A hero of the Hundred Years War, Joan of Arc remains a French national heroine six centuries later. As a teenager she heard voices from on high urging her to save France from English domination.

• Born: 1412
• Birthplace: Domrémy, France
• Died: 30 May 1431 (burned at the stake)
• Best Known As: The French heroine who was burned at the stake

When Joan was about 12 years old, she began hearing “voices” of St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret believing them to have been sent by God. These voices told her that it was her divine mission to free her country from the English and help the dauphin gain the French throne. They told her to cut her hair, dress in man’s uniform and to pick up the arms.

By 1429 the English with the help of their Burgundian allies occupied Paris and all of France north of the Loire. The resistance was minimal due to lack of leadership and a sense of hopelessness. Henry VI of England was claiming the French throne.

Joan convinced the captain of the dauphin’s forces, and then the dauphin himself of her calling. After passing an examination by a board of theologians, she was given troops to command and the rank of captain.

At the battle of Orleans in May 1429, Joan led the troops to a miraculous victory over the English. She continued fighting the enemy in other locations along the Loire. Fear of troops under her leadership was so formidable that when she approached Lord Talbot’s army at Patay, most of the English troops and Commander Sir John Fastolfe fled the battlefield. Fastolfe was later stripped of his Order of the Garter for this act of cowardice. Although Lord Talbot stood his ground, he lost the battle and was captured along with a hundred English noblemen and lost 1800 of his soldiers.

Charles VII was crowned king of France on July 17, 1429 in Reims Cathedral. At the coronation, Joan was given a place of honor next to the king. Later, she was ennobled for her services to the country.

In 1430 she was captured by the Burgundians while defending Compiegne near Paris and was sold to the English. The English, in turn, handed her over to the ecclesiastical court at Rouen led by Pierre Cauchon, a pro-English Bishop of Beauvais, to be tried for witchcraft and heresy. Much was made of her insistence on wearing male clothing.

She was told that for a woman to wear men’s clothing was a crime against God. Her determination to continue wearing it (because her voices hadn’t yet told her to change, as well as for protection from sexual abuse by her jailors) was seen as defiance and finally sealed her fate. Joan was convicted after a lengthy interrogation and on May 30, 1431 she was burned at the stake in the Rouen marketplace. She was nineteen years old. Charles VII made no attempt to come to her rescue.

In 1456 a second trial was held and she was pronounced innocent of the charges against her. She was beatified in 1909 and canonized in 1920 by Pope Benedict XV.

Joan of Arc achieved a remarkable achievement in her short life of 19 years. In particular she embodied religious devotion with great bravery and humility, her life helped change the course of French history.

The international beauty icon, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, developed a “Secret Communications System” to help combat the Nazis in World War II. By manipulating radio frequencies at irregular intervals between transmission and reception, the invention formed an unbreakable code to prevent classified messages from being intercepted by enemy personnel.

Lamarr and Anthiel received a patent in 1941, but the enormous significance of their invention was not realized until decades later. It was first implemented on naval ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis and subsequently emerged in numerous military applications. But most importantly, the “spread spectrum” technology that Lamarr helped to invent would galvanize the digital communications boom, forming the technical backbone that makes cellular phones, fax machines and other wireless operations possible.As is the case with many of the famous women inventors, Lamarr received very little recognition of her innovative talent at the time, but recently she has been showered with praise for her groundbreaking invention.

In 1997, she and George Anthiel were honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Pioneer Award. And later in the same year, Lamarr became the first female recipient of the BULBIE™ Gnass Spirit of Achievement Award, a prestigious lifetime accomplishment prize for inventors that is dubbed “The Oscar™ of Inventing.”

Proving she was much more than just another pretty face, Lamarr shattered stereotypes and earned a place among the 20th century’s most important women inventors. She truly was a visionary whose technological acumen was far ahead of its time.

We’ve all had conversations with strangers over the telephone and painted a picture of how the person looked, as well as what they were like, based on what we heard. We make judgments about age, appearance, confidence, vitality, background, ability and lifestyle – just on how a person speaks.

