Scientists

[sunilsringeri revanker]

[5/20, 3:33 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 20, 1964 - discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation by Robert Woodrow Wilson and Arno Penzias.

The CMB is the thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang. It is fundamental to observational cosmology as it is the oldest light in the universe. Good morning!
[5/22, 7:44 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 22, 1783 - birthday of William Sturgeon, an English physicist and inventor who made the first electromagnets, and invented the first practical English electric motor and galvanometer.

He apprenticed to a shoemaker. He joined the army and taught himself mathematics and physics. 22 years later, he became Lecturer in Science and Philosophy and in the following year he exhibited his first electromagnet. He displayed its power by lifting nine pounds with a seven-ounce piece of iron wrapped with wire through which a current from a single battery was sent. Good morning!
[5/22, 7:57 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: Today is observed as the "International Day for Biological Diversity" (or World Biodiversity Day) to promote issues related to biodiversity. The theme for 2015 is Biodiversity for Sustainable Development.
[5/23, 3:50 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 23, 2002 – The "55 parties" clause of the Kyoto Protocol is reached after its ratification by Iceland.

Article 25 of the Kyoto Protocol states that the Protocol comes into force "on the 90th day after the day on which not less than 55 countries (parties) attending the Convention, incorporating the countries which accounted for at least 55% of the total carbon dioxide emissions have accepted the Protocol".

The "55 Parties" clause was reached when Iceland ratified the Protocol. However, the ratification by Russia on 18th November 2004 satisfied the "55%" clause and brought the treaty into force on 16th February 2005 (after 90 days). Good morning!
[5/24, 5:57 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 24, 1686 - birthday of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German physicist, engineer, and glass blower who is best known for inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer and for developing a temperature scale now named after him.

Fahrenheit determined his scale by reference to three fixed points of temperature - the lowest was achieved at the equilibrium of the mixture of ice, water and ammonium chloride (0 °F), the next reference point was the temperature of water when ice was just being formed (32 °F) and the third calibration point, taken as 96 °F, selected as thermometer reading when placed under the arm or in the mouth.

The Fahrenheit scale later was redefined to make the freezing-to-boiling interval exactly 180 degrees. It is because of the scale's redefinition that normal body temperature today is taken as 98.2 degrees, whereas it was 96 degrees on Fahrenheit's original scale. Good morning!
[5/25, 6:34 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 25, 1865 - birthday of Pieter Zeeman, a Dutch physicist who shared the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics with Hendrik Lorentz for his discovery of the Zeeman effect.

The Zeeman effect is the effect of splitting a spectral line into several components in the presence of a static magnetic field. It is analogous to the Stark effect, the splitting of a spectral line into several components in the presence of an electric field.

The Zeeman effect is very important in applications such as nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, electron spin resonance spectroscopy, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and Mössbauer spectroscopy. Good morning!
[5/26, 5:32 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: Abraham de Moivre (26 May 1667 in Vitry-le-François, Champagne, France – 27 November 1754 in London, England; French pronunciation: ​[abʁaam də mwavʁ]) was a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, one of those that link complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory. He was a friend of Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and James Stirling. Among his fellow Huguenot exiles in England, he was a colleague of the editor and translator Pierre des Maizeaux.

De Moivre wrote a book on probability theory, The Doctrine of Chances, said to have been prized by gamblers. De Moivre first discovered Binet's formula, the closed-form expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth power of the golden ratio φ to the nth Fibonacci number. Good morning!
[5/26, 5:37 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 26, 1667 - birthday of Abraham de Moivre, a French mathematician known for de Moivre's formula, one of those that link complex numbers and trigonometry, and for his work on the normal distribution and probability theory.

He was a friend of Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, and James Stirling. De Moivre wrote a book the first textbook on probability theory, "The Doctrine of Chances", which was very popular among gamblers.

De Moivre first discovered Binet's formula, the closed-form expression for Fibonacci numbers linking the nth power of the golden ratio φ to the nth Fibonacci number. Good morning!
[5/27, 5:20 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 27, 1897 - birthday of Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, a British physicist and won the Nobel Prize in Physics for splitting the atomic nucleus, and was instrumental in the development of nuclear power.

In 1928, he began to work on the acceleration of protons with Ernest Walton. In 1932, they bombarded lithium with high energy neutrons, electrons and protons and succeeded in transmuting it into helium and other chemical elements. This was one of the earliest experiments to change the atomic nucleus of one element to a different nucleus by artificial means. This feat was popularly known as splitting the atom. Good morning!
[5/28, 6:02 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 28, 1879 - birthday of Milutin Milanković, a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer, doctor of technology, university professor and popularizer of science.

Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the "Canon of the Earth’s Insolation", which characterizes the climates of all the planets of the Solar system. The second contribution is the explanation of Earth's long-term climate changes caused by changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as Milankovitch cycles. This explained the ice ages occurring in the geological past of the Earth, as well as the climate changes on the Earth which can be expected in the future.

He founded planetary climatology by calculating temperatures of the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere as well as the temperature conditions on planets of the inner Solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon, as well as the depth of the atmosphere of the outer planets.

