes. The Babbage historian Bruce Collier argued that her contribution had been greatly overstated, and “it is no exaggeration to say that she was a manic depressive with the most amazing delusions about her own talents, and a rather shallow understanding of Charles Babbage and the Analytical Engine.” But Essinger, Toole, and others reject this interpretation. “As people realized how important computer programming was, there was a greater backlash and an attempt to reclaim it as a male activity,” Aurora told me. “In order to keep that wealth and power in a man’s hands, there’s a backlash to try to redefine it as something a woman didn’t do, and shouldn’t do, and couldn’t do.”

Suw Charman-Anderson said that Lovelace’s story resonates “because there are still people who seek to discredit her achievements. It is something that many women working in tech are only too familiar with. We can look at Ada and recognize that our own challenges are similar to hers, and her achievements are the sorts of things that we strive towards.”

In the late seventies, the Department of Defense developed a software language called Ada—one that brought together a number of different programming languages. It’s fitting for Lovelace—a woman who rode horses and played the harp and studied poetry—to tie seemingly disparate elements together. As Aurora told me, “Computer programming has so many interactions with the rest of the world.” While Babbage possessed technical ingenuity, Aurora said, Lovelace propelled his invention into the nascent days of computing: “She was the first person to see the true potential.” For this, Babbage called her “Lady Fairy.”

Millions of people of all ages, races and genders live their lives with some sort of disability. Many of those people do something amazing to lessen the impact that these injuries and diseases have on them by playing adaptive sports. Unfortunately, not everyone is aware of what they are and who can play. Daniella reports on a major change that is taking place all across the United States.  It’s basically leveling the playing field in sports.  

When you see your female friends Tuesday, give 'em high-fives: It's International Day of the Girl.

International Day of the Girl was first recognized in 2011, when the United Nations general assembly voted to set aside Oct. 11 as a day to honor girls and work to improve their lives. It's a day for sharing inspiration and spreading awareness. This year's celebration centers on the theme "Girls' Progress = Goals' Progress: What Counts for Girls."

In the United States, President Barack Obama took International Day of the Girl as a moment to shed light on Americans' work to get more young women involved in the historically male-dominated science, technology, engineering and math fields, push for equal pay and campaigns to curb sexual assault on college campuses.

"This is the future we are forging: Where women and girls, no matter what they look like or where they are from, can live free from the fear of violence. A future where all girls know they can hold any job, run any company, and compete in any field," Obama said in a statement. "Let us keep working to build a world that is more just and free — because nothing should stand in the way of strong girls with bold dreams."

International Day of the Girl is about more than just girl power — it's about redoubling global efforts to improve their lives. In some countries, the situation is bleak. 

There are 31 million school-aged girls who don't have the opportunity to attend elementary school. About 35 percent of women across the world have encountered physical or sexual violence. More than90 percent of teenaged girls have said they wish they could alter the way they looked. Only 4 percentof the top U.S. companies have women as their chief executive officers.

On International Day of the Girl, start a discussion about the challenges facing young women. Then, as you celebrate them, share these quotes from famous females, collected from Harper's Bazaar,StyleCaster and Goodreads:

"Girl power in my mind is to let girls be exactly what they are. Let them be angry. Let them be resentful. And rebellious. Let them be hard and soft and loving and sad and silly. Let them be wrong. Let them be right. Let them be everything, because they are everything." — Amy Sherman-Palladino

"Women will only have true equality when men share with them the responsibility of bringing up the next generation." — Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"A woman is like a tea bag — you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water." — Eleanor Roosevelt

"A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men." — Gloria Steinem

“Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties, and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer, and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex." ― Charlotte Brontë

"It took me quite a long time to develop a voice, and now that I have it, I am not going to be silent." — Madeleine Albright

"Feminism isn't about making women strong. Women are already strong. It's about changing the way the world perceives that strength." — G.D. Anderson

"The most effective way to do it, is to do it." — Amelia Earhart

"Of course I am not worried about intimidating men. The type of man who will be intimidated by me is exactly the type of man I have no interest in." — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

"Don't be afraid of speak up for yourself. Keep fighting for your dreams! - Gabby Douglas

"No one can make you feel inferior without your consent" - Eleanor Roosevelt

"The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before" - Albert Einstein

Hurricanes are the most violent storms on Earth. People call these storms by other names, such as typhoons or cyclones, depending on where they occur. The scientific term for all these storms is tropical cyclone. Only tropical cyclones that form over the Atlantic Ocean or eastern Pacific Ocean are called "hurricanes."

