“Bordering on the Marvellous”: The Astronomical Menagerie of Williamina Paton Fleming
When William Huggins became the first human to examine the spectrum of a star in 1864, he could little have imagined the magnitude of the project he had brough...
Dale DeBakcsy
The Plant Matriarch Of The Pacific Slope: Sara Plummer Lemmon
For thirty years, from the sweltering deserts of Arizona to the mountainous forests of Northern California, there traipsed a duo of botanists, broken in health...
Achtung, Brainy: Grace Lindsay And The Mathematical Modeling Of The Human Brain
You are placed in front of a screen that is black save for one spot of red in the center, and are told to focus strictly and solely upon that red dot. Yo...
How Fossils Get That Way: Paleontologist Anna “Kay” Behrensmeyer’s Years Amidst Rock And Bone
When it comes to bones, immortality is far from a sure thing. We generally think that the road from bone to fossil is a straight-forward and all but assu...
Between The Children And Catastrophe, A Woman: Dr. Frances O. Kelsey’s Victory Over Thalidomide
In September of 1960, the American pharmaceutical company Richardson-Merrell submitted their application to the FDA for the approval of Europe’s new wonder dru...
Hilda Geiringer And The Curious Behavior Of Stressed Metals
Beholding a bar of metal, it seems an object almost primal in its simplicity. Solid, reliable, the stuff of which cities are made. Gander beneath t...
The Concerns Of The Earth, And Above: Mae Jemison’s Life In Medicine And Space Travel
There is a bit of political wisdom we have lived with for half a century now, which says that spending money on space travel, while social problems still exist...
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 Times and Worst of Times ...
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 1,400 hearty souls it was...
Dale DeBakcsy
Dale DeBakcsy is the writer and artist of the Women In Science and Cartoon History of Humanism columns, and has, since 2007, co-written the webcomic Frederick the Great: A Most Lamentable Comedy with Geoffrey Schaeffer. He is also a regular contributor to The Freethinker, Philosophy Now, Free Inquiry, and Skeptical Inquirer. He studied intellectual history at Stanford and UC Berkeley before becoming a teacher of mathematics and drawer of historical frippery.