AP - On a once-lush landscape made wasteland overnight by the Tungurahua volcano, five members of the Meneses family raised picks and hoes in unison to strike at ash-encrusted earth.

Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male.

Midplane sedimentation of large solid bodies in turbulent protoplanetary discs, arXiv.org