tiny-librarian:

The first, Emilie du Chatelet, was a woman cut to a superhuman scale. “A genius in virtually every realm of mathematics,” she outsmarted the leading male scholars of her day. In addition, she looked like a celebrity model, loved like a Lotharia, and lived like a sultana. “The wench,” said a Romeo of the age, “is formidable.” “The most brilliant member of her sex in Europe,” she was also a “passionate,” magisterial siren who captured and held the two beaux du jour of Paris, the duc de Richelieu and Voltaire.

Seductress: Women Who Ravished the World and Their Lost Art of Love

This woman is my hero.

nasasapod:

The Tidal Tail of NGC 3628 
Image Credit & Copyright: Thomas V. Davis (tvdavisastropix.com)

Explanation: A mere 30 million light-years away, large spiral galaxy NGC 3628 (center left) shares its neighborhood in the local Universe with two other large spirals, in a magnificent grouping otherwise known as the Leo Triplet. In fact, fellow trio member M65 is near the center right edge of this deep cosmic group portrait, with M66 just above it and to the left. But, perhaps most intriguing is the spectacular tail stretching up and to the left for about 300,000 light-years from NGC 3628’s warped, edge-on disk. Know as a tidal tail, the structure has been drawn out of the galaxy by gravitational tides during brief but violent past interactions with its large neighbors. Not often imaged so distinctly, the tidal tail is composed of young bluish star clusters and star-forming regions.