Whatever they are called, tropical cyclones all form the same way.

Tropical cyclones are like giant engines that use warm, moist air as fuel. That is why they form only over warm ocean waters near the equator. The warm, moist air over the ocean rises upward from near the surface. Because this air moves up and away from the surface, there is less air left near the surface. Another way to say the same thing is that the warm air rises, causing an area of lower air pressure below.

Air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in to the low pressure area. Then that "new" air becomes warm and moist and rises, too. As the warm air continues to rise, the surrounding air swirls in to take its place. As the warmed, moist air rises and cools off, the water in the air forms clouds. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean's heat and water evaporating from the surface.

Storms that form north of the equator spin counterclockwise. Storms south of the equator spin clockwise. This difference is because of Earth's rotation on its axis.

As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the center. It is very calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure. Higher pressure air from above flows down into the eye.

When the winds in the rotating storm reach 39 mph, the storm is called a "tropical storm." And when the wind speeds reach 74 mph, the storm is officially a "tropical cyclone," or hurricane.

If you could slice into a tropical cyclone, it would look something like this. The small red arrows show warm, moist air rising from the ocean's surface, and forming clouds in bands around the eye. The blue arrows show how cool, dry air sinks in the eye and between the bands of clouds. The large red arrows show the rotation of the rising bands of clouds.

Tropical cyclones usually weaken when they hit land, because they are no longer being "fed" by the energy from the warm ocean waters. However, they often move far inland, dumping many inches of rain and causing lots of wind damage before they die out completely.

Tropical cyclone categories:

The two GOES satellites keep their eyes on hurricanes from far above Earth's surface—22,300 miles above, to be exact! 

These satellites, built by NASA and operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), save lives by helping weather forecasters predict and warn people where and when these severe storms will hit land.

Below you would find the location and forecast for Hurricane Matthew

The Democratic Party’s donkey and the Republican Party’s elephant have been on the political scene since the 19th century. The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson called him a jackass. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. Jackson went on to defeat incumbent John Quincy Adams and serve as America’s first Democratic president. In the 1870s, influential political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party.

The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and six years later Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House. An image of an elephant was featured as a Republican symbol in at least one political cartoon and a newspaper illustration during the Civil War (when “seeing the elephant” was an expression used by soldiers to mean experiencing combat), but the pachyderm didn’t start to take hold as a GOP symbol until Thomas Nast, who’s considered the father of the modern political cartoon, used it in an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon. Titled “The Third-Term Panic,” Nast’s drawing mocked the New York Herald, which had been critical of President Ulysses Grant’s rumored bid for a third term, and portrayed various interest groups as animals, including an elephant labeled “the Republican vote,” which was shown standing at the edge of a pit. Nast employed the elephant to represent Republicans in additional cartoons during the 1870s, and by 1880 other cartoonists were using the creature to symbolize the party.

Along with the donkey and elephant, the German-born Nast is associated with another political animal, the ferocious Tammany Tiger, which the crusading artist famously featured in an 1871 Harper’s Weekly cartoon that attacked New York’s William “Boss” Tweed and Tammany Hall, his corrupt political machine. Not all of Nast’s work was about politics, though; he’s also credited with creating the modern image of Santa Claus.

The Democratic Party’s donkey and the Republican Party’s elephant have been on the political scene since the 19th century. The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson. During that race, opponents of Jackson called him a jackass. However, rather than rejecting the label, Jackson, a hero of the War of 1812 who later served in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, was amused by it and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. Jackson went on to defeat incumbent John Quincy Adams and serve as America’s first Democratic president. In the 1870s, influential political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party.