He demonstrated the interrelatedness of celestial mechanics and the Earth sciences, and enabled consistent transition from celestial mechanics to the Earth sciences and transformation of descriptive sciences into exact ones. Good morning!
[5/28, 6:12 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 28, 1879 - birthday of Milutin Milanković, a Serbian mathematician, astronomer, climatologist, geophysicist, civil engineer, doctor of technology, university professor and popularizer of science.

Milanković gave two fundamental contributions to global science. The first contribution is the "Canon of the Earth’s Insolation", which characterizes the climates of all the planets of the Solar system. The second contribution is the explanation of Earth's long-term climate changes caused by changes in the position of the Earth in comparison to the Sun, now known as Milankovitch cycles. This explained the ice ages occurring in the geological past of the Earth, as well as the climate changes on the Earth which can be expected in the future.

He founded planetary climatology by calculating temperatures of the upper layers of the Earth's atmosphere as well as the temperature conditions on planets of the inner Solar system, Mercury, Venus, Mars, and the Moon, as well as the depth of the atmosphere of the outer planets.

He demonstrated the interrelatedness of celestial mechanics and the Earth sciences, and enabled consistent transition from celestial mechanics to the Earth sciences and transformation of descriptive sciences into exact ones. Good morning!
[5/29, 8:08 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 29, 1929 - birthday of Peter Ware Higgs, a British theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize laureate "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles".

He is best known for his 1960s proposal of broken symmetry in electroweak theory, explaining the origin of mass of elementary particles in general and of the W and Z bosons in particular. This so-called Higgs mechanism, predicts the existence of a new particle, the Higgs boson.

CERN announced on 4 July 2012 that they had experimentally established the existence of a Higgs-like boson. Good morning!
[5/30, 8:15 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 30, 1908 - birthday of Hannes Olof Gösta Alfvén, a Swedish electrical engineer, plasma physicist and winner of the 1970 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on magnetohydrodynamics (MHD). He described the class of MHD waves now known as Alfvén waves.

He was originally trained as an electrical power engineer and later moved to research and teaching in the fields of plasma physics and electrical engineering.

Alfvén made many contributions to plasma physics, including theories describing the behavior of aurorae, the Van Allen radiation belts, the effect of magnetic storms on the Earth's magnetic field, the terrestrial magnetosphere, and the dynamics of plasmas in the Milky Way galaxy. Good morning!
[5/31, 6:26 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: May 31, 1852 - birthday of Julius Richard Petri, a German microbiologist who is credited with inventing the Petri dish while working as assistant to pioneering bacteriologist Robert Koch.

The Koch laboratory at the Imperial Health Office began to culture bacteria on agar plates (on the advice of the wife of another assistant!). Petri invented the standard culture dish, or Petri plate, and further developed the technique of agar culture to purify or clone bacterial colonies derived from single cells. This advance made it possible to rigorously identify the bacteria responsible for diseases. Good morning!
[6/1, 5:49 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 1, 1796 - birthday of Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, a French military engineer and physicist, often described as the "father of thermodynamics".

In his only publication, the 1824 monograph Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire, Carnot gave the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines.

Carnot's work attracted little attention during his lifetime (he died of cholera  at the age of 36), but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin to formalize the second law of thermodynamics and define the concept of entropy. Good morning!
[6/2, 7:08 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 2, 1923 - birthday of Lloyd Stowell Shapley, a distinguished mathematician and Nobel Prize–winning economist. He has contributed to the fields of mathematical economics and especially game theory. Shapley has been regarded as the very personification of game theory.

Game theory is the study of strategic decision making. Game theory is mainly used in economics, political science, and psychology, as well as logic, computer science, and biology. Good morning!
[6/3, 5:57 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 3, 1873 - birthday of Otto Loewi, a German-born pharmacologist and psychobiologist whose discovery of acetylcholine helped enhance medical therapy. The discovery earned for him the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1936.

Acetylcholine is an organic molecule that acts as a neurotransmitter. It is an ester of acetic acid and choline.

Loewi is almost as famous for the means by which the idea for his experiment came to him as he is for the experiment itself. On Easter Saturday 1921, he dreamed of an experiment that would prove once and for all that transmission of nerve impulses was chemical, not electrical. He woke up, scribbled the experiment onto a scrap of paper on his night-stand, and went back to sleep.

The next morning he arose very excited because he knew this dream had been very important. But he found, to his horror, that he couldn't read his midnight scribbles. That day, he said, was the longest day of his life, as he could not remember his dream. That night, however, he had the same dream. This time, he immediately went to his lab to perform the experiment. From that point on, the consensus was that the Nobel was not a matter of "if" but of "when." Good morning!
[6/4, 7:27 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 4, 1877 - birthday of Heinrich Otto Wieland, a German chemist who won the 1927 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into the bile acids.

Bile acid-containing micelles aid lipases to digest lipids and bring them near the intestinal membrane, which results in fat absorption.

