16 Oct 2020 By Hamish Johnston (IOP)

Tuesday was Ada Lovelace Day, which celebrates achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM). Named after the 19th-century polymath Ada Lovelace, the annual initiative also seeks to engage with the challenges of attracting more women into STEM careers and supporting career development.

Nature’s On Your Wavelength blog celebrated with a piece by Ankita Anirban about five inspiring female physicists. Perhaps the most intriguing of the biographies is that of the Egyptian nuclear physicist Sameera Moussa, who some believe was murdered in 1952 to prevent Egypt from developing nuclear weapons.

There are also tales of wartime daring. The Dutch physicist and entrepreneur Caroline Bleeker, for example hid Jewish people from Nazi occupiers in her factory. And when it was raided in 1944, she managed to usher them to safety. After the war, her factory produced the world’s first complete phase contrast microscopes.

Meanwhile in wartime Berlin, the Japanese physicist Toshiko Yuasa developed a double-focussing beta spectrometer that she carried on her back through Siberia to Japan when she was expelled from Germany by the Soviet army. Read more at https://physicsworld.com/a/celebrating-emmy-noether-sameera-moussa-caroline-bleeker-toshiko-yuasa-and-other-inspiring-women-in-science/