Quote: When NASA launches its Artemis II mission, scheduled for this week, one astronaut will make history simply by taking her seat aboard the spacecraft. Christina Koch is set to become the first woman ever to travel beyond low-Earth orbit toward the moon, a milestone moment in human spaceflight.

Artemis II is scheduled to launch no earlier than Wednesday, April 1, during a two-hour window opening at 6:24 p.m. EDT, sending four astronauts on a 10-day journey around the moon and back to Earth. The mission will test the Orion spacecraft’s life-support systems with a crew onboard for the first time as well as navigation and communications technologies essential for future lunar landings.

Quote: Koch is making history as the first woman on a moon mission on Wednesday aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission. But she also set another record earlier in her career. 
Koch spent 328 days in space from 2019 to 2020, setting the record for the longest continuous spaceflight by a woman and participating in the first all-woman spacewalk.

Quote:As far as nicknames go, the moniker “Mad Madge” would not suggest that Margaret Cavendish enjoyed the full respect of her peers.

A poet, philosopher, scientist, playwright and fiction writer, the 17th-century duchess had a multitude of disciplines and was published under her own name in a period when women writers were either anonymous or ignored.

But Cavendish’s work at the time, while widely discussed, was often dismissed, particularly by fellow scientists, explained Sarah Connell, associate director of the NULab for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science.

Quote:Dr. Kharazi recalled how she once told a male surgeon that she planned to ask for operating privileges at his hospital in order to expand her practice. “And he told me, ‘Well, it’s generally not a good idea to go where you’re not invited.’”

The lesson here: “My entire life has essentially consisted of going where I wasn’t invited,” Dr. Kharazi said. If she hadn’t, she said, “I would be nowhere now.”

Quote:In 1960, during her first month at the Food and Drug Administration, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey took a bold stance against inadequate testing and corporate pressure when she refused to approve release of thalidomide in the United States. The drug had been used as a sleeping pill and was later proven to have caused thousands of birth deformities in Germany and Great Britain.

[...]

The task was supposed to be a straightforward review of a sleeping pill already widely used in Europe, but Kelsey was concerned by some data suggesting dangerous side effects in patients who took the drug repeatedly. While she continued to withhold approval, the manufacturers tried everything they could to get around her judgement.

In November 1961, reports began to emerge in Germany and the United Kingdom that mothers who had taken thalidomide during pregnancy were now having babies with severe birth defects. Dr. Helen Taussig learned of the tragedy from one of her students and traveled to Europe to investigate. By testifying before the Senate, Tauusig was able to help Kelsey ban thalidomide in the United States for good. At least 4000 children in Europe were affected by the drug, but thanks to Kelsey's rigorous professionalism a similar tragedy was averted here in America.

On August 7, 1962, President John F. Kennedy awarded Frances Kelsey the highest honor given to a civilian in the United States, the President's Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. She was the second woman to ever receive the award. Kennedy acknowledged "Her exceptional judgment in evaluating a new drug for safety for human use has prevented a major tragedy of birth deformities in the United States. Through high ability and steadfast confidence in her professional decision she has made an outstanding contribution to the protection of the health of the American people."

Quote:Women in the History of Quantum Physics includes 14 deeply researched chapters about women who contributed to the field from the 1920s onwards, many of whom worked during times when some of the field’s most celebrated and influential men were active, including Niels Bohr, Wolfgang Pauli and Paul Dirac. Though I have spent almost a decade either studying or writing about quantum physics, I must admit that I had heard of only two of these women – mathematician and philosopher Grete Hermann and nuclear physicist Chien-Shiung Wu.

Quote:For her work during the pandemic, Morawska was named one of Time magazine’s most influential people in 2021.

On Monday evening, she also received the top gong at the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science, for her “pioneering research about the air we breathe”.

Morawska described receiving the $250,000 prime minister’s prize as “an amazing joy”, but said importantly the award would bring attention to her field of research.

Her current work focuses on ultrafine particles – tiny pollutants tens to hundreds of times smaller than PM2.5 and believed to have more significant health impacts, but which are not yet widely regulated.

“Because they are so small, they can get deep into the human respiratory tract,” Morawska said.

Quote:The world-renowned primatologist Jane Goodall has died at the age of 91, her institute has said.

The Jane Goodall Institute announced that she had died of natural causes while in California as part of a US speaking tour.

“Dr Goodall’s discoveries as an ethologist revolutionised science,” the statement read. “She was a tireless advocate for the protection and restoration of our natural world.”

Born in London in 1934, Goodall began researching free-living chimpanzees in Tanzania in 1960. In 1977 she founded the Jane Goodall Institute, which works to protect the species and supports youth projects aimed at benefiting animals and the environment.

She was considered the leading expert on chimpanzees, her career spanning more than 60 years. Her research was pivotal in proving the similarities in primate and human behaviour.

Quote:Throughout her career, Telkes was a pragmatist who operated in the realm of applied science; she was interested in seeing her inventions put to use in the real world. By the time of her death in 1995 she had earned more than 20 patents, most of them for inventions that exploited what she saw as the limitless potential of solar power. “Sunlight will be used as a source of energy sooner or later anyway,” Telkes wrote in a 1951 paper, adding, “Why wait?”

Quote:Take the case of Harriet Brooks – Canada’s first woman nuclear physicist. Within a span of six years between 1898 and 1904, Brooks discovered the element radon, measured its half-­life, kickstarted the understanding of radioactive transmutation of elements, discovered the radioactive recoil effect, and pointed out the multiple stages of radioactive decay. Along the way, she had become the first woman to obtain a graduate degree at McGill University, and the first woman to work with two future Nobel Prize winners. She had proved her skills at three renowned academic institutions, and she had published a paper on her own in Nature.

Yet she had to abandon her faculty position at Barnard College after announcing her engagement. Barnard, founded in 1889 in response to Columbia University’s policy of not admitting women students, insisted that she resign. Her advisor, the Nobel Laureate Ernest Rutherford, recognized her brilliance, describing her as another Marie Curie, but it wasn’t enough to save her career.

Quote:Foote’s seminal experiment was ingeniously homemade. Using four thermometers, two glass cylinders, and an air pump, she isolated the component gases that make up the atmosphere and exposed them to the sun’s rays, both in sunlight and in shade. Measuring the change in their temperatures, she discovered that carbon dioxide and water vapor absorbed enough heat that this absorption could affect climate. 

Quote:During the height of Jim Crow segregation, the Dispensary’s stated mission was to treat anyone “irrespective of sect, creed, or color.” It was one of the only White-run hospitals in New Orleans that administered to African Americans, and The Times-Picayune reported in 1948 that Edith was one of the first women in the South to perform a major operation — an appendectomy on an African American girl — helping pave the way for “this to become a legal and commonplace occurrence.”

Quote:Another genetic study solidified the link between severe morning sickness and a mutation in GDF15. This gene encodes a hormone that is involved in how we respond to stress and is linked to nausea and vomiting, according to her essay.

After making these discoveries, Fejzo’s team began to investigate ways to target GDF15 in clinical settings, aiming to eventually discover a cure for the disease. The group is also collaborating with a treatment center focused on hyperemesis gravidarum to test new therapeutics.

She is conducting a study of metformin to prevent hyperemesis gravidarum , theorizing that this diabetes drug could help desensitize women to rising GDF15 levels during pregnancy.

Quote:Costantini’s doc pairs narrations from O’Shaughnessy and others who were close to Ride with animation and 16mm visuals. They express the love, the excitement of first relationships, the heavy toll from keeping these feelings secret and the sting when Ride – whose noted emotional reserve is making more and more sense – would behave inexplicably.