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Emma Darwin and the Invisible Heroism of the Scientific Caretaker.
The road leading to the creation and publication of The Origin of the Species was one of the most tortuous and personally costly in the...

Dale DeBakcsy
May 2, 2024
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She Sang the Arc Electric: Hertha Marks Ayrton
Sometimes, simplicity dooms. In World War I, chlorine gas hailed down upon the British soldiers trudging through their semi-lives in the...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 28, 2024
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The Last Woman Who Knew Everything: The Omnivorous Mind of Clémence Royer.
When Clémence Royer died on February 7, 1902, she took with her into oblivion perhaps the last human brain that believed in and aimed for...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 21, 2024
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Broken Hearts and Nuclear Secrets: Marie Maynard Daly, America's First Black Woman Chemist.
The years of the Second World War gifted to American feminism one of its most enduring icons in the form of Rosie the Riveter. She was...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 16, 2024
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Primal Screams: Sophie Germain’s Mathematical Labours
It is a well-known fact of humanity that the chances of a group of people electing to do something decent and necessary is inversely...

Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 6, 2024
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Jeanne Altmann, Baboon Moms, and the Justice League of Primatology.
It is a long standing saying* that the pantheon of primatology is essentially the Justice League of America, with Jane Goodall as...

Dale DeBakcsy
Mar 18, 2024
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The Strangers Within: Lynn Margulis and the Rebirth of Endosymbiosis
In terms of cell count, ninety percent of you isn't you at all. Bacteria, though by mass they only make up about two percent of a human...

Dale DeBakcsy
Mar 5, 2024
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Raising Nature Girls: How 18th Century Botanist Catharina Helena Dörrien Created Girls' Science Education.
Pondering the Enlightenment, one's thoughts tend to turn Frenchwards. The verbal barbs of Voltaire, the neuroses of Rousseau, the...

Dale DeBakcsy
Mar 1, 2024
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Lead, TNT, and Rayon: Alice Hamilton's Battle Against Industrial Poisons.
The lack of regulation in American industry during the early Twentieth Century is the stuff of horrific legend - from the grotesqueries...

Dale DeBakcsy
Feb 27, 2024
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Taking the Wheel: Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the CRISPR-Cas9 Revolution in Gene Editing.
Over the course of the last two decades, humanity has taken its first quiet steps from being the blind victims of genetic-molecular...

Dale DeBakcsy
Feb 19, 2024
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Brains In Love and Brains Alone: The Social Neuroscience of Stephanie Cacioppo
One would think that there is no aspect of the brain’s multitudinous biochemical majesty that lies outside of the interest of...

Dale DeBakcsy
Feb 14, 2024
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The Professor and the Frogs: The Ecology and Herpetology of Margaret Stewart.
Amphibians today are experiencing a population crisis of unprecedented scale. Frogs are going extinct, according to the most...

Dale DeBakcsy
Feb 6, 2024
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From the Underground Railroad to Santo Domingo: The Doctor’s Journey of Sarah Loguen Fraser
In 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States; within half a century 7,000 American...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 29, 2024
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From Quaker Crystallographer to World War Pacifist: The Journey of Kathleen Lonsdale
The list of Quaker women who made fundamental contributions to the science of crystallography while in prison is a short one. In fact,...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 28, 2024
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Death and Time: The Pioneering Biostratigraphy of Julia Anna Gardner.
On a lonely stretch of Florida swamp road, in the year 1920, a model T Ford with no headlights and two hastily replaced tires is trying...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 26, 2024
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Anne Innis Dagg, Giraffe, and the Winding Road of the Citizen Scientist.
Before Jane and Dian, Biruté and Jeanne, there was Anne. In 1957 Anne Innis (b. 1933) became the first woman to attempt a solo animal...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 25, 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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The Tragedy of Dian Fossey
There are people to whom it is given to wait alone on humanity's dark edge and stand against all the worst of our collective impulses:Â ...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 16, 2024
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Sofia Kovalevskaya: Love Makes all the Partial Difference
Everybody needs love, but for some the striving after it so dominates their every action and decision that it becomes impossible to ever...

Dale DeBakcsy
Jan 15, 2024
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