Pascal Gehring and colleagues point out that synthetic TIs, discovered only a decade ago, are regarded as a new horizon in materials science. Unlike conventional electrical insulators, which do not conduct electricity, TIs have the unique property of conducting electricity on their surface, while acting as an insulator inside. Although seemingly simple, this type of surface could allow manipulation of the spin of an electron, paving the way for development of a quantum computer. Such a computer would crunch data much faster than today’s best supercomputers.

However, the mechanisms behind sap exudation—processes that trigger pressure differences causing sap to flow— in maple trees are a topic of much debate. In a paper published today in the SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics, authors Maurizio Ceseri and John Stockie shed light on this subject by proposing a mathematical model for the essential physiological processes that drive sap flow.

Sugars are produced in the leaves of the maple tree by photosynthesis with the help of absorbed water, carbon dioxide, and sunlight, and are consumed for current growth, or stored as starch. In the cold, dormant season, some of the starch enters the sap, where it remains mostly frozen until the spring. In the period between this dormant state and the active growing season (during cold nights with below-freezing temperatures followed by mild, warm days with above-freezing conditions), the stored starch is converted into sugar and the sap pressure grows, allowing it to exude naturally from the tap hole when tapped.

He was also pleased at my interest in amateur astronomy. He didn't lecture me when a mishap chemistry experiment resulted in a spectacular explosion in my room (don't worry: my parents did!). The only reservation he communicated was after the Challenger Disaster (I was in the Air Force, home on a visit): he preferred I not become an astronaut, though I never promised him I wouldn't.

Dr. Hay had contacts with congressional leaders. He could have gotten me an appointment at one of the service academies. I declined, and stated I wanted to go to college close to home. He respected my wishes, and I did that. He invited me to bring some of my classmates and discuss majoring in engineering and science at his "Super Saturday" career day, which he did every year...at church. Yet, I don't ever recall his ever needing to 'correct my thinking,' challenge what I'd learned...or that he seemed threatened at all by my interest in science as some seem to be today. Galileo and Copernicus would have appreciated him, and our youth less confused by this boondoggle.

Note this excerpt:

"In an age when most major public policy challenges revolve around science, less than 2 percent of congresspersons have professional backgrounds in it. The membership of the 112th Congress, which ran from January 2011 to January 2013, included one physicist, one chemist, six engineers, and one microbiologist.

"In contrast, how many representatives and senators do you suppose have law degrees - and whom many suspect avoided college science classes like the plague? Two hundred twenty-two. It's little wonder we have more rhetoric than fact in our national policy making..."

Physicists announced on July 4, 2012, that, with more than 99 percent certainty, they had found a new elementary particle weighing about 126 times the mass of the proton that was likely the long-sought Higgs boson. The Higgs is sometimes referred to as the "God particle," to the chagrin of many scientists, who prefer its official name.

But the two experiments, CMS and ATLAS, hadn't collected enough data to say the particle was, for sure, the Higgs boson, the last undiscovered piece of the puzzle predicted by the Standard Model, the reigning theory of particle physics.

Now, after collecting two and a half times more data inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) — where protons zip at near light-speed around the 17-mile-long (27 kilometer) underground ring beneath Switzerland and France — physicists say the particle is the Higgs. [In Photos: Searching for the Higgs Boson]

"The preliminary results with the full 2012 data set are magnificent and to me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said CMS spokesperson Joe Incandela in a statement.

Now, more recently, in 2013, astrophysicists Dan Hooper of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and Tracy Slatyer at Princeton University, have published a study suggesting that a massive outflow of charged particles from Fermi bubbles, as they are known, outflows of charged particles (gamma rays) traveling at nearly a third the speed of light from the center of the Milky Way galaxy, may be partly due to collisions between dark matter particles that result in their annihilation, and the subsequent creation of the building blocks of visible matter—charged particles that appear as two lobes or "bubbles," above and below the center of the Milky Way Galaxy.

Another possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center.