Bile acids have other functions, including eliminating cholesterol from the body, driving the flow of bile to eliminate certain catabolites (including bilirubin), emulsifying fat-soluble vitamins to enable their absorption, and aiding in motility and the reduction of the bacteria flora found in the small intestine and biliary tract. Good morning!
[6/5, 6:27 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 5, 1862 – birthday of Allvar Gullstrand, a Swedish ophthalmologist and optician He applied the methods of physical mathematics to the study of optical images and of the refraction of light in the human eye. For this work, he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1911. Gullstrand is said to be “the only individual who practiced ophthalmology for a significant period who received a Nobel Prize.”

Gullstrand is noted also for his research on astigmatism and for improving the ophthalmoscope and corrective lenses for use after removal of a cataract from the eye. An interesting article “Gullstrand, Einstein, and the Nobel Prize” is also a good read!

Best wishes for the World Environment Day – Seven Billion Dream, One Planet, Consume with Care.
[6/6, 7:41 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 6, 1822 - Alexis St. Martin was accidentally shot with a musket at close range. The charge of the musket shot left a hole through his side that healed to form a fistula aperture into his stomach. William Beaumont, a US Army surgeon stationed at a nearby army post, treated the wound.

When the wound healed itself, the edge of the hole in the stomach had attached itself to the edge of the hole in the skin, creating a permanent gastric fistula.

This gave Beaumont an opportunity to study digestion (at a time very little was known). He could literally watch the processes of digestion by dangling food on a string into St. Martin's stomach, then later pulling it out to observe to what extent it had been digested.

Beaumont published his experiments in 1838 as "Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juice, and the Physiology of Digestion." Good morning!
[6/7, 6:40 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 7, 1862 - birthday of Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard, a German physicist and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1905 for his research on cathode rays and the discovery of many of their properties.

He confirmed some of J.J. Thomson's work, which eventually arrived at the understanding that cathode rays were streams of negatively charged energetic particles. He called them quanta of electricity or for short quanta, after Helmholtz, while J.J. Thomson proposed the name corpuscles, but eventually electrons has become the everyday term.

Lenard was the first person to study what has been termed the Lenard effect in 1892. This is the separation of electric charges accompanying the aerodynamic breakup of water drops. It is also known as spray electrification or the waterfall effect. Good morning!
[6/8, 7:08 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 8, 1625 - birthday of Giovanni Domenico Cassini, an Italian mathematician, astronomer, astrologer and engineer. Cassini discovered four satellites of the planet Saturn and noted the division of the rings of Saturn (with the Cassini Division becoming named after him).

Launched in 1997, the Cassini spaceprobe was named after him and became the fourth to visit Saturn and the first to orbit the planet. Good morning!
[6/9, 5:53 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 9, 1781 - birthday of George Stephenson, an English civil engineer and mechanical engineer who built the first public inter-city railway line in the world to use steam locomotives, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway which opened in 1830. He is renowned as the "Father of Railways".

His rail gauge of 4 feet 8 1⁄2 inches (1,435 mm), sometimes called "Stephenson gauge", is the standard gauge by name and by convention for most of the world's railways. Good morning!
[6/10, 5:47 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 10, 1832 - birthday of Nikolaus August Otto, engineer of the first internal-combustion engine to efficiently burn fuel directly in a piston chamber.

Though the concept of four strokes, with the vital compression of the mixture before ignition, had been invented and patented in 1861 by Alphonse Beau de Rochas, Otto was the first to make it practical.

The Otto engine was designed as a stationary engine and in the action of the engine, the stroke is an upward or downward movement of a piston in a cylinder. Good morning!
[6/11, 6:16 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 11, 1910 - birthday of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, a French naval officer, explorer, conservationist, filmmaker, innovator, scientist, photographer, author and researcher who studied the sea and all forms of life in water. He co-developed the Aqua-Lung, pioneered marine conservation and was a member of the Académie française.

Aqua-Lung was the original English name of the first open-circuit, "self-contained underwater breathing apparatus" (or "SCUBA") to reach worldwide popularity and commercial success. This class of equipment is now commonly referred to as a diving regulator or demand valve. Good morning!
[6/12, 7:32 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 12, 1899 - birthday of Fritz Albert Lipmann a German-American biochemist and a co-discoverer in 1945 of coenzyme A. For this, together with other research on coenzyme A, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1953 (shared with Hans Adolf Krebs).

Coenzyme A (CoA, CoASH, or HSCoA) is a coenzyme, notable for its role in the synthesis and oxidation of fatty acids, and the oxidation of pyruvate in the citric acid cycle. In humans, CoA biosynthesis requires cysteine, pantothenate and adenosine triphosphate. Good morning!
[6/13, 9:29 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 13, 1911 - birthday of Luis Walter Alvarez, an American experimental physicist, inventor, and professor who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968.

Alvarez devised a set of experiments to observe K-electron capture in radioactive nuclei, predicted by the beta decay theory but never observed. He produced tritium using the cyclotron and measured its lifetime. In collaboration with Felix Bloch, he measured the magnetic moment of the neutron. He contributed to a number of World War II radar projects.

