Happy birthday to #astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), trailblazer for women in #astronomy who discovered that hydrogen and helium are the most common elements in the universe.
Born England, she won a scholarship to Newnham College Cambridge in 1919 where she heard a lecture which changed her life. She wrote, “My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” 🧵
#OnThisDay, 9 May 1922, the International Astronomical Union formally adopts Annie Jump Cannon's stellar classification system. The principles in it still underpin modern classification.
Visited the #Curie museum (#MuseeCurie) in #Paris today. It's tiny, but really cool to see this collection on the lives of the Curie family with their three Nobel prize winners. And you can see Marie Curie's office and lab from the time when she was head of the Curie Laboratory!
Also: A quarter of her staff of ca. 40 people were women! In the 1930's! #WomenInSTEM
#OnThisDay, 20 Apr 1902, Marie and Pierre Curie refine radium chloride. The discovery leads to Marie being the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1903.
The Academy originally planned to award only Pierre and Henri Becquerel. Pierre insisted that Marie should also be included.
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Happy birthday to #biochemist Marie Maynard Daly (1921-2003), 1st Black woman to earn a PhD in #chemistry in the US! She made important research contributions to our understanding of the biochemisty of the cell nucleus & cardiovascular issues & the chemistry of histones & protein synthesis. She established that "no bases other than adenine, guanine, thymine, and cytosine were present in appreciable amounts" in DNA - #womenInSTEM#BlackInSTEM#histstm#printmaking#linocut#histmed#HeartDisease
Happy birthday to Canadian geneticist Irene Ayako Uchida (1917-2013)! She is shown surrounded by chromosones, with anomalies (pink arrows) due to radiation exposure, based on 1 of her research papers. A strand of DNA is hidden in the image (her watchband).
Uchida didn’t set out to be a scientist. She was studying English literature at UBC, before she was interned with other Canadians of Japanese heritage during WWII. 🧵1/
#OnThisDay, 8 Apr 1959, Mary K Hawes initiates a project to create the first universal programming language for computers used by businesses and government. Grace Hopper led the team that then created COBOL. Some mainframes are still using it.
New edition of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), surrounded by plants and a mineral she touted as medical treatments, her invented alphabet and model of the universe, on lovely ivory Japanese washi paper. Her writings preserve not only her own knowledge and theories but the nature of institutional medicine and folk healing of her day (which she deftly combined). 🧵1/2
"Stay curious!" Today I experimented with this prototype of a portable pocket shrine or lucky charm. The piece can be hung open on the wall or carried as a small bag, or even worn around the neck with a ribbon. Inspired by 19th century #Breverl, by art books, amulets, old meditation pictures, and cabinets of curiosities. Could there be people who buy such things? 🤔
Happy 90th birthday to the amazing Dr. Jane Goodall, born #OTD (3 Apr 1934). Here’s a display about her childhood nature club with a cool drawing, from the 2020 Becoming Jane exhbition at the National Geographic Museum:
A daring mission to revive a defunct NASA telescope? Let's talk about Spitzer Resurrector and speculate on why the Space Force (and not NASA!) is interested in this mission.