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Julia Baird

Julia Baird is a journalist and author

World famous astronomer Vera Rubin, 82, in her office at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Washington, DC, in  2010.

The 'invisible' women who died, nearly unnoticed

We barely blink when women in the sciences achieve (who remembers that Professor Elizabeth Blackburn won a Nobel prize in 2009?), so it is hardly surprising we are often caught napping when they die.

The beach could soon be a distant memory.

How to find your own peace in a brutal world

This week, I wanted to write about how to maintain sanity in the face of the precariousness of and, ugliness in, the world. Yet as I opened my laptop to write, tales of desperate Syrians poured from my radio, and my fingers froze for hours.

Why aren't we listening to our nurse leaders?

There's no such thing as 'just a nurse'

In Trumpian terms – and by that I mean in the terms determined by men who rate women simply according to their decorative value – Florence Nightingale was a "nasty woman". Lionised as a gentle "lady of the lamp" who wandered through hospital wards tending to wounded British soldiers during the Crimean War, we seem to have forgotten her fierceness: a young women who burned to abandon all social obligations and just work, who spurned suitors and lobbied politicians, who adored statistics and pioneered pie charts, and who revolutionised the medical establishment.

To acknowledge, or to not acknowledge? That is the question.

The hardest words for an author to write

Writing book acknowledgments can be so fraught. It should be a moment of triumph, cheer, relief. But there are so many potential pitfalls – forgetting people, sounding like a tosser, omitting crucial research assistance, sounding like a tosser, being excessively sentimental and sounding like a tosser.

Joseph Stalin as a young, charming man.

Time to talk to girls about young, hot Stalin

When I saw the footage of former Auburn deputy mayor Salim Mehajer verbally abusing his estranged wife, Aysha, last week I was reminded about the difference between passionate intensity and love. About how to recognise signs of aggression, manipulation, abuse or control in even the most nascent relationship – and what not to tolerate and when to walk away.