The Republican Party was formed in 1854 and six years later Abraham Lincoln became its first member elected to the White House. An image of an elephant was featured as a Republican symbol in at least one political cartoon and a newspaper illustration during the Civil War (when “seeing the elephant” was an expression used by soldiers to mean experiencing combat), but the pachyderm didn’t start to take hold as a GOP symbol until Thomas Nast, who’s considered the father of the modern political cartoon, used it in an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon. Titled “The Third-Term Panic,” Nast’s drawing mocked the New York Herald, which had been critical of President Ulysses Grant’s rumored bid for a third term, and portrayed various interest groups as animals, including an elephant labeled “the Republican vote,” which was shown standing at the edge of a pit. Nast employed the elephant to represent Republicans in additional cartoons during the 1870s, and by 1880 other cartoonists were using the creature to symbolize the party.

Along with the donkey and elephant, the German-born Nast is associated with another political animal, the ferocious Tammany Tiger, which the crusading artist famously featured in an 1871 Harper’s Weekly cartoon that attacked New York’s William “Boss” Tweed and Tammany Hall, his corrupt political machine. Not all of Nast’s work was about politics, though; he’s also credited with creating the modern image of Santa Claus.

If you had to pick one single spot as the birthplace of the blues, you might say it all started right here," said the late and great B.B. King while standing in front of the Dockery seed house in the 1970s Mississippi Public Television documentary, “Good Morning Blues.”King, who grew up in Mississippi, knew all too well that the sprawling plantation, which at one time covered 40 square miles and was home to 3,000 people, was the home base for blues pioneers over the course of three decades. The legendary musicians who called Dockery home included Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Eddie "Son" House, and Chester Burnett, who later would be known as Howlin' Wolf. Roebuck "Pops" Staples of The Staple Singers lived there in the later years and blues legend Robert Johnson joined in what were sometimes all-night performances on the plantation.

 King, who grew up in Mississippi, knew all too well that the sprawling plantation, which at one time covered 40 square miles and was home to 3,000 people, was the home base for blues pioneers over the course of three decades. The legendary musicians who called Dockery home included Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Eddie "Son" House, and Chester Burnett, who later would be known as Howlin' Wolf. Roebuck "Pops" Staples of The Staple Singers lived there in the later years and blues legend Robert Johnson joined in what were sometimes all-night performances on the plantation.

"All of these guys fed off each other and created this country blues that came out of that part of the Delta," says Luther Brown, the recently retired director of the Delta Center for Culture and Learning at Delta State University. "They traveled around. They weren't at Dockery all of the time. But it was pretty much their headquarters.”

The front porch of the commissary, where they often started playing on Saturday afternoons, is still standing at Dockery although the building burned down 50 years ago.

People would begin gathering on the porch on Saturday afternoons where the blues men would play for free before the party moved across the one-lane bridge to what they called the Frolicking House, a sharecropper's home emptied of furniture. With no electricity on the plantation, the musicians would put big mirrors along the walls of two rooms with a coal oil lantern in front of each for illumination and the music would start. They'd play all night, charging 25 cents a head. A musician could earn as much as $250 cash on a good night, far better than making 50 cents a day in the cotton fields.

Today, the farms are a collection of six buildings and a feeling, a destination for blues pilgrims who come from all over the world.

At the center of the Dockery Farms story is Charley Patton, considered the father of the Delta Blues. His father, Bill, and mother, Annie, moved to Dockery with their 12 children when he was about ten years old. By the time he was a teen, he was taking lessons from Henry Sloan, another transplant to Dockery who had started playing a different kind of music some were calling the blues.

By 1910, Patton turned from student to teacher, schooling bluesmen like Brown and Johnson. Later, he would share his style with Howlin' Wolf and Staples, who lived for 12 years on the plantation.

