Dale DeBakcsy
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...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 30, 2023
Parity Can Be Deceiving: The Experimental Physics of Chien-Shiung Wu
How does a neutrino sign its paycheck? Sometimes it’s the absurd questions that break physics from its well-worn grooves and force it to...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 29, 2023
Self-Remembrance: Mary Whiton Calkins’s Adventures Among the Atomists.
By 1910, the woman whose brilliance had forced the doors of Harvard University open to women (if only in an unofficial capacity) and who...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Signs: Ursula Bellugi and the Neuroscience of Language.
Sign Language is a grammarless series of bluntly defined iconic hand gestures. Until William Stokoe (1919-2000) published his...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Dealing: Dr. Iris Mauss and the Science of Emotion Regulation.
"Well Dale, we, the universe, hate to break it to you, but your desk is on fire, your copy of Thor 337 was lost in the mail, you've been...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Making Working Memory Work: The Multidisciplinary Neuroscience of Patricia Goldman-Rakic
You’re a monkey, and somebody in a white lab coat has shown you a location where a delicious, ever-so-nummy, bit of banana has been...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
A Doctor at Sky’s Edge: Susan Anderson and the Practice of Medicine on America’s Last Frontier
Seventy miles west of Denver, in a small town nestled 8,574 feet above sea level there rests the town of Fraser. Today an enclave of...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
A Healer at the Fringe of Civilization: The Siberian Odyssey of Doctor Anna Bek
It is the early 1870s and we are heading into the mining town of Gornyi Zerentui, located in the mountainous Transbaikal region on the...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Trota of Salerno and the Problem of Medieval Women’s Medicine
Imagine it is the twelfth century, and you have woken up experiencing some trouble breathing. Fortunately, you have the financial...
98 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Ivory and Bone: Agatha Christie’s Three Decades of Archaeology.
In a tent in Iraq, an Englishwoman attempts to sleep as mice crawl over her body and cockroaches look on from the walls. She is...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
It Takes a Forest to Grow a Tree: The Revolutionary Forest Ecology of Suzanne Simard.
Four short decades ago, the prevailing wisdom among forestry officials was the “Free To Grow” model by which, when a forest was clear cut...
26 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
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,...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
The Life Stories of Birds: How Margaret Morse Nice Ended Ornithology’s Long List Era.
When you headed out into the field as a 19th century ornithologist, you had one of two things in mind as to what constituted your...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Our Endogenous Retroviruses, Ourselves: The Life and Legacy of Anna Marie Skalka
In 1970, everybody knew, or believed they did, how the flow of genetic information in a cell works. The Central Dogma of genetics...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Jeanne Baret: The Two Stories of the World’s First Woman to Circumnavigate the Globe.
Told one way, the story of Jeanne Baret is an essentially inspiring tale: a woman born a peasant, raised with the expectation of seeing...
254 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Florence Bascom: The Many Facets of Geology’s “Stone Lady”
There is a special poetry in rocks available to a select few and utterly incomprehensible to absolutely everybody else. While...
216 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
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...
55 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
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...
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Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Janaki Ammal And the Fight for India’s Botanical Future.
Caste. Race. Gender. These were the three categories that, in early twentieth century Madras, combined to determine the boundaries of...
598 views
Dale DeBakcsy
Apr 27, 2023
Return to Nature: Stella Brewer and the Science Of Chimpanzee Rehabilitation.
Our interactions with our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the chimpanzees, have rarely been entirely honorable. We dress them up...
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