India, Nov. 8 -- Name one legendary woman scientist who isn't Marie Curie. It's hard, and that isn't your fault. As suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage noted in her essay Woman as an Inventor (1883), women's contributions to science have been consistently sidelined. In Gage's honour, the phenomenon came to be called The Matilda Effect. Now, an online initiative called The Matilda Project is bringing lost stories of such women into the spotlight. The Matilda Project is run by Canadian brothers Shehroze Saharan, 27, and Shehryar Saharan, 29. Take a look at some of the incredible stories they have documented. Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was a Chinese-American experimental physicist who, in 1956, conducted an experiment that disproved the long-standing assumption that the laws of physics always behave the same way under mirror reflection. It was a major scientific breakthrough. In 1957, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang received the Nobel Prize in Physics for the theoretical work that Wu had experimentally confirmed. Wu was excluded. "What's interesting is that she wasn't an obscure scientist," says Saharan. "She was exceptionally accomplished. Her expertise had been crucial to the discovery. Yet it was possible to leave her out." She was eventually awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in physics, in 1978. Christine Darden (1942-), an African-American aerospace engineer, joined NASA (the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) in 1967. Women with her qualifications were often assigned to computing roles, while similarly qualified men entered engineering positions. After five years without a promotion, Darden confronted a supervisor and was subsequently transferred into engineering, where her work in reducing sonic booms in supersonic aircraft became foundational to future research at NASA. "Her story is a reminder that women can be overlooked when decisions are made about who gets the opportunity to do the research in the first place," says Shehroze. Latika Nath (1970-), an Indian conservation ecologist, was conducting field research on tigers in India, using emerging technologies such as early camera traps. "One detail that stayed with us was her account of being dismissed as 'that girl in chiffon saris'," Saharan says. Worse still, an anonymous accusation that she had fabricated data resulted in her research funding being suspended for a year. Her data was subsequently verified, and the funding reinstated. "It's astonishing to think about the professional consequences of something like that," says Shehryar. Lori Alvord (1958-), the first Navajo woman surgeon in the US, trained at Stanford and built a career with a special focus on patients from her community. Admitted to hospital with pneumonia during her own surgical residency, Alvord found herself uncomfortable with elements of care such as the frequent direct questions, lack of privacy, and levels of noise. She decided to work to make medical care more culturally responsive. Working on a New Mexico reservation, she introduced traditional healers into the recovery process, worked to make hospitals quieter, with more direct access to natural spaces. "Her work reminds us that the history of medicine isn't simply about who becomes a doctor," Saharan says, "but also whose perspectives are taken seriously when deciding what good patient care looks like." Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) was a naturalist who studied insects and their life cycles. On an exploratory trip to Suriname in South America, she observed a large spider preying on a hummingbird, which she depicted in her zoological illustrations. Naturalists ridiculed her finding, treating it as fanciful and implausible. Subsequent observations would of course confirm that large spiders can prey on small birds. "For many years, Merian was remembered more as an artist than as a scientist," Shehroze says. Yet her 1705 magnum opus, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, is still considered a comprehensive account of the ecology of this remote region....