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Geek Mom has a post about a great new CD for science geeks: Science Fair.

The songs of Science Fair are all performed by women and girls, including some kids’ music greats like Frances England, Elizabeth Mitchell, Lunch Money, Renee & Jeremy, and Ashley Albert of The Jimmies. The musical styles represented are as diverse as the science topics, from hip hop to rock to folk, phytoplankton to fossils to outer space. The album name drops Feynman, Heisenberg, Einstein, Bohr, Newton, Schrödinger, with a terrific ukelele-filled song dedicated to Marie Curie.

Speaking of women in science, the Elsevier Foundation, The Academy of Sciences for the Developing worls (TWAS) and the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World (OWSD) have launched an awards program for women scientists in developing countries.

Valerie Weiss has an excellent post on indiewire.com about the problems of portraying science in the media: Women, Science and Film.

1. Girls are not dumb. They have interests outside of the world of Abercrombie or Forever 21. They are actually just as discerning as you and me and can tell when they’re fed dumbed-down messages.

2. Science can actually be cool. Why else would there be news reports on the search for dark energy and why else would we care about the race to find a cure for cancer? Why else would people actually study it?

In this Word & Film interview, the fabulous Kristen Scott Thomas dishes about being an older woman in Hollywood and why she prefers to make movies in Europe these days.

“The Hollywood film industry nourishes everything else because that’s the mother hand, but it’s true: The movies I’m making in Europe are more exciting to me than the things I’ve been asked to do recently coming out of America. That doesn’t mean to say I don’t want to do them anymore, but when you have even a much smaller part, it’s so exciting. And in Europe, they’re interested in women of my age. I don’t think that here they are.” 

Have you ever thought that computer science should include more dragons and wizards? Well, you're in luck! Computational Fairy Tales is here to save the day!

Did you hear Maureen Corrigan's NPR review of Caitlin Moran's book, How To Be A Woman?

But, more importantly, like Barr used to do, Moran invests her consciousness-raising confessions with an all-too-rare working-class worldview.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is presenting a five-part piece called Women of Will, created by Tina Packer, which will explore the female roles in Shakespeare's plays.

Packer's theory is that Shakespeare's changing approach to women over the years illustrates his own ever-evolving complexity of thought and understanding. Women in his time, she points out, were necessarily shrewd observers, analysts of the power structure and their own place within it.

The Comic's Journal has a review of a new publication of Flannery O'Connor's lineoleum cut cartoons she made while in high school and college.

I think the significance of O’Connor’s cartoons lies not in their connection to her fiction but the gap between them. That they stand so puny and so far from her writing speaks to the wonder of the creative process. They attest to the mind’s capacity to access and master dangerous and potentially self-devouring material in ways that can not be foreseen, for which logic can construct no model for others to follow. 

I've seen some photos of awesome swag people are bringing home from San Diego Comic-Con, but I'm pretty that Mercedes Becerra has them all beat. She scored a ticket to space!

The SF Gate had a great piece about Dona Bailey, the woman who helped create the iconic arcade game Centipede.

"It was interesting to see how a male society functioned," she says. "It was kind of rough sometimes, too. It was a culture that I don't think they were thinking 'there is one woman, we should modify our behavior for her sake' ... I grew a thicker skin."

Meet Missy Franklin, who will soon become the first US woman to swim in seven events in one Olympic Games. She's definitely someone to watch. According to Teri McKeever, the head coach of the US Olympic women's swimming team.

"Missy is definitely the marquee female athlete on this Olympic team and probably has the highest expectations. Our job as coaches is to help her manoeuvre those and help her stay true to who she is."

Sabera Talukder, 16 years old, invented an inexpensive and portable water purification sysmter for developing countries, and became a finalist in the Google Science Fair.