History and Philosophy (often of Science)
jlynch | July 24, 2007Events
1978 - Birth of Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby".
1984 - Salyut 7 Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya becomes the second woman in space and the first to perform a space walk.
Births
1799 - David Douglas, Scottish botanist
1920 - Rosalind Franklin, English crystallographer whose work formed the basis for Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double helical structure of DNA.
Deaths
1616 - Andreas Libavius, German physician and chemist
1842 - Dominique Jean Larrey, French surgeon
1843 - Charles Macintosh, Scottish chemist and inventor
1963 - Ugo Cerletti, Italian neurologist
jlynch | July 23, 2007Births
1794 - Johan Georg Forchhammer, Danish geologist
Deaths
1974 - James Chadwick, English physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1986 - Fritz Albert Lipmann, American biochemist, Nobel Prize laureate
2005 - Richard Doll, English epidemiologist
jlynch | July 22, 2007Events
1962 - Telstar relays the first live trans-Atlantic television signal.
1972 - The United States launches Landsat 1, first Earth-resources satellite.
Births
1775 - Etienne-Louis Malus, French physicist and mathematician
1886 - Walter H. Schottky, German physicist
1906 - Vladimir Prelog, Croatian chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1773 - George Edwards, English naturalist
1878 - Carl Freiherr von Rokitansky, Bohemian physician
1916 - Sir William Ramsay, Scottish chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1968 - Henry Hallett Dale, English scientist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | July 21, 2007
Births
1711 - Georg Wilhelm Richmann, Russian physicist
1784 - Friedrich Bessel, German mathematician and astronomer
1887 - Gustav Ludwig Hertz, German physicist, Nobel laureate
1888 - Kirk Bryan, American geologist
1888 - Selman Waksman, Ukrainian-born biochemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1802 - Marie François Xavier Bichat, French anatomist
1826 - Giuseppe Piazzi, Italian astronomer
1922 - Jokichi Takamine, Japanese chemist
jlynch | July 20, 2007Events
1925 - Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, high school biology teacher John T. Scopes is found guilty of teaching evolution in class and fined $100.
1969 - Neil A. Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin become the first men to walk on the Moon, during the Apollo 11 mission.
1983 - The world’s lowest temperature is recorded at Vostok Station, Antarctica at â89.2°C (â129°F).
Births
1620 - Jean Picard, French astronomer
1710 - Paul Möhring, German physician
1810 - Henri Victor Regnault, French chemist
1923 - Rudolph A. Marcus, Canadian chemist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
2004 - Edward B.…
jlynch | July 20, 2007Events
1969 - Apollo Program: Apollo 11 lands on the Moon.
1976 - The Viking 1 lander successfully lands on Mars.
1994 - Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9’s Fragment Q1 hits Jupiter.
Births
1797 - Sir PaweÅ Edmund Strzelecki, Polish explorer and geologist
1822 - Gregor Mendel, father of modern genetics
1897 - Tadeus Reichstein, Polish-born chemist, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine laureate
1909 - Jean Focas, Greco-French astronomer
1947 - Gerd Binnig, German-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1937 - Guglielmo Marconi, Italian inventor, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics
jlynch | July 19, 2007I’m finally back in circulation, albeit only for a few days. Next Tuesday I leave for the ISHPSSB conference in Exeter (UK) and wont be bringing a laptop with me. The past ten days, I was spending time with family in Michigan - hence the relative silence
Below the fold is Today in Science.
Births
1865 - Charles Horace Mayo, American surgeon and founder of the Mayo Clinic
1921 - Rosalyn Yalow, American physicist, Nobel laureate
1938 - Jayant Narlikar, Indian astrophysicist
Deaths
1838 - Pierre Louis Dulong, French physicist
1910 - Johann Gottfried Galle, German astronomer
jlynch | July 17, 2007Events
1898 - Marie and Pierre Curie announce the discovery of a new element and proposed to call it polonium.
Births
1635 - Robert Hooke, English scientist
1720 - Gilbert White, English ornithologist
1853 - Hendrik Lorentz, Dutch physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1937 - Roald Hoffman, Polish-born chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1948 - Hartmut Michel, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1884 - Ferdinand von Hochstetter, Austrian geologist
1968 - Corneille Heymans, Belgian physiologist, Nobel Prize laureate
1997 - Eugene Merle Shoemaker, American astronomer
2002 - Victor Emery, British…
jlynch | July 17, 2007
Events
1975 - Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock with each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.
1976 - Viking 1 successfully lands on Mars.
1998 - Biologists report how they sequenced the genome of the bacterium that causes syphilis, Treponema pallidum (above).
