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Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 19, 2023
Casualty of Genius: The Sacrifice of Mileva Marić-Einstein.
Content Note: By the end of this article, you are not going to like Albert Einstein much. If this is a problem for you, if part of your...
1,254 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 13, 2023
Sex, Cards and Calculus: A Day with Émilie du Châtelet
In popular mythology, the 1687 publication of Newton’s Principia was the culminating moment when one human told the world how the...
195 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 10, 2023
Ada Lovelace and the Curious Practice of Programming for Non-Existent Computers
What did Ada Lovelace do? She is one of the most fetishized scientists today - at conventions when I'm taking sketch commissions she...
388 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 9, 2023
Grace Hopper and the Democratization of Computer Programming
In a room across the hall from where I teach, a group of a dozen kids between the ages of nine and thirteen are learning how to program...
1,578 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Dec 6, 2023
All Creatures Small: Libbie Hyman's Invertebrates.
Science is a creature of lurches and inchings, presided over by two (mostly) mutually exclusive castes. We know the lurchers well,...
66 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 27, 2023
Cultures in Contact: Anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons and the Mechanics of Acculturation.
Culture is not a thing. It is a negotiation, an ongoing tumult of borrowings and innovations hung upon a skeleton of previously...
403 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 26, 2023
Capping the Chromosome: Elizabeth Blackburn and the Discovery of Telomerase
Telomerase is one of those enzymes which just won’t let you come to a settled opinion. When it runs wild, it promotes cancer. But it...
313 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 25, 2023
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...
344 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 23, 2023
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. ...
48 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 18, 2023
Letting the Light Through: Katharine Burr Blodgett and the Physics of Non-Reflective Coating.
Every day, we subject our eyes to a nearly ceaseless barrage of screen-mediated experiences - phones, computers, televisions, tablets,...
180 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 11, 2023
Queen of Carbon: The Materials Science Legacy of Mildred Dresselhaus
Carbon. Its astounding versatility is matched only by our total and historic complacency in the face of its wonders. “Carbon? Whatever...
134 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
Bringing Science to Psychoanalysis: The Many Survivals of Sabina Spielrein.
The life of Russian psychologist Sabina Spielrein (1885-1942) began in emotional and physical abuse, and ended with the murder of herself...
76 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
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...
462 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 7, 2023
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...
297 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 6, 2023
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...
1,017 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 4, 2023
Hedy Lamarr: The Movie Star Who Invented Bluetooth… in 1942.
A movie star. An avant-garde composer. A radio-controlled torpedo. Wi-Fi. One of the unfortunate truths about our web of modern...
428 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Nov 2, 2023
The Algebraist of Baghdad: Sutayta Al’ Mahamali’s Medieval Mathematics.
It is a thousand years ago. Europe is a stumbling, superstition-addled giant, depleting its energies on visions of holy violence and...
1,130 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 29, 2023
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...
538 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 24, 2023
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...
747 views


Dale DeBakcsy
Oct 20, 2023
Making the Gradient: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard and the Mysteries of Embryo Development
How is it that, starting from a single fertilized egg, employing only mechanical processes, you can form a kangaroo, a housefly, or a...
49 views
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