Today in Science
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Events
1885 - The first successful appendectomy is performed by William W. Grant.
1958 - Sputnik 1 falls to Earth from its orbit
1959 - Luna 1 becomes the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon.
2004 - Spirit, a NASA Mars Rover, lands successfully on Mars
Births
1643 - Isaac Newton, English natural philosopher
1894 - Manuel de Abreu, Brazilian physician
1900 - James Bond, American ornithologist
1940 - Brian David Josephson, British physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1945 - Richard R. Schrock, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1761 - Stephen Hales, English…
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Events
1496 - Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests a flying machine.
1999 - The Mars Polar Lander launches.
Births
1722 - Fredric Hasselquist, Swedish naturalist
Deaths
1641 - Jeremiah Horrocks, English astronomer
1927 - Carle David Tolmé Runge, German physicist
1969 - Jean Focas, Greco-French astronomer
1980 - Joy Adamson, Czech conservationist
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Events
1860 - The discovery of the planet Vulcan is announced at a meeting of the Académie des Sciences
1959 - Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, is launched
2004 - Stardust successfully flies past Comet Wild 2, collecting samples that it will return to Earth two years later.
Deaths
1893 - John Obadiah Westwood, British entomologist
1917 - Edward Burnett Tylor, English anthropologist
2005 - Maclyn McCarty, American geneticist
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Events
1801 - Dwarf planet Ceres is discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi.
1925 - Edwin Hubble announces the discovery of galaxies outside the Milky Way.
1983 - The ARPANET officially changes to using the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet.
1985 - The Internet’s Domain Name System is created.
1989 - The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer comes into force.
Births
1774 - André Marie Constant Duméril, French zoologist
1854 - Sir James George Frazer, Scottish anthropologist
1876 - Harriet Brooks, Canadian physicist
1878 - Agner Krarup Erlang, Danish scientist and…
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I’m going to close things down here until the beginning of the New Year - a combination of projects I need to finish and family commitments mean that I will be posting little (if anything) for the next two weeks. I wish all my readers a happy, safe & peaceful holiday season.
Your Today in Science is below the fold.
Births
1706 - Ãmilie du Châtelet, French mathematician and physicist
1778 - Sir Humphry Davy, English chemist and physicist
1835 - Alexander Emanuel Agassiz, American scientist; son of Louis Agassiz
1853 - Ãmile Roux, French physician
1908 - Willard Frank Libby, American…
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Births
1776 - Johann Wilhelm Ritter, German physicist
1882 - Walther Meissner, German physicist
1901 - Margaret Mead, American anthropologist
Deaths
1687 - William Petty, English scientist and philosopher
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Last year a few of us did this - basic idea is to reproduce the first sentence of the first post every month over the past year. I’m going to ignore "Today in Science" posts. Let’s see what we got ...
What is this mystery beast captured on film in Kayan Mentarang National Park, East Kalimantan, Indonesia in 2003? [link]
Today I ran a workshop for my freshmen on argumentative writing, so this seems appropriate: [link]
As Razib notes, Arthur Schlesinger has died at the age of 89. [link]
Well, we know where McCain’s priorities lie: [link]
Four years ago on this day, Bush declared that "major…
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Births
1852 - Henri Becquerel, French physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1860 - Niels Ryberg Finsen, Danish physician and Nobel Prize laureate
1916 - Maurice Wilkins, New Zealand-born physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1923 - Freeman Dyson, English-born American physicist
Deaths
1958 - Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, Austrian-born American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
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Events
1782 - The Montgolfier brothers first balloon lifts on its first test flight.
1900 - Max Planck presents a theoretical derivation of his black-body radiation law.
1962 - Mariner 2 becomes the first spacecraft to fly by Venus.
Births
1909 - Edward Tatum, American geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate
1922 - Nikolay Basov, Soviet physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1873 - Louis Agassiz, Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist [See last year’s post on Agassiz]
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Births
1640 - Robert Plot, English naturalist
1662 - Francesco Bianchini, Italian philosopher and scientist
1724 - Franz Aepinus, German scientist
1867 - Kristian Birkeland, Norwegian explorer and scientist
1923 - Philip Warren Anderson, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1565 - Conrad Gessner, Swiss naturalist
1783 - Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin, Swedish astronomer
1868 - Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, German botanist
1895 - Anyos Jedlik, Hungarian physicist
1919 - Woldemar Voigt, German physicist
1930 - Fritz Pregl, Slovenian/Austrian chemist and Nobel Prize laureate…
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Births
1866 - Alfred Werner, Swiss chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1892 - Herman PotoÄnik, Slovenian rocket engineer
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Births
1761 - Gian Domenico Romagnosi, Italian physicist
1781 - Sir David Brewster, Scottish physicist
1843 - Robert Koch, German bacteriologist and Nobel Prize laureate
1863 - Annie Jump Cannon, American astronomer
1882 - Max Born, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1925 - Paul Greengard, American neuroscientist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1797 - Richard Brocklesby, English physician
1950 - Leslie Comrie, New Zealand astronomer
1978 - Vincent du Vigneaud, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1998 - André Lichnerowicz, Polish-French physicist
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Events
1684 - Isaac Newton’s derivation of Kepler’s laws from his theory of gravity, contained in the paper De motu corporum in gyrum, is read to the Royal Society by Edmund Halley.
