Mercury, final prompt for #printerSolstice2425, made me think of #alchemy. It is an element the alchemists favoured & felt was fundamental in their efforts to transmute base into precious metals, both in western & Chinese alchemy (from whence western alchemy emerged).

This is my #linocut portrait of an #alchemist known as Master Geng (before ~975, 耿先生; Gěng Xiānshēng, sometimes Kêng Hsien-shêng). 1/n

For the #printerSolstice2425 prompt silicon my #linocut of brilliant trailblazing US #geologist & prof Florence Bascom (1862-1945) who championed women’s education, & used polarizing microscopes for detailed petrographic analysis to show that rocks previously identified as sedimentary were in fact metamorphosed volcanic rocks she called aporhyolite (implying a change in rhyolite, a silica rich igneous rock, as in her 1/n

Since silicon is a common element in the crust, for the #printersolstice2425 prompt silicon I’m making a portrait of trailblazing geologist Florence Bascom (1862-1945), complete with geological cross sections and thin sections from her publications.
1/2

The last of my older prints which would fit #printerSolstice2425 prompt silicon: four radiolarians of the of the spyroidea family on handmade Japanese paper. Radiolarians (or radiolaria) are a type of tiny creature -amoeboid protozoa - which produce silica mineral skeletons. They occur as zooplankton throughout the oceans and their tiny skeletal remains can be used as diagnostic fossils to date submarine sediments.

The next prompt from #printerSolstice2425 is silicon and as a geophysicist I am always going to think of SiO2, quartz, one of my favourites and the first mineral I printed in this older #linocut. Quartz was the first mineral I learned to identify as a child. Rhapsodizing about the averageness of its physical properties might sound like a strange yet boring thing to celebrate but physicists love using the power of approximation. 1/n

For the #printerSolstice2425 prompt sodium, my #linocut of Marie Meudrac (c. 1610-1680), a woman in science right at the transition between alchemy & chemistry. Born to a land-owning family, she moved to the Château de Grosbois after marrying, where she became good friends with Countess de Guiche. She wrote ‘La Chymie Charitable et Facile, en Faveur des Dames’ [Easy Charitable Chemistry for Ladies]. She had her own lab where she tested all

The next prompt for #printerSolstice2425 is sodium, which had me thinking of salt. To the alchemists (following Paracelsus) matter was made of various concentrations of three elements: salt, mercury and sulphur. So, for my next print I am working on a portrait of an alchemist who worked right at the transition from alchemy to chemistry (and pharmacy). 1/2

Here’s an older print which would also have been a match for the #printerSolstice2425 prompt copper: my lino block print of the beautiful green mineral malachite. Malachite is a copper carbonate hydroxide mineral, with the formula Cu2CO3(OH)2. This mineral has been mined for thousands of years. It has been used as a source of copper and as a mineral pigment since antiquity.1/2

For the @printersolstice #printerSolstice2425 prompt copper, I made a #linocut horseshoe crab (Tachypeus gigas) in grey, blue-bronze and dark brown on 8" x 8" cream-coloured Japanese paper with bark inclusions. They get their name from their horseshoe like shape but they are not crabs; they are chelicerates, more closely related to arachnids and they are "living fossils" which have changed very little since

For #printersolstice2425 prompt neon I made a lino block print of four Nixie tubes spelling the word “Neon” on lovely Japanese mulberry paper, 8” x 8”.

Nixie tubes , also known as or cold cathode display, are electronic devices used for displaying letters or numerals or other information using glow discharge. Introduced in 1955, they are prized today for their vintage aesthetics. Inside a glass tube, 1/2

The #printerSolstice2425 prompt this week is iron, so after talking last week about how certain numbers of nucleons are "magic" as you grow increasingly large nuclei, now we're talking about how you do that: how you grow nuclei from a single proton to the largest naturally-occurring transuranic elements. British-born, American #astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) is 1 of the people instrumental in building our understanding
#linocut #printmaking #sciart #histsci #womenInSTEM #MastoArt

Making my #linocut portraits of #astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) for #PrinterSolstice2425 prompt: iron! It’s about how most of you and I are stardust, made of elements built in stars through stellar nucleosynthesis. Supergiant stars build elements up to iron through nuclear fusion. In a famous paper known as B2FH, first-authored by Margaret Burbidge, they reviewed everything known about stellar 1/2

Working on my next #linocut for #printersolstice2425 - last week we talked about how some numbers of nucleons (neutrons and protons) are “magic” so sometimes if you add another the binding energy is lower than the last, so the resulting nuclei are more common and stable. This week is about how you do that…. How you add nucleons to nuclei and grow heavier elements.

Anyone recognize this #astrophysicist ?

For the #PrinterSolstice2425 prompt lead, the woman who figured out why lead is particularly stable & 2nd woman to win the Nobel Prize for #physics: German-American theoretical #physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972). As the series of increasingly large atomic nuclei grows with additional nucleons (protons p & neutrons n) from hydrogen to transuranic elements, there are points where the binding energy of the next nucleon is a lot lower

I chose chemists (and one palaeontologist) for the first several elements of #printersolstice2425 but the next two will be about nuclear physics! Working on a #linocut portrait for the prompt lead. Maria Goeppert Mayer (1906-1972) #physicist and Nobel laureate who explained why certain nuclei are more stable with her nuclear shell model. 1/2

Animals need cobalt for our metabolism; we get it as vitamin B12. So, for #printerSolstice2425 prompt cobalt I made a #linocut of English chemist & x-ray crystallographer Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin (née Crowfoot, 1910-1994), who won the Nobel Prize in #chemistry for her models of biomolecules like vitamin B12, penicillin & insulin, which were essential to structural biology. My portrait includes her own data of electron densities & model for Vitamin