A recent NPR piece on the series Joe’s Big Idea interviewed Caltech astrophysicist Shrinivas Kulkarni.

During the interview Dr. Kulkarni made the following statement:

“Many scientists are I think, secretly, are what I call ‘boys with toys.”

Needless to say this has had some impact on the blogosphere and the Twitterverse has gone nuts.

Read all about it in an excellent piece by Kate Clancy a woman scientist who plays with toys of her own over at Slate. 

Or look at all these photos of women scientist playing with their toys:

Elizabeth Goldschmidt with her blue laser for studying Rydberg atoms

Karen James flanked by sequencing machines, explaining Sanger sequencing to citizen scientists

Katie Mack helping to build a new dark matter detector

Tanya Harrison playing with the Mars rovers