Mondays Google Doodle Celebrates Biologist Anne McLaren, Scientist Anne McLaren, whose work in the 1950s lay the groundwork for in vitro fertilization technology, celebrated her 94th birthday on Monday with a Google Doodle. She contributed to the demonstration that it was feasible to develop viable embryos outside the womb using mice as test animals.
McLaren, who was born in London on April 26, 1927, claimed that her little part in the 1936 H.G. Wells science fiction film The Shape of Things to Come served as her initial inspiration for pursuing a career in science. She continued on to the University of Oxford to study biology.
In 1958, she co-wrote “one of the most important articles in the history of reproductive biology and medicine” with colleague John Biggers, and 20 years later, IVF was successfully used on people.
She was the first woman to hold office at the Royal Society in science in 1991, and in 1994, she was chosen to lead the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Age 80 saw her pass away in 2007.
News: The Hidden History of Black Disqualification is Exposed via a Virtual Tour
Mondays Google Doodle Celebrates Biologist Anne McLaren, Stories of the Black experience that has been plowed over throughout the years are being uncovered with the aid of virtual reality.
On a chilly April morning, ominous clouds are beginning to gather over Old Lick Cemetery. Numerous Black people are buried on the modest plot of woodland property in Roanoke, Virginia, which is located just north of the city center.
A crumbling, hand-carved wooden sign serves as a silent reminder that this cemetery formerly had a larger footprint. It is surrounded by a chain-link fence and is located on a narrow plot of land sandwiched between an active main road and an interstate. In 1961, Virginia decided to build I-581, and the road was given priority. The cemetery’s inhabitants moved to this small area when most of it was dug up.
Hundreds of gravestones are dispersed carelessly. Some acted as grave markers and others piled up in an unseemly manner.
“Around 960 persons were relocated after being dug up. Sadly, they did not spend the time to properly identify those bodies “says Roanoke’s vice mayor Trish White-Boyd. Simply terrible
Were it not for a project called Hidden in Plain Site, the creation of creative agency Brown Baylor, the terrible tale of the cemetery would probably remain a footnote in the history of the city. With experiences, you may view through a browser or virtual reality headset. It seeks to revive the lost narrative of disqualified Black people in the US.
Montrose Brown, CEO, and founder of Brown Baylor claims that interstates have completely disturbed and destroyed towns. “The fact that these stories are 100% consistent across our nation is what has the biggest impact. Any historically undersold group can be aligned with it”.
News: Making a Virtual Tour for Towns
A conversation that took place just days after the murder of George Floyd is where HiPS was first conceived.
Brown was already collaborating on a virtual reality tour of their city of Richmond, Virginia, with Dean Browell, executive vice president of the research firm Feedback, and David Waltenbaugh, CEO, and founder of Root VR. The “admittedly bland” tour of the city the trio had originally planned was expanded upon by the Black Lives Matter movement.
Mondays Google Doodle Celebrates Biologist Anne McLaren, according to Browell, “the genuine dream of exactly what this could take flight”.
They begin their virtual tour of Richmond at Devil’s Half Acre and Lumpkin’s Jail, two locations where slaves were purchased and sold and executed by hanging. With the location currently being a vacant field adjacent to a parking lot near the freeway, the tour underlines how these stories have been buried.
Not just the history of slavery has been kept secret. Buildings and entire communities have been demolished in order to hide Black empowerment stories.
Every project starts with the 360-degree photography and videography of a location, which is then blended with old photographs to demonstrate how a place once looked. Illustrations and 3D representations are used when there are no pictures. For visitors to “see” what the city was like in ages past with a VR headset from wherever you are, Waltenbaugh virtual reality business has put all of these together in an interactive tour using the Unity gaming software. Which is also used for games like Cup head and Pokémon Go.
It’s also publicly accessible as a desktop tour that functions similarly to Google Street View, with narration and navigation, in order to make the experience as accessible as possible.
With VR technology, Waltenbaugh explains, “our goal is to develop experiences that leverage some of the rules that are inspired by what it delivers in its immersion, but are accessible in a wider way”. Visit www.themacforums.com for news and updates.