Births
1920 - Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser
1955 - Paul Stamets, American mycologist and environmentalist
Deaths
1894 - Josef Hyrtl, Austrian anatomist
1912 - Henri Poincaré, French mathematician
jlynch | July 16, 2007
Events
1862 - Comet Swift-Tuttle is discovered by Lewis Swift.
1945 - Manhattan Project: The Atomic Age begins when the United States successfully detonates (see above) a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon at the Trinity site near Alamogordo, New Mexico.
1994 - Jupiter is hit by fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9.
Births
1888 - Frits Zernike, Dutch physicist, Nobel laureate
1926 - Irwin Rose, American biologist, Nobel laureate
Deaths
1916 - Ilya Mechnikov, Russian microbiologist, Nobel laureate
1994 - Julian Schwinger, American physicist, Nobel laureate
jlynch | July 14, 2007Births
1918 - Bertram N. Brockhouse, Canadian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1921 - Robert Bruce Merrifield, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1922 - Leon M. Lederman, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1928 - Carl Woese, American microbiologist
1943 - Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Irish astrophysicist
Deaths
1919 - Hermann Emil Fischer, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
jlynch | July 14, 2007
Events
1965 - Mariner 4 flyby of Mars takes the first close-up photos (above) of another planet.
Births
1671 - Jacques D’Allonville, French astronomer and mathematician
1801 - Johannes Peter Müller, German physiologist
1921 - Geoffrey Wilkinson, English chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
1924 - James W. Black, Scottish pharmacologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
Deaths
1907 - William Henry Perkin, English chemist
jlynch | July 12, 2007
Births
1527 - John Dee, English scientist
1579 - Arthur Dee, English physician
1932 - Hubert Reeves, Canadian astrophysicist
Deaths
1896 - Friedrich August Kekulé von Stradonitz, German chemist and discoverer of the structure of benzene (above)
jlynch | July 11, 2007Births
1849 - Sir William Osler, Canadian physician and author
1850 - Otto Schoetensack, German anthropologist
1861 - George Washington Carver, American botanist
1863 - Albert Calmette, French physician
1863 - Paul Karl Ludwig Drude, German physicist
1913 - Willis Lamb, American physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
1928 - Elias James Corey, American chemist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1682 - Jean Picard, French astronomer
jlynch | July 10, 2007
Events
1979 - Skylab (above) returns to Earth.
Births
1916 - Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov, Russian physicist, Nobel laureate
1924 - César Lattes, Brazilian physicist
1931 - Tullio Regge, Italian physicist
Deaths
1909 - Simon Newcomb, American astronomer and mathematician
jlynch | July 10, 2007Events
1796 - Carl Friedrich Gauss discovered that every positive integer is representable as a sum of at most three triangular numbers.
1925 - Scopes Trial: In Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" begins with John T. Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law.
1962 - Telstar, the world’s first communications satellite, is launched into orbit.
Births
1809 - Friedrich August von Quenstedt, German geologist
1832 - Alvan Graham Clark, American telescope maker and astronomer
1902 - Kurt Alder, German chemist, Nobel…
jlynch | July 8, 20076.02 x 1023
Births
1800 - Friedrich Gustav Jakob Henle, German physician
1858 - Franz Boas, German anthropologist
1911 - John A. Wheeler, American physicist
1926 - Ben Roy Mottelson, American-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1856 - Amedeo Avogadro, Italian chemist; the number of elementary entities in one mole of a substance, 6.02 x 1023, is known as Avogadro’s number.
1880 - Paul Broca, French physician and anatomist
1903 - Alphonse François Renard, Belgian geologist
jlynch | July 8, 2007The Wellcome Trust has released its medical image collection under the Creative Commons Attribution, Non-commercial Licence 2.0. Go get yourself some pictures.
jlynch | July 8, 2007In 1999, Dembski established the Michael Polanyi Center - an ID institute - at Baylor University. As this article notes, Dembski appropriated Michael Polanyi’s name, contrary to the wishes of his literary executor and son, Nobel Laureate John Polanyi, in an attempt to associate Polanyi with a cause he clearly would not have shared. Richard Gelwick, the articles author, should know. He is the author of The Way of Discovery: an Introduction to the Thought of Michael Polanyi (1977) and Michael Polanyi: Credere Aude: His Theory of Knowledge and Its Implications for Christian Theology (1965),…
jlynch | July 8, 2007Births
1857 - Alfred Binet, French psychologist
1895 - Igor Tamm, Russian physicist, Nobel Prize laureate
Deaths
1695 - Christiaan Huygens, Dutch scientist
1784 - Torbern Bergman, Swedish chemist
1895 - Johann Josef Loschmidt, Austrian scientist
1934 - Benjamin Baillaud, French astronomer
1939 - Havelock Ellis, British physician
1979 - Sin-Itiro Tomonaga, Japanese physicist, Nobel laureate
1979 - Robert B. Woodward, American chemist, Nobel laureate