Marie Curie: The Badass Scientist Who Glowed in the Dark (Literally)

Celebrating Women's History Month with a badass a day.

Let’s talk about Marie Curie. You know, the woman who basically invented the term “glow up” by discovering radium and then, you know, glowing in the dark because of it. (Okay, maybe not the healthiest glow, but still—iconic.)

Marie Skłodowska Curie was born in 1867 in Warsaw, Poland, at a time when women weren’t exactly encouraged to, say, pursue higher education or revolutionize science. But Marie wasn’t having it. She was a genius, and she knew it. So, she packed her bags, moved to Paris, and enrolled at the Sorbonne—where she promptly became the top of her class. Because of course she did.

Here’s the thing about Marie: she didn’t just break barriers; she vaporized them. She became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize—not once, but twice. And not in the same category, either. She snagged one in Physics (1903) for her work on radioactivity (a term she coined, by the way) and another in Chemistry (1911) for discovering radium and polonium. Oh, and she named polonium after her homeland, …