Wolves, Rings, and a Certain Scientific Textbook

Today I Learned:

1) The reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone had a surprising number and variety of effects on the Yellowstone ecosystem. Most of the effect seems to have come from scaring elk and caribou and other ungulates away from overgrazed riverbanks and some forested areas, which gave those areas a chance to grow much more thickly and densely. This had a number of impacts, including attracting songbirds that like the forest; attracting bears and other animals that eat the berries off of mature plant life; attracting beavers that like to eat the full-grown trees and which themselves created ponds which attracted more kinds of wildlife; and stabilizing riverbanks and changing the flows and geography of rivers in the park.

More here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q. I’m not sure exactly how credible this video is, but if only half of it is true it’s still pretty cool.

2) Saturn’s rings have seasons! Just like Earth, Saturn has tilt, which causes some parts of the rings to be exposed to more sunlight than others at different times. Moreover, scientists are now using anomalies in the heating and cooling rates of the different bands to study the makeup of the rings.

3) Michael Faraday was apparently inspired to study science by a chemistry textbook by one Jane Marset. It’s kind of unusual to see an early 19th century chemistry textbook *written by a woman*, but it turns out that that book was wildly successful in several countries (though it failed miserably in Germany?), was printed 23 times, and imitated by most of the chemistry textbooks of the period.
Apparently there was some debate at the time of whether young women should learn chemistry. An argument was put forth that chemistry taught useful skills and knowledge for domestic work, and that knowledge of chemistry would lead to “spiritual insight”, though I’m not sure how that was supposed to work. These, at least, were the justifications given by instructors and administrators of schools for women. I’m no historian, and I certainly don’t know the historical consensus on this particular topic, but there’s some reason to believe that those teachers, and Jane Marset in particular, were really more interested in teaching the science behind chemistry for the sake of the science, and used the “domestic” and “spiritual” arguments as a cover for a (for the time) more radical move to educate women in the theory and practice of chemistry.