Alvarez was involved in the design of a liquid hydrogen bubble chamber that allowed his team to take millions of photographs of particle interactions, develop complex computer systems to measure and analyse these interactions, and discover entire families of new particles and resonance states. This work resulted in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1968.

The American Journal of Physics commented, "Luis Alvarez was one of the most brilliant and productive experimental physicists of the twentieth century." Good morning!
[6/14, 6:04 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 14, 1736 - birthday of Charles-Augustin de Coulomb, a French physicist. He was best known for developing Coulomb's law, the definition of the electrostatic force of attraction and repulsion, and his work on friction. Coulomb was also a pioneer in the field of geotechnical engineering (his most valuable contribution being the retaining wall design).

The SI unit of electric charge, the coulomb, was named after him. His name is one of the 72 names of French scientists, engineers and mathematicians inscribed on the Eiffel Tower. Good morning!
[6/15, 7:02 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 15, 1667 – The first fully documented human blood transfusion was administered by Dr. Jean-Baptiste Denys.

He transfused about twelve ounces of sheep blood into a 15-year old boy, who had been bled with leeches 20 times. The boy survived the transfusion possibly due to the small amount of blood that was actually transfused into these people, which allowed him to withstand the allergic reaction.

Denys' experiments with animal blood provoked a heated controversy in France, and in 1670 the procedure was banned. It wasn't until after Karl Landsteiner's discovery of the four blood groups in 1902 that blood transfusions became safe and reliable. Good morning!
[6/16, 6:46 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 16, 2010 – Bhutan becomes the first country to institute a total ban on tobacco. The Tobacco Control Act of Bhutan regulates tobacco and tobacco products, banning the cultivation, harvesting, production, and sale of tobacco and tobacco products in Bhutan.

Premised on the physical health and well being of the Bhutanese people – important elements of Gross National Happiness – the Tobacco Control Act recognizes the harmful effects of tobacco consumption and exposure to tobacco smoke on both spiritual and social health. Good morning!
[6/17, 12:37 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 17, 1832 - birthday of Sir William Crookes, a British chemist and physicist who worked on spectroscopy. He was a pioneer of vacuum tubes, inventing the Crookes tube and the Crookes radiometer (which today is made and sold as a novelty item).

A Crookes tube is an early experimental electrical discharge tube, with partial vacuum, in which cathode rays, streams of electrons, were discovered. The Crookes radiometer, also known as a light mill, consists of an airtight glass bulb, containing a partial vacuum. Inside are a set of vanes which are mounted on a spindle. The vanes rotate when exposed to light, with faster rotation for more intense light, providing a quantitative measurement of electromagnetic radiation intensity. Good afternoon!
[6/18, 6:18 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 18, 1845 - birthday of Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran, a French physician who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1907 for his discoveries of parasitic protozoans as causative agents of infectious diseases such as malaria and trypanosomiasis.

In 1880, while working in the military hospital in Constantine, Algeria, he discovered that the cause of malaria is a protozoan, after observing the parasites in a blood smear taken from a patient who had just died of malaria. He found the causative organism to be a protozoan which he named Oscillaria malariae, but later renamed Plasmodium. This was the first time that protozoans were shown to be a cause of disease of any kind. The discovery was therefore a validation of the germ theory of diseases.

Laveran later worked on the trypanosomes, particularly sleeping sickness, and showed once again that protozoans were responsible for the disease. Good morning!
[6/19, 7:34 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 19, 1623 - birthday of Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Christian philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen.

Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum.

In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines. After three years of effort and fifty prototypes, he built 20 finished machines (called Pascalines) over the following ten years, establishing him as one of the first two inventors of the mechanical calculator.

19 June is also celebrated as the World Sickle Cell Day.

Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) is the most frequent genetic disease worldwide. It is estimated that 500,000 are born every year with this severe and invalidating condition and that 50% of them will die before the age of 5 years. Good morning!
[6/20, 6:54 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 20, 1945 – The United States Secretary of State approves the transfer of Wernher von Braun and his team of Nazi rocket scientists to America.

Braun was a rocket scientist and space architect credited with inventing the V-2 Rocket and the Saturn-V, for Nazi Germany and the United States, respectively. He was one of the leading figures in the development of rocket technology in WWII Germany and the United States and is considered by NASA to be the "Father of Rocket Science" (in reality it is Tipu Sultan).

His dream to help mankind set foot on the Moon became a reality on July 16, 1969 when a Saturn V rocket launched the crew of Apollo 11 on its historic eight-day mission. Over the course of the program, Saturn V rockets enabled six teams of astronauts to reach the surface of the Moon. Good morning!
[6/21, 6:09 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: ‎June 21, 1781 - birthday of Siméon Denis Poisson, a French mathematician, geometer, and physicist. Poisson's name is attached to a wide variety of ideas, for example - Poisson's integral, Poisson's equation in potential theory, Poisson brackets in differential equations, Poisson's ratio in elasticity, and Poisson's constant in electricity.