The good news is that we all learn how to speak and so, therefore, we can unlearn and learn again. If you feel let down by parents, teachers or friends for not having helped you to develop a better voice, it’s now down to you to do something about it.

Think of a woman whose voice you admire. What is it about her voice that you like? Are these qualities lacking in your own voice? How would you like to sound or have others describe your voice?

A fit voice
Your health, both physical and mental, influences the quality of your voice. A depressed spirit is conveyed in an instant. If you want to make a good impression on others, even if you aren’t feeling on top of the world, you’ve got to get yourself physically and emotionally in gear.

Tips to sound energetic at a meeting
Before an important meeting or phone call, you want to be both energized and calm. These are complementary, not conflicting, values. An energized voice conveys enthusiasm and interest, while a note of calm and control conveys confidence.

• To sound energetic you need to be energetic – so get moving. Get the blood pumping with a brisk walk around the block before an important phone call. Filling the lungs with long, easy, deep breathes not only wakes you up but also calms you down.

• If nervous before a meeting or phone call, stretch out on the floor.

1. Place a cushion or rolled-up towel under your pelvis to ease the strain on your back. Don’t have a snooze but rather gently stretch your body in different directions. Put your arms up over your head and pretend that your arms and legs are being pulled in opposite directions. Hold for ten seconds and release. Obviously this is one to give a miss if you work in an open-plan office!
2. Now bend your legs up to your chest and roll them down to one side while your upper body and arms go in the opposite direction. Gently roll from one side to the other, holding the stretch for ten to twenty seconds when upper and lower body are in opposite directions. Do ten of these: five of each stretch.
3. Stand up and swing your arms forward, from the shoulders, in large circles ten times. Now repeat in the opposite direction another ten times.
4. Standing again, inhale, filling your lungs from the bottom to the top, and hold for ten seconds when the lungs are full. Empty the lungs slowly from the top to the bottom. Do this five times.

After this brief routine your brain cells and blood are revitalized with an extra shot of oxygen, and you are calm and controlled and ready for that encounter.

A final note on helping your voice to sound more energized – smile. Try this exercise. With a straight, expressional face, say: I would really love to join you all on Saturday night. Oh really? Could have fooled me. Try saying it with a smile. Better still, stand up, smile and say it. Now I believe you!

Body Language
If you think that a little box at the back of your throat does all the talking, you are sadly mistaken. Ineffective voices are the result of not using all your equipment: your posture, lungs, throat, mouth and face.

Posture
The way you sit and stand affects the quality of your voice. A slumped demeanour neither sounds enthusiastic nor looks it. If your posture is letting your voice down, take steps to stand to sit tall to allow the sounds to resonate as fully as possible.

Lungs
You need to use the full capacity of your lungs to sustain your words. Nothing is more unnerving than a short, breathless voice, or someone who runs out of puff and has to take great gasps to get going again. Poor fitness can let down your health, appearance and voice. Strengthen a thin, weak or breathy voice by increasing oxygen intake and improving the ventilatory efficiency of your lungs. To increase the oxygen you need to add brisk, aerobic activity to your life and quit or cut down on smoking.

To ensure that your lungs work as efficiently as possible, practice long, deep breathing. If you haven’t learned how to breathe properly (okay, okay! I know this sounds ridiculous as you are alive and breathing) find a meditation or yoga class with an instructor who will take you step by step through the process. Deep breathing is a life-enhancing experience – so simple yet so powerful. By using deep-breathing techniques, you will strengthen your lungs, potentially add years to your life and be able to relax and de-stress yourself when necessary.

Deep breathing is a tried and tested remedy for nervousness and worth practicing before any speaking opportunity. Practice this technique standing or lying down for best effect. Relax your facial muscles. Inhale through your nose slowly to the count of ten. Imagine having to slowly inflate your lower abdomen, then your tummy, then your chest with air. Hold the air for another ten counts, then slowly exhale through your mouth, imagining you are letting air out of a balloon from the top of your chest, through your tummy, then the abdomen. Sit quietly through three to five sessions of deep breathing and you will find yourself markedly relaxed at the end of it.

