Major, Jack, Willie and Warren

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In the year 1899 an American cyclist won the world championship in the 1-mile track event. In those days, track cycling was what really mattered and cycling was a reasonably big deal. So this was an event in sport. An even bigger deal was the fact that Marshall “Major” Taylor (Wikipedia) was black. This fact was, likewise, important:

The League of American Wheelmen, then the governing body for the sport, banned blacks from amateur racing in 1894, just as bicycling’s popularity surged.

More Thank-You Cards from Donors Choose

As I cannot restate enough, some of our Readers were very generous during October’s DrugMonkey Blog Reader Challenge as a part of the other ScienceBlogs’ participation in the DonorsChoose.org Bloggers Challenge. One of cool parts of DonorsChoose is that the teachers and children who have benefited from donor funded projects send Thank You notes.
I have just received another batch which I thought I would share with you.
Before you check those out, I thought I would mention another opportunity for you to support young scientists. In this case, Isis the Scientist of On Becoming an Domestic and Laboratory Goddess blog has partnered with the American Physiological Society to fund an award for an undergraduate woman who has submitted a superlative research abstract for their Annual Meeting.
Go visit Isis for all the details, all she’s asking for is your eyeball, viewing her blog pages for the next few weeks. (If you are feeling a tad more generous feel free to click the PayPal link on her sidebar and send a couple of bucks her way. It’s for the junior scientists!) [Update: I just noticed that the APS has opened up a special line on their donation page for the David J. Bruce/ISIS Award fund. In case you want to directly donate in that way.]