The Poisson distribution, a discrete probability distribution, is named after him. A practical application of this distribution was made by Ladislaus Bortkiewicz in 1898 when he was given the task of investigating the number of soldiers in the Prussian army killed accidentally by horse kicks; this experiment introduced the Poisson distribution to the field of reliability engineering.

Poisson frequently said, "Life is good for only two things - discovering mathematics and teaching mathematics."

‎Wishing you a successful "International Day of Yoga"
[6/22, 5:35 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 22, 1978 – Charon is discovered by American astronomer James W. Christy. Charon, also called (134340) Pluto I, is the largest satellite of the dwarf planet Pluto. Christy first suggested the name Charon as a scientific-sounding version of his wife Charlene's nickname, "Char".

Charon is a very large moon in comparison to its parent body, Pluto (11.6% mass of Pluto). Its gravitational influence is such that the barycenter (centre of mass) of the Pluto–Charon system lies outside Pluto, it has been argued that Charon should be considered to be part of a binary system.

The other moons of Pluto, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx, orbit the same barycenter, but they are not large enough to be spherical, and they are simply considered to be satellites of Pluto.
[6/23, 5:42 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 23, 1912 - birthday of Alan Mathison Turing, a British pioneering computer scientist, mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher, mathematical biologist, and marathon and ultra distance runner.

He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general purpose computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence.

An interesting book which talks about Turing's contribution to field of study cryptography is "The Code Book" by Simon Singh. Don't miss the cipher challenge at the end of the book. Good morning!
[6/24, 6:58 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 24, 1927 - birthday of Martin Lewis Perl, an American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics  in 1995 jointly with Frederick Reines. The prize was awarded "for pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics". Perl received half "for the discovery of the tau lepton" while Reines received his share "for the detection of the neutrino".

The tau lepton (τ, also called the tau particle, tauon or simply tau) is an elementary particle similar to the electron, with negative electric charge and a spin of 1⁄2, but with 3477 times the mass. Together with the electron, the muon, and the three neutrinos, it is classified as a lepton.

The symbol τ was derived from the Greek τρίτον (triton, meaning "third" in English), since it was the third charged lepton discovered. Good morning!
[6/25, 7:07 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 25, 1864 - birthday of Walther Hermann Nernst, a German physicist who is known for his theories behind the calculation of chemical affinity as embodied in the third law of thermodynamics, for which he won the 1920 Nobel Prize in chemistry.

Nernst helped establish the modern field of physical chemistry and contributed to electrochemistry, thermodynamics and solid state physics. He is also known for developing the Nernst equation.

Nernst invented, in 1897 an electric lamp, using an incandescent ceramic rod. His invention, known as the Nernst lamp, was the successor to the carbon lamp of Edison and the precursor to the tungsten incandescent lamp of his student Irving Langmuir. Good morning!
[6/26, 6:57 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 26, 1824 - birthday of William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin a British mathematical physicist and engineer. He did important work in the mathematical analysis of electricity and formulation of the first and second laws of thermodynamics, and did much to unify the discipline of physics in its modern form.

Absolute temperatures are stated in units of kelvin in his honour. While the existence of a lower limit to temperature (absolute zero) was known prior to his work, Lord Kelvin is widely known for determining its correct value as approximately −273.15 degree Celsius or −459.67 degree Fahrenheit. Good morning!
[6/27, 6:54 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 27, 1806 - birthday of Augustus De Morgan, a British mathematician and logician. He formulated De Morgan's laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, making its idea rigorous.

Mathematical induction is a method of mathematical proof typically used to establish a given statement for all natural numbers.

He also promoted the work of the self-taught Indian mathematician Ramchundra, who has been called De Morgan's Ramanujan. He supervised the publication in London of Ramchundra's book on "Maxima and Minima" in 1859. De Morgan was born in Madurai, Madras Presidency, India.

Today is also the birthday of Helen Keller. Good morning!
[6/28, 6:45 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 28, 1873 - birthday of Alexis Carrel, a French surgeon and biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1912 for pioneering vascular suturing techniques. He invented the first perfusion pump with Charles A. Lindbergh opening the way to organ transplantation.

Carrel was a young surgeon in 1894 when the French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated with a knife. His large abdominal veins had been severed, and surgeons who treated the president felt that such veins were too large to be successfully reconnected. This left a deep impression on Carrel, and he set about developing new techniques for suturing blood vessels. Good morning!
[6/29, 5:22 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 29, 1893 - birthday of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis, an Indian scientist and applied statistician. He is best remembered for the Mahalanobis distance, a statistical measure. He founded the Indian Statistical Institute, and contributed to the design of large-scale sample surveys.

He made pioneering studies in anthropometry in India. Anthropometry involves the systematic measurement of the physical properties of the human body, primarily dimensional descriptors of body size and shape. Today, anthropometry plays an important role in industrial design, clothing design, ergonomics and architecture where statistical data about the distribution of body dimensions in the population are used to optimize products. Good morning!
[6/30, 6:22 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: June 30, 2015 - Today - the day will be longer by 1 second, called the leap second. While a typical 24 hour day has 86,400 seconds, it takes the Earth 86,400.002 seconds to complete a rotation. A leap second is added to compensate for the additional fraction.

