The Women In Science Archive

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Junie & TheHutFriends, a WeirdCore music outfit bringing some of the free wheeling vocal and electronic experimentation of the early 1980s to the social media age.

#WomenInMusic #MusicSky #BookSky 📖🎹

Chemist and physicist Ida Noddack was born 130 years ago today. In 1925 she and her husband co-discovered Rhenium, and her 1934 paper criticizing some results of Fermi anticipated the theory of nuclear fission.

#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky #PhysicsSky #HistSci 🧪⚛️

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features MC Lyte (b. 1970), whose 1988 album Lyte As Rock furthered the start made by Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 Hot, Cool and Vicious and brought a compelling new voice and set of experiences to the 80s rap scene.

#WomenInMusic #MusicSky #BookSky 🎹

Brazilian mathematician Marília Chaves Peixoto was born 106 years ago today. She was the first Brazilian woman to earn a PhD in math, the 1st to be inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and was, during her short life, an important researcher on structural stability.

#WomenInSTEM #MathSky

Today's Women in Music Spotlight features the iconic Janis Joplin (1943-1970), whose vocal style and stage presentation struck with the force of revelation at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and has served as a wellspring for country and rock performers ever since.

#WomenInMusic #BookSky #Music

Knowing When to Flower: The Classical Botany of Agnes Arber 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 thing. So magnificent, however, that it’s h...

Botanist Agnes Arber was born 147 years ago today. Her insights into the development of differentiated plant structures were a breath of fresh air in the early 20th century, and her 1950 book The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form, is still a great read.

tinyurl.com/4rnwcrwe

#WomenInSTEM #PlantSky 🌱

1st woman botanist elected as Fellow of the Royal Society: #BOTD 1879 Agnes Arber FRS, plant morphologist and anatomist, historian of botany and philosopher of biology. @wisarchive.bsky.social @admirablewomen.bsky.social @carvehername.bsky.social @feministory.bsky.social @carolemason.bsky.social

YouTube video by Sophie Michaux L'Astratto - Barbara Strozzi - Sophie Michaux, Benjamin Katz, Paul Morton

Here is a fun performance of Strozzi's incredibly meta, fourth wall breaking, song L'Astratto, which is a song about songs that keeps stopping itself mid-stream as the composer/singer changers her mind and pursues new ideas. And hey, check out that dope theorbo!!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fW6...

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), the prolific 17th century composer who took a very modern narrative approach to the song form, releasing eight collections of madrigals, cantatas, and arias in the 1620s through 1640s.

#WomenComposers #MusicSky #BookSky 🎹

Plant physiologist Marguerite Henrici was born 134 years ago today. She published some 80 papers during the 1920s through 1940s about the chemical and nutritional properties of South African grasses, establishing important base data for the regional food chains there.

#WomenInSTEM #PlantSky 🧪🌱

Today's Women In Music Spotlight falls on Deadly Nightshade, the seminal Women's Music group that signed with RCA Records, releasing two important records in the 1970s that reflected the feminist issues of the era.

#WomenInMusic #BookSky #MusicSky 🎹🧪

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 groundbreaking Sign Language Structure in 1960, this was overwhelmingly th...

Psychologist Ursula Bellugi would have been 95 years old today. Her insights into the complexities of American Sign Language were revolutionary in their time, as was her work to understand Williams Syndrome during her later career.

tinyurl.com/2x7345my

#WomenInSTEM #PsychSky #NeuroSky 🧠🧪

Today's Women in Music Spotlight falls on the song "He's a Rebel", a classic of the Girl Group era of the early 1960s, when women musicians were given so little control that producers sometimes subbed them out of their own songs. This song by The Crystals was actually sung by The Blossoms.

#BookSky

Wishing a happy 67th birthday to Kenyan agricultural scientist Mary Abukutsa-Onyango! Her research of the last four decades has centered on indigenous African vegetables and how they can be used to combat malnutrition in regions where meat is no longer affordable.

#WomenInSTEM #PlantSky #AgroSky 🧪

Today's Women in Music Spotlight falls on Toshiko Akiyoshi (b. 1929), the jazz composer, musician, and living legend who for six decades stretching from 1954 to 2019, released a series of records bringing exciting new soundscapes to the world of jazz.

#WomenInMusic #Jazz #BookSky 🎹

Taking the Wheel: Jennifer Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier, and the CRISPR-Cas9 Revolution in Gene Editing. Over the course of the last two decades, humanity has taken its first quiet steps from being the blind victims of genetic-molecular chance towards becoming purposeful actors in our biological fates.  ...

