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Knowing the Enemy: Margaretta Hare Morris and the Birth of Agricultural Entomology.
In the late 18th century, when a crop failed, farmers and agricultural enthusiasts traded theories about what was to be done in the pages...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 9
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Helen Dick Megaw and the Dynamic Lives of Inorganic Molecules.
In 1941, the first patent was filed for a hot new product that stood to revolutionize the electronics field - it was a capacitor that...

Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 28, 2024
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Naval Engineer Raye Montague and the Tale of the World’s First Computer-Designed Naval Vessel.
In March 1971, a computer science whiz with an unlikely background was given six months to complete a seemingly impossible project for...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 21, 2024
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Marie-Anne Lavoisier and the Birth of Modern Chemistry.
It is early August in the year 1794, and jails, choked with the enemies of Maximilien Robespierre and his Committee for Public Safety,...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 20, 2024
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From Wartime Radar to W-Bosons: The Experimental Physics of Joan Freeman.
In 1983, one of the great pillars of modern physics was cemented in place when CERN announced the discovery of a group of particles that...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 7, 2024
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Mother of the Telephone, Grandmother of Flight: Mabel Hubbard Bell.
We have been living without the menace of Scarlet Fever for a solid century now, and in that time it has devolved from a creature of...

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 25, 2023
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Steering the Future of Women in Science: The Institutional Wizardry of Microbiologist Rita Colwell.
One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. ...

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 23, 2023
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Gone, Fission: How Lise Meitner was Written Out of the Nuclear Age
To fully appreciate Lise Meitner, you have to first forget everything you learned about the atom in high school. Forget that the nucleus...

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
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The Unstoppable Marie Curie
You want to see tough? Take a look at this picture of Marie Curie near life’s end. It’s not an image you see a lot, but there is no...

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
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A Bigger Boom: Mary Sherman Morgan, the World's First Woman Rocket Scientist.
On October 4, 1957, the United States received the greatest single blow to its prestige since the burning of the White House in 1814 with...

Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 6, 2023
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Water, Fire, and Lightning: The Life of Laura Bassi, the First Woman Professor of Science.
It's April of 1732, and the hot ticket in Bologna is not an opera, a play, or a beheading, but rather that most mundane of things: a...

Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 29, 2023
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Born Not Taught: Marian Koshland and the Source of Antibody Variation.
The human body is a truly wonderful place to live, if you can fit in it. It's warm and protected and, because humans are such clever at...

Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 24, 2023
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A Life in Service to the Birds: America’s Pioneering Woman Ornithologist, Florence Merriam Bailey
In the late eighteenth century, it would have been not at all unusual to run into a woman on the streets of New York wearing upon her...

Dale DeBakcsy
Sep 10, 2023
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Making Continents Move: The Ocean Cartography of Marie Tharp
If you're a scientist, and you've lived long enough, there's a good chance that you'll see your life's work overwritten and forgotten in...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 13, 2023
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The Totally Improbable, Completely True Life of Betsi Cadwaladr, Welsh War Nurse
On a winter’s night in 1854, two steel-willed women regarded each other with mutual dislike across a desk located on a scrap of...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 24, 2023
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Of Artificial Radiation and Natural Genius: The Chemistry of Irène Joliot-Curie
Radioactivity is a great thing. Terrible, as they say, but great. The medical applications of radioactively tagged molecules, as Rosalyn...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 16, 2023
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Margaret Floy Washburn and the Motion of Thought.
Margaret Floy Washburn (1871-1939) was the first American woman to receive a PhD in psychology (though not, as we learned from our time...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 10, 2023
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ATLAS Soared: Fabiola Gianotti and the Discovery of a Higgs Particle
In a corner of a room, tucked unostentatiously away from the notice of the raving hordes of just barely contained school children using...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 8, 2023
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Lavinia Waterhouse: Gold Rush Physician, Frontier Suffragette
Lavinia Waterhouse (1809–1890) lived at the intersection of a tangle of ideas that, to the twenty-first-century mind, have no business...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 5, 2023
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Margaret Mead and the Anthropology of Cultural Relativism.
There is hardly a name in science more encrusted with bad faith generalizations and well-meaning but ahistorical hagiography than that of...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 4, 2023
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