Rosaly Lopes: NASA’s Volcano Hunter of the Outer Solar System Rosaly Lopes (born 1957) is a Brazilian planetary scientist (studies the planets and moons of our solar system) and volcanologist (studies volcanoes) whose analysis of data from NASA’s Galileo spacecraft led to the discovery of 71 active volcanoes on Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon, an achievement recognized by Guinness World…
Marcia Barbosa: Modeling the Most Mysterious Liquid in the Universe Marcia Barbosa (born 1959) is a Brazilian physicist whose research on the structural and thermodynamic properties of water has transformed scientific understanding of why the most common liquid on Earth behaves so strangely. Working at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in…
Grace Hopper: Origins of Compiler Technology Grace Hopper (1906–1992) established the foundations of modern computer programming through her invention of the first compiler, a program that automatically translates human-readable instructions into machine code, and her work as a pioneer of machine-independent programming languages (ones that run on any computer, not just a…
Katherine Johnson (1918–2020) established the mathematical foundations for America’s early space achievements through her expertise in celestial mechanics (the mathematics of how objects move through space under gravity), trajectory analysis, and orbital calculations (working out the curved paths a spacecraft follows). Her precise computations enabled historic missions from Alan Shepard‘s first American spaceflight to…
Marie Curie: Origins of Nuclear Science Marie Curie (1867–1934) established the foundational framework for understanding radioactivity (the spontaneous energy that unstable atoms release as they break down) and revolutionized both physics and chemistry through her systematic investigation of radioactive phenomena. Her discovery and isolation of polonium and radium, her formulation of radioactivity theory, and her development of quantitative methods for…
Real-world cases from Equifax to Razer illustrate the human and financial toll of cyberattacks. A security breach rarely announces itself. It begins with a misconfiguration, an unpatched vulnerability, or a single employee clicking the wrong link — and ripples outward in ways that can take years to resolve. The consequences…
How a 1991 model still guides organizations in protecting everything from databases to IoT sensors. In 1991, John McCumber proposed a three-dimensional model that remains one of the clearest frameworks for evaluating an organization’s security posture. Known as the McCumber Cube, it asks security teams to consider three overlapping dimensions…
From medical records to smart devices, your data footprint is far larger than you think. Personal data is any information that can be used to identify you — your name, social security number, date and place of birth, your mother’s maiden name, even the messages you exchange with family. Cybercriminals…
Understanding your offline and online identity in an age of constant surveillance. A cyberattack happens every 39 seconds — and the relationship between online identity and cybersecurity has never been more consequential. The target of these attacks isn’t always a bank or a government. More often, it’s an ordinary person who underestimated…
Introduction: Why the Perceptron Still Matters The Frank Rosenblatt perceptron is widely recognized as the first artificial neural network and a foundational model in the history of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Introduced in the late 1950s, the Frank Rosenblatt perceptron demonstrated how learning could emerge from adaptive systems using…