To form all of these structures, the cell has to be internally specialized, with different regions having distinct sets of proteins and chemicals. But it's hard to study the processes that make one part of the cell different from another. Most of the tools we have are rather blunt and affect the whole cell equally. But researchers have reported a clever trick that lets them activate proteins in a specific location: stick them on a tiny magnetic bead, then move the bead around inside the cell.

"We have found that this is the oldest known star with a well-determined age," said Howard Bond of Pennsylvania State University in University Park, Pa., and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md.

The star could be as old as 14.5 billion years (plus or minus 0.8 billion years), which at first glance would make it older than the universe's calculated age of about 13.8 billion years, an obvious dilemma.

But earlier estimates from observations dating back to 2000 placed the star as old as 16 billion years. And this age range presented a potential dilemma for cosmologists. "Maybe the cosmology is wrong, stellar physics is wrong, or the star's distance is wrong," Bond said. "So we set out to refine the distance."

The new Hubble age estimates reduce the range of measurement uncertainty, so that the star's age overlaps with the universe's age — as independently determined by the rate of expansion of space, an analysis of the microwave background from the big bang, and measurements of radioactive decay.

This "Methuselah star," cataloged as HD 140283, has been known about for more than a century because of its fast motion across the sky. The high rate of motion is evidence that the star is simply a visitor to our stellar neighborhood. Its orbit carries it down through the plane of our galaxy from the ancient halo of stars that encircle the Milky Way, and will eventually slingshot back to the galactic halo.

At a press conference February 17 during the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston, Samuel Ting, the MIT physicist who is the principal investigator for AMS, said his team was working on a paper analyzing a subset of the AMS data involving detections of high-energy electrons and positrons. “We waited for 15 years—actually, 18 years—to write this paper,” he said. “We have finished the paper and are now making the final checks.” He said he anticipated that the paper would be completed and submitted to a journal (as yet undecided, although Ting said later one possibility is Physical Review Letters) in two to three weeks.

While Ting didn’t disclose any of the results that will be in that paper, he did discuss what the paper would cover. It will examine the ratio of positrons to electrons as a function of energy from 0.5 to 350 billion electron volts. (The AMS can detect particles up to a trillion electron volts, but Ting said they didn’t yet have a statistically significant sample of data at the higher energies.) It will also measure changes in the ratio as a function of direction to see if its distribution is the same in all directions or has peaks in a particular direction, such as towards the center of the galaxy.

Changes in that positron/electron ratio as a function of energy, including increases or sharp drops, could provide evidence for one candidate of dark matter known as weakly interacting massive particles, or WIMPs. Dark matter comprises about 23 percent of the universe, but its influence has only been detected indirectly, such as the rotation curves of galaxies. Scientists hypothesize that if dark matter is made of WIMPS—in particular, a particle known as a supersymmetric neutralino—it will produce antimatter particles like positrons when it collides with each other, creating a signature in the data detected by AMS.

"In time we hate that which we often fear." William Shakespeare

Organizations, mostly dominated by men, are telling everyone else what they can be, how they can act, what to do with decisions about their own welfare, bodies and careers.

On Friday March 8, we should make sure that the women in our institutions enjoy a coffee or a lunch. Let them talk and exchange their thoughts, and take pictures to show the world that there are women in science, and sharing their experience on Twitter and Google+ (hashtag #WomenOfScience). They are here, not a majority, but they are an important part of scientific work and discussion.

For all the "little scientists and engineers," and the pleasant world I would like them to inherit...

Official Site: International Women's Day
Office of Science and Technology Policy: Women in STEM
US Department of Commerce: Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation
NSF: Women, Minorities and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering
Cosmic Diary: Featuring the Women of Science
STEM connector: 100 Women Leaders in STEM
WAMC: Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
STEMinist: Voices of Women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Skylar, who is also a TED2012 Senior Fellow, recently presented a new concept at TED2013: 4D printing – where materials can be reprogrammed to self-assemble into new structures. Apparently, this is just the tip of the iceberg in manufacturing with minimum energy consumption.