The plantation was founded on the vision of Will Dockery, a graduate of the University of Mississippi, who took a $1,000 gift from his grandmother and purchased tracts of Delta wilderness in 1885. Over a decade, the transformed the land into a cotton plantation. Eventually, the company town had an elementary school, churches, post and telegraph offices, a resident doctor, a ferry, a blacksmith shop, a cotton gin, cemeteries, picnic grounds for the workers, its own currency, and a commissary that sold dry goods, furniture, and groceries. To ship out the cotton, Dockery built a railroad depot and a spur route, named the Pea Vine for its twisted path, was laid from the main station in nearby Boyle (Patton’s “Pea Vine Blues” pays tribute to the line). At one time, roughly 3,000 people lived on the plantation’s 40 square miles.

That concentration of people — a big consumer base — made Dockery an incubator for blues musicians. Howlin' Wolf moved there, Brown notes. Robert Johnson moved there. "Part of the draw was that they could go to the commissary on a Saturday or hang out at the railroad station or street corner and they could draw a crowd and make enough money to make a living," Brown says.

Patton was a flamboyant performer who played guitar with his teeth and behind his head and considered himself a professional musician, not a sharecropper. He and the others were the rock stars of their day. "Honeyboy Edwards played with Robert Johnson and he said if you saw a black man walking down the street in a suit he was either a preacher or he was a bluesman," Brown adds. "They were the only ones who would have enough money."

In 1934, shortly before he died, Patton was in a New York studio cutting what would be his final recordings. Months earlier, he'd been thrown out of Dockery Farms, a consequence of his womanizing. It stung. Like all great blues musicians, he chronicled his pain in song. This one was called “34 Blues:”

They run me from Will Dockery’s, Willie Brown, I want your job

Buddy, what’s the matter?

Ah, one of them told papa Charley

I don’t want you hanging around my job no more

Well, look down the country, it almost make you cry

After the introduction of the mechanical cotton picker in 1944, the Great Migration saw 6 million African Americans emigrate to the industrial urban centers of the Midwest and the Northeast, and the bluesman followed suit. Dockery continued as a mechanized farm, eventually diversifying into corn, soybeans, and rice as the price of cotton fell.

William Lester, the executive director of the Dockery Farms Foundation, is the last man living on the plantation. Forty years ago, he convinced Joe Rice Dockery, Bill’s son, to sell him some land so he could build a home there when he got a job teaching art at nearby Delta State University. During his early years on the farm, he befriended Tom Cannon, Patton’s nephew who told him stories – “All the good stories and all the bad stories,” Lester says – about his uncle’s years on the farm.

Six key buildings remain standing, including three that have been restored – the seed house with the iconic sign listing the farm’s owners, the gas station, and the platform where cotton bales were stored awaiting pickup by the train. Three more buildings -- the original seed house, which became a hay barn, the supply house, and the cotton gin – still need repair. The Dockery family heirs lease the land to farmers who grow soybeans, rice, corn, and cotton.   

As the farm buildings fell into disrepair, the plantation's blues legacy became largely forgotten. In the transcript of a 1979 oral history with Joe Rice Dockery, who worked on the plantation starting in 1926 and took over after his father died in 1936, the blues are mentioned only in passing. In the 1990s, when Mississippi sought to widen the two-lane road running by the plantation to four lanes, the original plans would have destroyed several of the historic buildings on the site, Brown says.

Lester organized a protest on the site with more than 300 people. After they’d finished, a Swedish motorcycle group -- European blues fans have long made the Dockery pilgrimage – rode up and he asked them to sign a petition and pose for a picture. They happily agreed. The shot made the front page of the local Boliver Commercial newspaper the next day. Blues fans and history buffs, as well as politicians, inundated the Mississippi Department of Transportation with calls and letters. The department surrendered. “They said, ‘Tell people to quit calling us,’” Lester recalls. “’We will not tear down Dockery.’”

While we often focus on figures like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates as the lone geniuses behind wildly successful companies, the truth is their skills were bolstered by the teams of talented people working for them. Gates himself has said that creativity is less of an individual characteristic than it is an "emergent property" that surfaces when people convene around a problem. This way of thinking is beginning to align more and more with the way people want to work.

