ScienceBrunch

No guest of honor today. Instead, we talk about some of the interesting happenings in the modern science world. And Katie tells us about her fossil dig!

You may have never heard of him, but African-American chemist Percy Lavon Julian is the guy you should thank for your hormonal birth control.

And life is just better when nerds name things!

Mary Agnes Chase struggled to begin her career in botany, so when she finally made the big time, she turned around to help other women and minorities succeed in the field.

Botanist Carl Linnaeus had a noble goal: to create a new standardized system of naming all living creatures on the planet. But he was only human, after all, and couldn't resist immortalizing his enemies' names in some of the gross stuff he found in nature.

Margaret Mead traveled the world to study and compare different cultures, in a quest to find out which parts of us are driven by nature and which by culture.

Richard Feynman was a brilliant theoretical physicist who won a Nobel Prize and inspired his younger sister to a career in STEM -- but is he worthy of hero worship?

"Birdman of India" Sálim Ali spent nearly 80 years observing and documenting bird species in India, yet he still considered his research a drop in the bucket.

Cytogeneticist Barbara McClintock proved chromosomal crossover in meiosis long before anyone in her field understood it.

Qian Xuesen is known as the father of China's missile and space program. He helped transform China into a world-class military power but started his career in the United States, working in the WWII war effort.

Vera Rubin's observations of galaxy rotations showed that we can only actually see about 5% of the universe.