Wishing a happy 62nd birthday to CRISPR-Cas9 co-originator and 2020 Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, whose simple but effective gene editing technology harnesses ancient bacterial defense systems to make micro-targeted changes to genetic structures.

tinyurl.com/2wr28ny8

#WomenInSTEM #BioSky 🧬🧪

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features American drummer Viola Smith (1912-2020), known in her time as "the female Gene Krupa", whose distinctive 13 drum, 2 tom rig gave an iconic punch to the band she performed in during the heyday of the Girl Bands and beyond.

#WomenInMusic #MusicSky #BookSky

Astronomer Alice Grace Cook was born 149 years ago today. She was one of the first women admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, and in World War I, she headed, with Fiammetta Wilson, the Meteor Section of the British Astronomical Association.

#AstroSky #HistSci #WomenInSTEM #BookSky 🔭

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Dorothy Fields, Tin Pan Alley composer of some 400 songs and 15 musicals, whose songs "The Way You Look Tonight", "On the Sunny Side of the Street", and "I'm in the Mood for Love" are now immortal members of the American Songbook.

#MusicSky #BookSky

Nursing on the Fringe: Mary Breckinridge and the Founding of the Frontier Nursing Service America in the 1920s. The Jazz Age - flappers and motorcars, talkies and speak-easies - it is difficult to reflect on this time without conjuring visions of individuals in evening wear Charlestoning t...

Mary Breckinridge, the founder of the Frontier Nursing Service, a grand experiment started in the 1920s to bring organized nursing resources to rural areas that would otherwise have had no medical access at all, was born on this day 145 years ago!

tinyurl.com/3avbm583

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky #Nursing

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Esther "Jinx" Dawson (b. 1950), lead vocalist for the proto-metal band Coven, whose 1969 album Witchcraft Destroys Minds & Reaps Souls originated much of what we associate with the metal scene today.

#WomenInMusic #HeavyMetal #BookSky 🧪🎹

Botanist Marie Clark Taylor was born 115 years ago today. After serving as an army nurse during World War 2, she was the head of the botany department at Howard University for three decades, pursuing photomorphogenic research.

#WomenInSTEM #PlantSky #Botany #BioSky 🧪🌱

My author copies of A History of Women in Music have arrived! This was a tremendously fun and fulfilling book to write, and I worked hard to give readers new avenues of listening from the world over to investigate - hope you find your next great listen here!

#BookSky #MusicSky 🎹📖

Wishing a happy 76th birthday to Brazilian physician Eliete Bouskela, whose research unveiled new ways of studying microcirculation to get at the bottom of what is happening when those systems go awry. We hope you have a good one, Dr. Bouskela!

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky #BioSky 🧪⚕️

Today's Women in Music Spotlight features Mary Lou Williams (1910-1981), the phenomenally talented jazz musician whose career as a performer, composer, and arranger spanned six decades. She was simply one of the most respected musicians of the 20th century.

#BookSky #MusicSky 🎹📖

Wishing a happy 90th birthday to French nuclear physicist Monique Sené, the first president of the Scientists for Nuclear Energy Information Association who has worked for decades for a more transparent and participatory discussion of nuclear energy in France.

#WomenInSTEM #Physics 🧪

Today's Women in Music Spotlight falls upon my secret favorite woman composer of the 19th century, Emilie Mayer (1812-1883), the pharmacist's daughter who rose to become a composer of some of the century's most delightful and evergreen symphonies.

#MusicSky #BookSky 🎹📖

Book out now in the UK!

Corralling the Light Elements: The Nuclear Spectroscopy of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove In the opening days of the Nazi attack on France, a Jewish engineer took his family aside and instructed them on how to commit suicide by slitting their wrists, explaining that death by one’s own hand...

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of Fay Ajzenberg-Selove's birth! For four decades she was responsible for the collection and publication of the planet's most accurate and up-to-date data on the energy levels of the light elements. Here is her dramatic story!

tinyurl.com/ycyeamnx

#WomenInSTEM ⚛️🧪

Today our Women in Music Spotlight falls on Carrie Jacobs-Bond (1862-1946), one of the most beloved American songwriters of the late 19th/early 20th century, who also established a highly successful music publishing company. We think it's high time for a Jacobs-Bond revival!

#MusicSky #BookSky 🎹📖

Varieties: The Life and Mathematics of Hanna Neumann. Of all the realms of mathematics, there are few where more people feel more at home than in the safe harbours of algebra. From the age of 9, we are made familiar with all of the classic moves involved...

Mathematician Hanna Neumann was born 112 years ago today. Her 1967 text on Varieties of Groups is an absolute classic, and her efforts to re-inject pure mathematics into the British and Australian educational systems were widely recognized in her time.

tinyurl.com/5fre2ch3

#WomenInSTEM #MathSky 🧮