This happens because Earth's rotation is slowing down, thanks to a kind of braking force caused by the gravitational tug of war among Earth, the sun and the moon. Many other factors can affect the length of a day. For example, seasonal and daily weather changes can influence the length of a day by several milliseconds every year.

Scientists added about one leap second every year from 1972 to 1999, but leap seconds have become less frequent since then; today's extra second is only the fourth since 2000.

The extra second can create glitches for stock traders, computer programmers and airline companies unless their systems are prepared for the change. Good morning!
[7/1, 6:30 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 1, 1882 - birthday of Bidhan Chandra Roy, the second Chief Minister of West Bengal in India. He  was a highly respected physician and a renowned freedom fighter.

Bidhan Roy is often considered the great architect of West Bengal, who founded five eminent cities, Durgapur, Kalyani, Bidhannagar, Ashokenagar, Habra.

He was an alumnus of the Medical College Calcutta of the University of Calcutta. The National Doctors' Day is celebrated on the date of his birth (and death) 1 July every year.

He was awarded Bharat Ratna on 4 February 1961. Good morning!
[7/2, 7:15 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 2, 1862 - birthday of Sir William Henry Bragg, a British physicist, chemist, mathematician and active sportsman who uniquely shared a Nobel Prize with his son William Lawrence Bragg – the 1915 Nobel Prize in Physics: "for their services in the analysis of crystal structure by means of X-rays".

He invented the X-ray spectrometer and with his son (then a research student at Cambridge), founded the new science of X-ray crystallography, the analysis of crystal structure using X-ray diffraction.

The mineral Braggite is named after him and his son. Good morning!
[7/3, 6:38 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 3, 1518 - birthday of Li Shizhen, was a Han Chinese polymath, medical doctor, scientist, pharmacologist, herbalist and acupuncturist of the Ming dynasty. His major contribution to clinical medicine was his 27-year work, which is found in his scientific book Compendium of Materia Medica (Bencao Gangmu).

He is also considered to be the greatest scientific naturalist of China, and developed many innovative methods for the proper classification of herb components and medications to be used for treating diseases.

The Bencao Gangmu is a medical text with 1,892 entries, each entry with its own name called a gang. The mu in the title refers to the synonyms of each name. The book has details about more than 1,800 drugs including 1,100 illustrations and 11,000 prescriptions. It also described the type, form, flavor, nature and application in disease treatments of 1,094 herbs. Good morning!
[7/4, 6:25 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 4, 2012 – The discovery of particles consistent with the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider is announced at CERN. The Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs, one of six physicists who, in 1964, proposed the mechanism that suggested the existence of such a particle.

The Higgs boson is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics. Observations of the particle allows scientists to explore the Higgs field—a fundamental field of crucial importance to particle physics theory, that unlike other known fields such as the electromagnetic field, takes a non-zero constant value almost everywhere.

Higgs boson has often been called the "God particle", from a 1993 book on the topic; the nickname is strongly disliked by many physicists, including Higgs, who regard it as inappropriate sensationalism. Good morning!
[7/5, 6:32 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 5, 1687 – Isaac Newton published his book "Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica" (Latin for "Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy").

Often referred to as just "The Principia", it states Newton's laws of motion, forming the foundation of classical mechanics, also Newton's law of universal gravitation, and a derivation of Kepler's laws of planetary motion (which Kepler first obtained empirically).

The Principia is "justly regarded as one of the most important works in the history of science". Good morning!
[7/6, 2:01 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 6, 1885 – Louis Pasteur successfully tests his vaccine against rabies on Joseph Meister, a boy who was bitten by a rabid dog.

Despite the fact that he could have been prosecuted for practicing medicine without a license as he was not a medical doctor, Pasteur decided to treat the boy with a rabies virus vaccine grown in rabbits and weakened by drying, using an untested version of a treatment he had earlier tried on dogs. The treatment was successful and the boy did not develop rabies.

Pasteur is best known to the general public for his invention of the technique of treating milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurization.

He is regarded as one of the three main founders of bacteriology, together with Ferdinand Cohn and Robert Koch, and is popularly known as the "father of microbiology". Good morning!
[7/6, 7:19 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 7, 1843 - birthday of Camillo Golgi, an Italian physician, biologist, pathologist, scientist, and Nobel laureate. Several structures and phenomena in anatomy and physiology are named after him, including the Golgi apparatus, the Golgi tendon organ and the Golgi tendon reflex.

The Golgi apparatus also known as the Golgi complex, Golgi body, or simply the Golgi, is an organelle found in most eukaryotic cells. It is a major collection and dispatch station of protein products received from the endoplasmic reticulum.

Golgi is recognized as the greatest neuroscientist and biologist of his time. Golgi, together with Santiago Ramón y Cajal, received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1906 for his studies of the structure of the nervous system. Good evening!
[7/7, 9:48 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 8, 1895 - birthday of Igor Yevgenyevich Tamm, a Soviet physicist who received the 1958 Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov and Ilya Frank, for their 1934 discovery of Cherenkov radiation.

