In March of 1944, a physicist and radar specialist named Ruby Payne-Scott aimed her equipment at the sky and became the world's first woman radio astronomer.
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Evolution is great. As an explanatory idea, as a process governing biology, from just about any aspect you care to consider it, evolution is a magnificent thin...
Last week my stepfather, a retired electrical engineer, passed away at the age of 89, and in the boxes and boxes of papers he had kept as the signifiers of his ...
In the 1750s, when France was foundering scientifically in the Cartesian shallows, it took Emilie du Châtelet’s French translation of Newton’s Principia to rein...
It is a story in three acts, ending with many bangs and much whimpering.
Act I: In the early 20th century, a small cadre of physicists laid the groundwork f...
April 18, 1906, and Alice Eastwood's lunch bag hangs casually from a mastodon's tusk while outside, a proud city burns. It is the morning of the great San Fran...
The long life of Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to earn a Medical Degree in America, can be divided into two roughly equal parts: four decades...
Humans have a profound genius for generating terrible ideas. Slavery. Theocratic government. But there is one particular idea we hung onto for an unfathomabl...
It might be difficult to believe if you were born within the last three decades, but there was once a time when America was led by a doddering former B-List cel...
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.