By 2020, Millennials will make up 50 percent of the workforce, and 88 percent of them currently say they they prefer an environment that is collaborative over one that's competitive.

The following infographic illustrates how companies are designing their workplaces around this idea.

Spiders are skillful engineers, gifted with amazing planning skills and a material that allows them to precisely design rigorous and functional web. 

The material—spider silk—has chemical properties that make it lustrous, strong and light. It’s stronger than steel and has impressive tensile strength, meaning it can be stretched a lot before it snaps. Scientists have been trying for decades to decode exactly what gives the silk both strength and elasticity, but so far they have found only clues.

Any individual spider can make up to seven different types of silk, but most generally make four to five kinds, says Jonathan Coddington, director of the Global Genome Initiative and senior scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Spiders use their silk for several purposes, including web-building. That diversity is not hard to imagine, given that Earth hosts 45,749 species of spiders, according to the World Spider Catalog. The number is changing constantly with the frequent discovery of new species.

Why build webs? They serve as “pretty much offense and defense,” says Coddington. “If you’re going to live in a web, it’s going to be a defensive structure,” he says, noting that vibrations in the strands can alert the spiders to predators. Webs are also used to catch prey, says Coddington, whose research has focused in part on spider evolution and taxonomy.

Sometimes spiders eat their own webs when they are done with them, as a way to replenish the silk supply.

Spider silk is made of connected protein chains that help make it strong, along with unconnected areas that give it flexibility. It is produced in internal glands, moving from a soluble form to a hardened form and then spun into fiber by the spinnerets on the spider’s abdomen.

Spiders’ multiple spinnerets and eight legs come in handy for web-building. The architecture of a web is very species-specific, says Coddington. “If you show me a web, I can tell you what spider made it,” he says, adding that spiders “are opinionated” about where they will make a web. Some might be at home in the bottom of a paper cup, while others wouldn’t touch that space.

Most web-building happens under the cover of darkness.

The typical orb weaver spider (the group that’s most familiar to Americans) will build a planar orb web, suspended by seven guy lines attached to leaves, twigs, rocks, telephone poles or other surfaces. Hanging from a leaf or some other object, the spider must get its silk from that point to the other surfaces.

The spider starts by pulling silk from a gland with it fourth leg. The opposite fourth leg is used to pull out multiple strands of silk from about 20 additional silk glands, creating a balloon-like structure. The spider sits patiently, knowing that eventually a warm breeze will take up the balloon, which carries away the first line of silk.

Eventually the balloon's trailing silk strand snags—and, like an angler with a fish on the line, the spider can feel the hit. It tugs to make sure the silk strand is truly attached, then it pulls out new silk and attaches the strand to whatever it is perched on and starts gathering up the snagged strand, pulling itself towards the endpoint, all the while laying out new silk behind it. That new silk is the first planar line. The spider may do this 20 times, creating a network of dry (not sticky) silk lines arcing in all directions.

The spider then has to determine which of those lines constitute seven good attachment points—they must be in a plane and “distributed usefully around the circle the web will occupy,” says Coddington. The spider cuts away the 13 lines that it won't use. “Now that you have the seven attachments you need, you no longer need to touch the ground, leaves, twigs, anything ... you are in your own, arguably solipsistic, world.”

Then the spider starts to spin its web, a relatively simple and predictable process. It begins at the outside and works its way in, attaching segment by segment with its legs, creating concentric circles and ending with a center spiral of sticky silk that traps much-needed prey—all the energy invested in making the web depletes protein stores.

The sticky stuff merely immobilizes the prey. The coup de grâce comes from the spider’s jaws. “Most spiders attack with their teeth,” says Coddington. “They just wade in and bite the thing to death.” That’s a risky proposition, though, because the prey might not be entirely stuck.

A few families of spiders have developed an alternative mode of offense: the sticky-silk wrap attack. Those spiders lay a strand of sticky silk across the ground. When an insect crosses, the vibration alerts the spider, which then attacks, flicking lines of sticky, strong silk around the insect and wrapping it up until it is fully immobilized. The spider then moves in for the death bite. But this is more of a rarity than a rule in the spider world.