Cherenkov radiation is electromagnetic radiation emitted when a charged particle (such as an electron) passes through a dielectric medium at a speed greater than the phase velocity of light in that medium.

The characteristic blue glow of an underwater nuclear reactor is due to Cherenkov radiation. Good evening!
[7/8, 6:51 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 9, 1819 - birthday of Elias Howe, Jr.,  an American inventor and sewing machine pioneer.

Howe was not the first to conceive of the idea of a sewing machine. However, Howe originated significant refinements to the design concepts of his predecessors, and on September 10, 1846, he was awarded the first patent for a sewing machine using a lockstitch design.

Howe also received a patent for an "Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure", the zip! Perhaps because of the success of his sewing machine, he did not try to seriously market it, missing recognition he might otherwise have received. Good evening!
[7/9, 5:03 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 10, 1902 - birthday of Kurt Alder, a German chemist and Nobel laureate. Alder received the 1950 Nobel Prize in Chemistry which he shared with his teacher Diels for their work on what is now known as the Diels–Alder reaction.

The Diels–Alder reaction is an organic chemical reaction between a conjugated diene and a substituted alkene, commonly termed the dienophile, to form a substituted cyclohexene system.

The lunar crater Alder is named in his honour. The insecticide aldrin, created through a Diels–Alder reaction, is also named after the scientist. Good evening!
[7/10, 9:46 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 11, 1801 – French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons makes his first comet discovery.

Pons was born in a poor family and received little formal education. He began working for the Marseille observatory as a caretaker, and gradually gained some experience in assisting the astronomers with observations. He learned to make observations himself, and had a remarkable ability to remember star fields and note changes in them.

In his early astronomical career, Pons was often the target of jokes perpetrated by more experienced astronomers. Franz Xaver von Zach once advised him to look for comets when sunspots were visible, though in doing so Zach may have inadvertently given Pons very good advice.

Between 1801 and 1827, Pons discovered thirty-seven comets, more than any other person in history. Good night!
[7/11, 9:32 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 12, 1863 - birthday of Léon Charles Albert Calmette, a French physician, bacteriologist and immunologist, and an officer of the Pasteur Institute.

He discovered the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin, an attenuated form of Mycobacterium used in the BCG vaccine against tuberculosis. He also developed the first antivenom for snake venom, the Calmette's serum.

The BCG vaccine can be anywhere from 0 to 80% effective in preventing tuberculosis for a duration of 15 years. It is on the WHO's List of Essential Medicines, a list of the most important medication needed in a basic health system. Good night!
[7/12, 6:47 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 13, 1831 - birthday of Jakob Ernst Arthur Böttcher, a Baltic German pathologist and anatomist.

Böttcher is largely known for his anatomical investigations of the inner ear, particularly studies involving the structure of the reticular lamina and nerve fibers of the organ of Corti.

Today his name is associated with the eponymous "Bottcher cells", which are cells of the basilar membrane of the cochlea. Other anatomical terms that contain his name are - Böttcher's canal, Böttcher's ganglion, Böttcher's space and Charcot-Böttcher filaments. Good evening!
[7/13, 5:08 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 14, 1921 - birthday of Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson, an English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.

He is well known for his development of Wilkinson's catalyst RhCl(PPh3)3, and for the discovery of the structure of ferrocene. Wilkinson's catalyst is used industrially in the hydrogenation of alkenes to alkanes.

He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his work on “organometallic compounds” (with Ernst Otto Fischer).

He is also well known for writing, with his student F. Albert Cotton, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry", often referred to simply as "Cotton and Wilkinson", one of the standard inorganic chemistry textbooks. Good evening!
[7/13, 5:08 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 14, 1921 - birthday of Sir Geoffrey Wilkinson, an English chemist who pioneered inorganic chemistry and homogeneous transition metal catalysis.

He is well known for his development of Wilkinson's catalyst RhCl(PPh3)3, and for the discovery of the structure of ferrocene. Wilkinson's catalyst is used industrially in the hydrogenation of alkenes to alkanes.

He received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1973 for his work on “organometallic compounds” (with Ernst Otto Fischer).

He is also well known for writing, with his student F. Albert Cotton, "Advanced Inorganic Chemistry", often referred to simply as "Cotton and Wilkinson", one of the standard inorganic chemistry textbooks. Good evening!
[7/14, 8:00 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 15, 1922 - birthday of Leon Max Lederman, an American experimental physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988, along with Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger, for their research on neutrinos - "for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino."

Among his achievements are the discovery of the muon neutrino in 1962 and the bottom quark in 1977. He is Director Emeritus of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA.

In 1977, a group of physicists led by Leon Lederman announced that a particle with a mass of about 6.0 GeV was being produced by the Fermilab particle accelerator. The particle's initial name was the greek letter Upsilon. After taking further data, the group discovered that this particle did not actually exist, and the "discovery" was named "Oops-Leon" as a pun on the original name and Lederman's first name. Good evening!
[7/15, 4:32 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 16, 2186 - A total solar eclipse will occur on this day. This will be the longest total solar eclipse between the dates of 4000 BC and at least 8000AD, lasting a maximum of 7 minutes, 29 seconds.