Births
1452 - Johannes Stöffler, German mathematician and astronomer
1588 - Isaac Beeckman, Dutch scientist and philosopher
1751 - George Shaw, English botanist and zoologist
1805 - Josef Skoda, Bohemian physician
1934 - Howard Martin Temin, American geneticist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1198 - Averroes, Arab physician and philosopher
1603 - William Gilbert, English scientist
1831 - Thomas Seebeck,…
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Births
1571 - Metius, Dutch mathematician and astronomer
1652 - Augustus Quirinus Rivinus, German physician
1748 - Claude Louis Berthollet, French chemist
1906 - Grace Murray Hopper, American computer pioneer
1917 - James Rainwater, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1919 - William Lipscomb, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1926 - Henry Way Kendall, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1798 - Johann Reinhold Forster, German botanist
1830 - Heinrich Christian Friedrich Schumacher, Danish surgeon, botanist and professor of anatomy
1937 - Nils Gustaf Dalén…
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Births
1730 - Jan Ingenhousz, Dutch-born British physiologist and botanist
1795 - Peter Andreas Hansen, Danish astronomer
1874 - Ernst Moro, Austrian physician
1947 - Thomas R. Cech, American chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1632 - Philippe van Lansberge, Flemish astronomer
1779 - Nathan Alcock, English physician
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Events
1900 - Max Planck discovers the law of black body emission.
1972 - Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew take the photograph known as "The Blue Marble" (above) as they leave the Earth.
1995 - The Galileo spacecraft arrives at Jupiter, a little more than six years after it was launched by Space Shuttle Atlantis during Mission STS-34.
Births
903 - Abd Al-Rahman Al Sufi, Persian astronomer
1810 - Theodor Schwann, German physiologist
1905 - Gerard Kuiper, Dutch-born American astronomer
Deaths
1978 - Alexander Wetmore, American ornithologist
1993 - Wolfgang Paul…
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Births
1586 - Niccolò Zucchi, Italian astronomer
1778 - Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, French physicist and chemist
1863 - Charles Martin Hall, American chemist
1890 - Yoshio Nishina, Japanese physicist
1920 - George Porter, British chemist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1771 - Giovanni Battista Morgagni, Italian anatomist
1867 - Jean Pierre Flourens, French physician
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Births
1855 - Clinton Hart Merriam, American ornithologist
1868 - Arnold Sommerfeld, German physicist
1896 - Carl Ferdinand Cori, Austrian-born biochemist and Nobel Prize laureate
1901 - Werner Heisenberg, German physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1903 - Cecil Frank Powell, British physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
1907 - Giuseppe Occhialini, Italian physicist
1932 - Sheldon Lee Glashow, American physicist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1624 - Gaspard Bauhin, Swiss botanist
1965 - Joseph Erlanger, American physiologist and Nobel Prize laureate
2001 - Franco Rasetti, Italian physicist
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Births
1852 - Orest Khvolson, Russian physicist
1908 - Alfred Hershey, American bacteriologist and Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1123 - Omar Khayyám, Persian poet, astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher
1798 - Luigi Galvani, Italian physicist
1935 - Charles Robert Richet, French physiologist
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Events
1904 - The Jovian moon Himalia is discovered by Charles Dillon Perrine.
1967 - A transplant team headed by Christiaan Barnard carries out the first heart transplant on a human (53-year-old Louis Washkansky).
1973 - Pioneer 10 sends back the first close-up images of Jupiter.
1999 - NASA loses radio contact with the Mars Polar Lander moments before the spacecraft enters the Martian atmosphere.
Births
1776 - Johann Spurzheim, German neuroscientist
1838 - Cleveland Abbe, American meteorologist
1842 - Ellen Swallow Richards, American scientist
1886 - Manne Siegbahn, Swedish physicist and…