Many researchers are studying spider behavior and spider silk in the hopes of some day being able to farm the material or perhaps replicate it through genetic engineering. The silk could be used, for instance, to increase the strength of body armor, or to create skin grafts. “That would be a great thing for the human race,” says Coddington.

A handful of companies are currently invested in spider silk, including Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Kraig Biocraft Laboratories, a Swedish biotech firm, Spiber Technologies, and a German company, AMSilk, which says it has genetically engineered a protein that is similar to spider silk that is currently being used in shampoos and other cosmetics.

The fierce female warriors – the Amazons – were strong and brave, but did they really exist?

History’s first mention of a race of warrior women is found in Homer’s ILIAD, an account of the Trojan War, probably written in the 8th or 7th century B.C.. Homer’s Amazons, a race of fierce women who mated with vanquished male foes and kept only the female children they bore, were believed to occupy the area around the Black Sea. Amazon women also crop up in Greek myths. One of the labors of Hercules, for example, required him to acquire the girdle of the Amazon queen, Hippolyte. The Amazons of Greek mythology most likely had no connection to the women of the steppes, says archaeologist Jeannine Davis-Kimball. “I think the idea of the ‘Amazon’ was created by the Greeks for their own purposes,” she says.

A battle between Amazons and Greek warriors is depicted in a marble sarcophagus on display at the Pio Clementino museum in the Vatican. (Colin/Wikimedia Commons)

A history of sorts:
The works of the Greek historian Herodotus, written around the 5th century B.C., describe a group of female warriors who lost to the Greeks at the battle of Thermodon. Herodotus' Amazons were taken prisoner and put on ships, but overwhelmed and killed the Greek crew. Unable to sail themselves, the women drifted to the shores of the Black Sea, to the territory of the Scythians, a nomadic culture of Iranian descent. The women, Herodotus says, intermarried with the Scythian men, and convinced their new husbands to move northeast across the flat grassy plains, high mountains, and searing deserts of the Russian steppes, where the group eventually evolved into the Sauromatian culture.

Amazons in Eurasia:
The first direct evidence for warrior women of high status on the steppes of southern Russia comes from excavations of burial sites of the Sauromatian culture dating from the 6th to the 4th century B.C. Judging from their grave goods, Sauromatians were nomadic, experts in animal husbandry, and skilled in warfare.

In some archaeological digs in Eurasia, as many as thirty-seven per cent of the graves contain the bones and weapons of horsewomen who fought alongside men. Credit Photograph by Erich Lessing / Art Resource.

Starting around the 4th century B.C., Sauromatian culture evolves into the Sarmatian culture, also a nomadic people that make their livelihood raising animals and versed in the art of war. The culture, which had been expanding its territory, soon shifts its focus. “They become raiders and traders, with forays to the west to interface with the Romans, and they relocate to cities and to areas along large trade routes,” Davis-Kimball says. “Their wealth increases. We see that in their burial items. We see strong, powerful women, but their role changes. We find burials of women that still retain cultic artifacts, indicating that they were a priestess of some sort, but there is much more gold and more secular ornamentation — more golden cups, more golden jewelry, elaborate things — and less weaponry. This type of evolution is a normal manifestation of culture.”

From the 2nd century B.C. to the 2nd to 3rd century A.D., the Sarmatians migrate to the west and north of the Black Sea, and eventually invade Dacia (now Romania). In the 3rd century A.D. the Sarmatians are invaded by the Goths, and in 370 A.D. they are overtaken by Huns and either killed or assimilated. Jeannine Davis-Kimball believes that remnants of the integrated Sarmatian population can still be found in the descendants of that conquering horde of Mongols. The Mongols relocated from southern Russia to western China and western Mongolia 150 to 200 years.

Whether college is still several years away, or just around the corner, we can all use some help with deciding where to apply. Eden gets some expert advice on the plethora of factors to consider.