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Newest Portraits


Outwitting the Predators: Elizabeth Bernays and the Hectic Lives of Plant-Eating Insects.
Being a bug is a chancy thing. From the moment your egg is laid, you are the target of a vast array of predators hungry for your gushy, nutritive innards. Chances are, you will never make it out of your egg, as hosts of other insects either eat you directly or scoop you out to make room for their own babies to grow in the resources prepared by your mother. Out of a hundred eggs laid, it is a good day if a few dozen occupants make their way out, hopelessly, ludicrously exposed

Dale DeBakcsy
3 hours ago9 min read
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Of Her Time: Bethenia Owens-Adair, Pioneer Doctor & Devoted Eugenicist.
The American West in the mid 19th century made profound demands on all those fated to experience it. The cost for even momentary lapses of vigilance was often death, and the people raised under the intense pressures and expectations of this time and place were a hard lot - self-sufficient almost to a fault, capable of feats of endurance and application that beggar belief today. Competence and self-reliance on that scale, however, usually comes at a steep cost. Having done so

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 148 min read
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Core Principles: The Life and Work of Seismologist Inge Lehmann.
At 10:17 in the morning on June 17, 1929, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake shook New Zealand’s Murchison region, causing landslides that claimed seventeen lives, and sending seismic P-waves throughout the Earth’s interior, to be picked up by seismology stations scattered across the globe, including to a handful of outposts that, according to everything everybody knew about the inner structure of the Earth, should not have been able to detect the quake. For some, these results were

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 68 min read
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Maintaining Focus: The Life and Career of Hamida Saiduzzafar, India’s First Woman Ophthalmologist
In 1947, the partition of India carved out a theoretically Muslim-majority territory out of the Indian state, sparking a bloody era of desperate migration as members of religious minorities in the new Indian and Pakistani nations left ancestral homes and sought safety within the boundaries of their co-religionists. That same year, a Muslim woman from northern India whose parents had recently passed away boarded a boat, seeking medical training in England, entirely unsure as t

Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 195 min read
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The Miners’ Doctor: The Many Battles of Mary Babcock Atwater
When Dr. Mary Babcock first arrived in Montana in 1891 to take up her unprecedented position as company doctor to the gold miners there,...

Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 127 min read
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