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The Chemistry of Beauty: Hazel Bishop Betrayed.
Remember back when I said that botanists were the most under-respected members of the scientific community? Well, that's true until you...
Dale DeBakcsy
Aug 17, 2023
111 views


More than a Prize Unwon: The Manifold Legacies of Rosalind Franklin
When Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-seven, she left behind monumental contributions to three...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 26, 2023
322 views


A Scientist Takes the Helm: The Story of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
In 1989, Angela Merkel was a quantum chemist with a respectable reputation for applying statistical mathematics to chemical analysis. In...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 17, 2023
60 views


Where Sex Begins: The Chromosomal Investigations of Nettie Stevens.
If you were to ask an ancient Greek how it is determined that a baby is born a boy or a girl, they would have had some interesting and...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jul 8, 2023
258 views


Casualty of Marriage: The Tragedy of Clara Immerwahr, Germany's first Woman Doctor of Chemistry
The lady researcher Is always fumbling about, searching and probing around her, For problems to fathom; She studies and parlays and...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 21, 2023
46 views


Gerty Radnitz Cori: Glycogen to Glucose, and Back Again
For a science teacher, perhaps the most dreaded question is "What Is Energy?" Sure, we have a standard answer - "The ability to do work"...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 7, 2023
249 views


Corralling the Light Elements: The Nuclear Spectroscopy of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
In the opening days of the Nazi attack on France, a Jewish engineer took his family aside and instructed them on how to commit suicide by...
Dale DeBakcsy
Jun 1, 2023
704 views


Quantizing the Nucleus: Maria Goeppert-Mayer and the Creation of Nuclear Shell Theory
How does radioactive decay know when to stop? When Uranium-238 breaks up, it goes through twenty-two intermediate isotopes before...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 23, 2023
266 views


Lady of Iron: The Life of Victorian Industrialist Lady Charlotte Guest.
There was a time, during the Golden Age of Railroads, when the name of the small Welsh town of Dowlais was stamped on iron rails that ran...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 19, 2023
18 views


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
220 views


Clean Water, Breathable Air, and the Science of Food: The Remarkable Legacy of Ellen Swallow
Every morning we wake up to a feast of assumptions. We assume that the place our sewage gets dumped is not the same place our drinking...
Dale DeBakcsy
May 1, 2023
1,629 views


Sarah Stewart Johnson, Mars, and the Search for Life as We Don’t Know It.
The Red Planet has not always been kind to those who have given their lives to its study. Before the rise of rover-based observation,...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
3 views


Spectral Lines from a Dying Nation: The Molecular Spectrometry of Hertha Sponer.
It is hard to imagine a time and place outside of Charles Dickens’s Revolutionary France that more embodies the spirit of the Best of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
64 views


Queen of Scythes: The Protoindustrial Revolution of Louisa Catharina Harkort.
In the late 1750s and early 1760s, the Seven Years’ War, an intercontinental struggle that would largely determine the power structure of...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
1 view


Global Warming and Nuclear Fallout: The Foundational Geochemistry of Saruhashi Katsuko.
On July 16, 1945, the United States detonated the world’s first atomic bomb in the deserts of Alamogordo, New Mexico. At the time, it...
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
217 views
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