The factors that will make this such a long eclipse are:
1. The Earth being very near aphelion (furthest away from the Sun in its elliptical orbit, making its angular diameter nearly as small as possible). This occurs around July 6th.

2. The Moon being almost exactly at perigee.

3. The midpoint of the eclipse being very close to the Earth's equator, where the orbital velocity is greatest.

4. The midpoint of the eclipse being near the subsolar point (the part of the Earth closest to the Sun, and therefore also closest to the Moon during an eclipse).

5. The vector of the eclipse path at the midpoint of the eclipse aligning with the vector of the Earth's rotation (i.e. not diagonal but due east).

Good evening!
[7/16, 7:19 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 17, 1894 - birthday of Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven.

He proposed (independently of Russian physicist Alexander Friedman) the theory of the expansion of the universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble.

He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article.

Lemaître also proposed what became known as the Big Bang theory of the origin of the Universe, which he called his "hypothesis of the primeval atom" or the "Cosmic Egg". Good evening!
[7/17, 6:31 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 18, 1853 - birthday of Hendrik Antoon Lorentz, a Dutch physicist who won the 1902 Nobel Prize in Physics. He derived the transformation equations subsequently used by Albert Einstein to describe space and time.

Lorentz theorized that the atoms might consist of charged particles and suggested that the oscillations of these charged particles were the source of light.

When Pieter Zeeman (a colleague and former student of Lorentz) discovered the Zeeman effect in 1896, Lorentz supplied its theoretical interpretation. The experimental and theoretical work was honored with the Nobel prize.

Lorentz' name is now associated with the Lorentz-Lorenz formula, the Lorentz force, the Lorentzian distribution, and the Lorentz transformation. Good evening!
[7/18, 6:09 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 19, 1938 - birthday of Jayant Vishnu Narlikar an Indian astrophysicist. Narlikar is a proponent of steady state cosmology.

He developed with Sir Fred Hoyle the conformal gravity theory, commonly known as Hoyle–Narlikar theory. It synthesises Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and Mach's Principle. Based on this theory, the gravitational constant G decreases strongly with time.

Narlikar was awarded Padma Vibhushan in 2004 for his research work. Good evening!
[7/19, 5:05 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 20, 1822 - birthday of Gregor Johann Mendel, a German-speaking Moravian scientist who gained posthumous fame as the founder of the modern science of genetics.

Though farmers had known for centuries that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity, now referred to as the laws of Mendelian inheritance.

The profound significance of Mendel's work was not recognized until the turn of the 20th century (more than three decades later) with the independent rediscovery of these laws. Good evening!
[7/20, 7:16 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 21, 1923 – birthday of Rudolph Arthur Marcus, a Canadian chemist who received the 1992 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for his contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems".

Marcus theory is a theory developed by him, starting in 1956, to explain the rates of electron transfer reactions – the rate at which an electron can move or jump from one chemical species (called the electron donor) to another (called the electron acceptor).

It was originally formulated to address outer sphere electron transfer reactions, in which the two chemical species only change in their charge with an electron jumping, but do not undergo large structural changes. It was extended to include inner sphere electron transfer contributions. Good evening!
[7/21, 8:24 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 22, 1784 - birthday of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel, a German astronomer, mathematician, physicist and geodesist. He was the first astronomer who determined reliable values for the distance from the sun to another star by the method of parallax.

While studying the dynamics of 'many-body' gravitational systems, Bessel developed what are now known as Bessel functions. Critical for the solution of certain differential equations, these functions are used throughout both classical and quantum physics.

Even in the absence of any work in astronomy, Bessel's role in developing the Bessel's functions by itself, placed him among the most significant and influential mathematicians. Good evening!
[7/22, 8:24 AM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 22 - observed as Pi Approximation Day, since the fraction 22⁄7 is a common approximation of π, which is accurate to two decimal places and dates from Archimedes.

The number π is a mathematical constant, the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, commonly approximated as 3.14159. It has been represented by the Greek letter "π" since the mid-18th century.

Being an irrational number, π cannot be expressed exactly as a common fraction. Its decimal representation never ends and never settles into a permanent repeating pattern. The digits appear to be randomly distributed; however, to date, no proof of this has been discovered. Good morning!
[7/22, 7:26 PM] Pravin Kumar SVYM H D Kote: July 23, 1995 – Comet Hale–Bopp is discovered by Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp; it becomes visible to the naked eye on Earth nearly a year later.

Comet Hale–Bopp (formally designated C/1995 O1) was one of the brightest comet seen for many decades. It was visible to the naked eye for a record 18 months, twice as long as the previous record holder, the Great Comet of 1811.

The comet may have been observed by ancient Egyptians during the reign of pharaoh Pepi I (2332–2283 BC). In Pepi's pyramid in Saqqara is a text referring to an "nhh-star" as a companion of the pharaoh in the heavens, where "nhh" is the hieroglyph for long hair. Good evening!