Stories by Katie Hafner

Physicist Jess Wade explains the importance of recognizing female scientists on Wikipedia. She’s created more than 2,000 Wikipedia articles to do just that

In the 1970s a young psychologist challenged a popular theory of how we acquire language, launching a fierce debate that continues to this day

Melba Phillips co-authored a paper with J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1935 that proved important in the development of nuclear physics. Later she became an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons

Annie Maunder was an astronomer who expanded our understanding of the sun at the turn of the 20th century. Her passion was photographing eclipses.

The Morris sisters made significant contributions to botany and entomology, but their stories were erased from the history of early American science, both accidentally and by design.

Ursula Bellugi was fixated on how we learn language. Her groundbreaking research on sign language demonstrated the connection between language skills and biology

In 1910 an Anglo-Irish woman named Lilian Bland built a plane with little to no encouragement from her family or aviation enthusiasts. Shortly after the plane took off, she quit flying and moved on to her next challenge

Sara Little Turnbull used materials science to invent and design products for the modern world

Sallie Pero Mead made major discoveries about how electromagnetic waves propagate that allowed objects to be detected at a distance

Annie Montague Alexander went on paleontology expeditions most women could only dream of in the early 1900s

This early feminist fought for the credit she deserved for her deductive reasoning system and her educational qualifications

Hungarian-American biophysicist and inventorMária Telkes illuminated the field of solar energy. She invented a solar oven, a solar desalination kit and, in the late 1940s, designed one of the first solar-heated houses

Eunice Newton Foote showed that carbon dioxide traps the heat of the sun in 1856, beating the so-called father of the greenhouse effect by at least three years. Why was she forgotten?

Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first Black woman in the U.S. to receive an M.D., earned while the Civil War raged, and the first Black person in the country to write a medical book, a popular guide with a preventive approach

How Elizebeth Smith Friedman went from scouring Shakespeare for secret codes to taking down a Nazi spy ring

Eight pages hidden in an archive led to the discovery of the story of Christine Essenberg

Sarah Loguen Fraser was the daughter of abolitionists and one of the first African American female doctors trained after the Civil War.

Lillian Gilbreth pioneered time and motion efficiency in workplaces and revolutionized kitchen design

Letters between Lise Meitner and the chemist Otto Hahn reveal how she struggled with Hahn's failure to credit her work and condemn the Nazi atrocities

Lise Meitner, an Austrian-born Jewish physicist, never received the Nobel Prize she deserved for her pioneering work on nuclear fission

Physicists Ruth Howes and Caroline Herzenberg’s 10-year research project ensured a place in history for the female scientists, engineers and technicians who worked on the atomic bomb

After atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nuclear physicist Katharine Way persuaded the world’s greatest physicists to contribute essays to a book opposing nuclear weapons

Here’s the story of the Lilli Hornig, the only female scientist named in the film Oppenheimer.

Naomi Livesay worked on computations that formed the mathematical basis for implosion simulations. Despite her crucial role on the project, she is rarely mentioned as more than a footnote—until now