Women in Science

Natural Cycles App

Apps Can Help You Get Pregnant. But Should You Use Them as a Contraceptive?

An increasing number of women are relying on apps to track their menstrual cycles. Now, there's even an app approved as birth control.

Bishop's long-lasting lipstick was advertised as "kissable."

Chemist Hazel Bishop's Lipstick Wars

Bishop said her advantage in coming up with cosmetics was that, unlike male chemists, she actually used them

Anna Morandi Manzolini (1714-1774), Italian anatomist and sculptor, from a drawing by Cesare Bettini.

The Lady Anatomist Who Brought Dead Bodies to Light

Anna Morandi was the brains and the skilled hand of an unusual husband-wife partnership

Illustration made using an 1851 portrait of Mitchell by H. Dassell and a false-color image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A by NASA.

When Girls Studied Planets and the Skies Had No Limits

Maria Mitchell, America's first female astronomer, flourished at a time when both sexes “swept the sky”

Maryam Mirzakhani

Remembering the Brilliant Maryam Mirzakhani, the Only Woman to Win a Fields Medal

The Stanford professor investigated the mathematics of curved surfaces, writing many groundbreaking papers

Lash Lure: pretty packaging, but bad news for makeup wearers.

Three Horrifying Pre-FDA Cosmetics

From mercury-loaded face cream to mascara that left you blind

Jerrie Cobb stands before a Project Mercury space capsule in heels and gloves. What you can't see: inside the capsule, a male mannequin lies in the place where an astronaut eventually would. The FLATs were never seriously considered for astronaut positions.

Meet the Rogue Women Astronauts of the 1960s Who Never Flew

But they passed the same tests the male astronauts did—and, yes, in high heels

Each time you use your phone's weather app, you're indebted to a self-taught computer scientist named Klara von Neumann.

The Unheralded Contributions of Klara Dan von Neumann

Despite having no formal mathematical training, she was a key figure in creating the computer that would later launch modern weather prediction

Thank Andrey Markov for your smartphone's predictive text feature—and also somewhat sillier uses.

Three Very Modern Uses For A Nineteenth-Century Text Generator

Andrey Markov was trying to understand poems with math when he created a whole new field of probability studies

Marie Curie and President Warren Harding walk down the White House steps arm in arm in 1921.

When Women Crowdfunded Radium For Marie Curie

The element was hard to get and extremely expensive but essential for Curie's cancer research

The 3D printed ovaries

Mice With 3D-Printed Ovaries Successfully Give Birth

The gelatin-scaffold ovary could one day help restore endocrine function in young cancer patients and treat infertility

A posthumous engraving of Maria Agnesi from 1836.

The Witch of Agnesi

A mistranslation led to the unusual name of this mathematical concept

Frances Oldham Kelsey, a pharmacologist with the Food & Drug Administration, helped prevent a generation of children born with congenital deformities in the United States.

The Woman Who Stood Between America and a Generation of 'Thalidomide Babies'

How the United States escaped a national tragedy in the 1960s

Peggy Whitson's latest record is one of many she's held during her inspiring career.

Astronaut Peggy Whitson Breaks NASA Record for Most Days in Space

She has spent 534 cumulative days (and counting) in orbit

This dress is made with the power of cow manure.

Fashion Made From Cow Poo Wins Innovation Award

Mestic looks to manure to produce bioplastic, paper and fashion-forward textiles

Naomi Weisstein was a feminist activist, a neuropsychologist and, for a brief time, a rock 'n roll musician.

This Feminist Psychologist-Turned-Rock-Star Led a Full Life of Resistance

Naomi Weisstein fought against the idea of women as objects in both the fields of psychology and rock 'n roll

Emmy Noether, mathematical genius

Mathematician Emmy Noether Should Be Your Hero

She revolutionized mathematics, and then was forgotten because she was a woman

Ada Lovelace, “The world’s first computer programmer.” In the mid 1800s, she predicted that machines would compose music and forward scientific progress, based on her experiences programming Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” to calculate Bernoulli numbers.

These Bold Illustrations Celebrate the Incredible Contributions of Women in Science

A designer's touch brings the achievements and faces of female pioneers to a wider audience

Marianne North's Obsession with the Carnivorous Pitcher Plant

Painter Marianne North's obsession with local Borneo vegetation led her to one of the most unusual and rare plants in the world

Cunitz was among the few who saw the truth in Johannes Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, which stated that planets moved in elliptical orbits around the sun. Here, a concept drawing of the Earth and moon in orbit around the sun.

The 17th-Century Lady Astronomer Who Took Measure of the Stars

Astronomer Maria Cunitz might not be such an anomaly, were other women given the same educational opportunities

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