In 1993, science historian Margaret Rossiter introduced the term the Matilda Effect. Writing in the journal Social Studies of Science, Rossiter described a recurring pattern
In today’s episode, I give a historical account of the life of Haiti’s first female physician, Dr. Yvonne Sylvain, who fought for maternal care, cancer screening, and modern medical practice in the twentieth century.
Podcast transcripts Welcome to Math! Science! History! I’m Gabrielle Birchak, your host. For Women’s History Month, I wanted to feature one brilliant thing, one clean win, and one woman whose work still quietly runs the world, even if most of us do not realize it. Today’s “one brilliant thing” was a sorting system. A classification scheme. A way to take the universe,
Science fiction is not valuable because it predicts the future. It is valuable because it trains the mind. It gives us a way to practice thinking about systems before we build them, and to practice caring about consequences before consequences have real names.
If you have ever felt your stomach drop when you’ve lost a file on your computer, then you already understand the first lesson of history. History is not only made by people. History is also made by what survives.
Today on Math! Science! History! I follow ten Black women inventors. Some left thick paper trails, stamped with patent numbers and filing dates.
It’s Flashcards Friday! This podcast is a follow-up to Tuesday’s episode about Benjamin Banneker. This brilliant individual was predominantly self-taught. I found his story very inspiring because he was self-educated. In other words, he learned everything he knew about astronomy and surveying without being in a classroom. And today, when people say they are self-taught, that means so more than
The holidays have ended, the decorations have come down, and many people have stepped outside to find that the ground has been quietly transformed into a dense, slippery physics problem.
Today we explore something wonderfully nerdy: the neuroscience of puzzles. Not just why puzzles are fun, but what your brain is actually doing the moment you lean over a crossword, a logic grid, or a deliciously tricky time-travel cipher.
Discover how the olfactory system works, why smell shapes memory and emotion, and three science-backed ways to strengthen and train your sense of smell.