The other day, a friend and I were having a chat about the curious inclination people (or at least bloggers) have towards compiling lists of sexy scientists, or sexy atheists, or sexy what have you. (I’m guessing it’s related to the same impulse to rate the “hotness” of one’s professors with the handy chili pepper icon on RateMyProfessor.com.)
That these lists are often assembled by men and populated by women obviously means there’s a certain narrowness to the definition of “sexy” in play. When the list is meant to identify the sexy (female) members of a profession that is largely male dominated, the focus on traits that are not necessarily viewed as enhancing one’s professional worth — indeed, traits that can end up being used by one’s colleagues as an excuse to discount one’s professional talents — can make them much more annoying than amusing.
Still, in the course of this chat, my friend jokingly suggested, “We should put together a calendar of the sexiest scientific couples!”
“There’s only one I could nominate,” I replied.
The thermocouple!
I’m happy to entertain nominations for other scientific couples that you think might be in the same league, as far as sexiness goes.
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Image from Wikimedia Commons
Well it’s about time the couple had its moment.
(Do you see what I did there?)
Y’know, it’s very rude to win the thread in the first comment…
As a serious answer, surely Jen Ouellette and Sean Carroll are the Brangelina of sci-comms 😉
Sci would like to nominate the PCR plate and the multi-tip pipetter.
Mouse breeding pairs, of course.
Marie and Pierre Curie is the obvious choice here.
Takes off Tilley hat.
Whaps Dr. Free-Ride with hat.
Snaps hat back open and returns it to his head.
The Tusi-couple naturally!
Oh, the twisted, groovy world of nucleotide base-pairs! I used to think they were so straight – guanine and cytosine, so faithful, and adenosine keeping a bit of uracil on the RNA side of things while maintaining its steady partner thymine for DNA pairing. Then I learned about the loopy world of tRNA, and wobble pairs and I was all shaken up.
But it was nothing compared to finding out that A and T and even G and C engage in the perverted practice of Hoogsteen geometry. Using your N7 instead of your N1 to engage in bonding with a pyrimidine is just sickening and wrong.
Biotin & avadin.
I find power couplings to be pretty sexy.
My garagist tried to support same-sex cable connector couplings, and just couldn’t understand why it wasn’t working…
Marie Curie and Paul Langevin (Much sexier than Marie and Pierre).
Force Couples (but there can be too much pressure)
Albert Einstein and almost anything in skirts