Throat
The quality of your sounds is affected by how well you use your throat. Many of us restrict the use of the throat (and the mouth), effectively strangling the words and sounds. Singing is a great release for a constricted throat. You know you sound heaps more like Celine Dion if you widen the back of your throat and let those notes sail out. To speak well, you don’t need to go to such extremes, but try to open up the throat so that the sounds reverberate to come over as rich as possible. An open throat requires a relaxed jaw and flexible facial muscles, which helps to ease the mouth and throat. The throat then ‘feels’ capable of more expansive, fuller sound.

Mouth and face
A stiff upper lip cannot produce a rich voice or make words sound magical. Many adults have indifferent voices because their mouths and faces are stiff and hardly move. If you have good breathing, diction and articulation but you use your mouth as a funnel, you won’t have a compelling voice. Try to open up your face, mouth and jaw when you speak. Do so, in a very exaggerated fashion, in front of a mirror. Have a laugh. Work your face, mouth and jaw like an animated speaker you admire. Dawn French, Sharon Stone, Joanna Lumley, Andie McDowell, Gloria Hunniford, Ruby Wax, Goldie Hawn and Bette Midler all make full use of their face, mouth and jaw and have rich, distinctive voices as a result.

The sound of your own voice
If you want to improve your voice, you need to start by analyzing it. Take a tape recorder and read something from the newspaper or talk about your day into it. Play the tape back. Note what you like and what you don’t. Keep the original recording to see how your voice improves as you continue to practice speaking better, using better diction, varying the pitch and pace, and improving the general quality.

Imitate characteristics in others that you like. For example, a colleague at work might sound quite impressive to you because she speaks more loudly than you do. Imitate her and turn up your volume. Watching a movie, you might note how another voice has variety and isn’t monotone (as yours might be). Try ‘acting’ the new voice with your tape recorder by reading a story for a few minutes, trying to imitate the pitch of the voice you admire. If you hear a change – and you like it – keep practicing. Start to use your new techniques every time you speak and soon they will be your voice.

Pace of speech
Confident people tend to speak more slowly because they believe others want to listen to them. Rushing over words can make them indistinct and make a person sound more tentative. This is because the words themselves have lost their clarity, we feel the speaker has lost confidence in them and by extension what they are talking about.

Scientist
Born:  25 July 1920
Died:  16 April 1958
Birthplace:  London, England
Nationality:  British
Fields:  X-ray crystallography
Institutions: British Coal Utilisation Research Association
Best known as:  The woman whose crystal studies showed the structure of DNA

Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction studies contributed to the double helix model of the molecular structure of DNA. Franklin had studied physical chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge. She received her PhD in 1945 for research into the small-scale structures of coal and carbons. As a postdoctoral researcher in Paris, she became familiar with the use of X-ray diffraction as a method for analysing molecular structures. Working at King’s College London, from 1951 to 1953, she applied this technique to DNA. Without her knowledge, one of the resulting X-ray images and a report on her work were passed on to Francis Crick and James Watson at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. This information helped the two Cambridge researchers to develop the double-helix model of DNA.

Later, Franklin investigated other structures, especially the tobacco mosaic virus. Diagnosed with cancer in 1956, Franklin did not live to see the Nobel Prize awarded to Crick, Watson and Maurice Wilkins, her former colleague at King’s. Since her death, there has been debate over whether her contributions to the discovery of the double helix were properly acknowledged. Some of Franklin’s friends and colleagues were particularly enraged by James Watson’s portrayal of her in his 1968 account, The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA.

Kids’ big dreams deserve high expectations, she says, starting with grownups’ willingness to learn from children as much as to teach.

A voracious reader from age three, Adora Svitak’s first serious foray into writing — at age five — was limited only by her handwriting and spelling. (Her astonishing verbal abilities already matched that of young adults over twice her age.)

As her official bio says, her breakthrough would soon come “in the form of a used Dell laptop her mother bought her.”

At age seven, she typed out over 250,000 words — poetry, short stories, observations about the world — in a single year.

Svitak has since fashioned her beyond-her-years wordsmithing into an inspiring campaign for literacy — speaking across the country to both adults and kids. She is author of Flying Fingers, a book on learning.