100 Greatest Science Discoveries - Final Part

Couple of Days back i started reading 100 Greatest Science Discoveries of All Time Book By Kendall Haven.

I wanted to share few important quotations i found from this book from 75 - 100 top discoveries.

With This book has been completed.

76) The Function of Genes - Beadle discovered how genes perform their vital function.

George Wells Beadle (October 22, 1903 – June 9, 1989) was an American scientist in the field of genetics, and Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine Nobel laureate who with Edward Lawrie Tatum discovered the role of genes in regulating biochemical events within cells.

Beadle and Tatum's key experiments involved exposing the bread mold Neurospora crassa to x-rays, causing mutations. In a series of experiments, they showed that these mutations caused changes in specific enzymes involved in metabolic pathways. These experiments led them to propose a direct link between genes and enzymatic reactions, known as the "one gene, one enzyme" hypothesis.

Beadle was born in Wahoo, Nebraska. He received his Bachelor of Science degree in agronomy from the University of Nebraska's College of Agriculture in 1926 where he was a member of FarmHouse fraternity. At the recommendation of his advisor, Franklin D. Keim, he then entered graduate school in agronomy at Cornell University, intending to study ecology. He soon switched his focus to genetics and cytology, pursuing research on maize (corn) genetics under Rollins Adams Emerson—including some collaboration with Barbara McClintock. He received his Ph.D. from Cornell in 1931.

Fun Facts: Humans have between 25,000 and 28,000 genes. Different genes direct every aspect of your growth and looks. Some do nothing at all. Called recessive genes, they patiently wait to be passed on to the next
generation, when they might have the chance to be come dominant and control some thing.

77) Ecosystem - The plants, animals, and environment in a given place are all interdependent.

Sir Arthur George Tansley (August 15, 1871 - November 25, 1955) was an English botanist who was a pioneer in the science of ecology. From the start, he was much influenced by the Danish plant ecologist Eugenius Warming. He championed the term ecosystem in 1935 and ecotope in 1939. He was one of the founders of the British Ecological Society, and editor of the Journal of Ecology for twenty years. The prestigious botany journal 'New Phytologist' publishes a special paper in each issue called the "Tansley Review". These articles are typically a synthesis of modern ideas in botany, and is named after Arthur Tansley. The Tansley Review is always available free to anyone via the New Phytologist Trust.

Arthur Tansley also theorised about psychology, with a psychoanalytic emphasis. His The New Psychology and its Relation to Life (1920) was his first book to attract a broad readership. Recent research by Peder Anker has argued a close theoretical relationship between Tansley's ecology and his psychology.

Fun Facts: An important eco system service that most people don’t think about is pollination. Ninety percent of the world’s food crops would not exist with out pollinators like bees, bats, and wasps.

78) Weak and Strong Force - The last two of the four fundamental physics forces of nature.

Carlo Rubbia (born on March 31, 1934 in Gorizia, Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy) is an Italian physicist at CERN who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984, a prize he shared with Simon van der Meer.

Rubbia received a PhD doing cosmic ray experiments at Scuola Normale in Pisa in 1959. He then went to the United States where he spent about one and a half years at Columbia University performing experiments on the decay and the nuclear capture of muons. This was the first of a long series of experiments which Rubbia has performed in the field of Weak Interactions and which culminated in the Noble Prize-winning work at CERN.

In 1961 he moved back to Europe, attracted by the newly founded CERN where he worked on experiments on the structure of weak interactions. CERN had just commissioned a new type of accelerator, the Intersecting Storage Rings, using counter-rotating beams of protons colliding against each other. Rubbia and his collaborators conducted experiments there, again studying the weak force. The main results in this field were the observation of the structure in the elastic scattering process and the first observation of the charmed baryons. These experiments were crucial in order to perfect the techniques needed later for the discovery of more exotic particles in a different type of particle collider.

In 1970 Rubbia was appointed Higgins Professor of Physics at Harvard University (Cambridge, Massachusetts), where he spent one semester per year, while continuing his reserch activities at CERN. In 1989, he was appointed Director-General of the CERN Laboratory.

Hideki Yukawa FRSE , was a Japanese theoretical physicist and the first Japanese Nobel laureate.

Yukawa was born in Tokyo, Japan. In 1929, after receiving his degree from Kyoto Imperial University he stayed on as a lecturer for four years. After graduation, he was interested in theoretical physics, particularly in the theory of elementary particles. In 1932, he married Sumi and had two sons, Harumi and Takaaki. In 1933 he became an assistant professor at Osaka University, at age 26.

Fun Facts: Hideki Yukawa was the first Japanese to win the Nobel prize.

79) Metabolism - Krebs discovered the circular chain of chemical reactions that turns sugars into energy inside a cell and drives me tabolism.

Hans Adolf Krebs (August 25, 1900 – November 22, 1981) was a German, later British medical doctor and biochemist. Krebs is best known for his identification of two important metabolic cycles: the urea cycle and the citric acid cycle. The latter, the key sequence of metabolic chemical reactions that produces energy in cells, is also known as the Krebs cycle and earned him a Nobel Prize in 1953.

He was born in Hildesheim, Germany, to Alma and Georg Krebs. His father, Georg, was an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Hans went to school in Hildesheim and studied medicine at the University of Göttingen and at the University of Freiburg from 1918–1923. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg in 1925, then studied chemistry in Berlin for one year, where he later became an assistant of Otto Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology until 1930. He then returned to clinical medicine at the municipal hospital of Altona and then at the medical clinic of the University of Freiburg, where he conducted research and discovered the urea cycle.

Fun Facts: The average per son’s body could theoretically generate 100 watts of electricity using a bio-nano generator, a nano-scale electrochemical fuel cell that draws power from blood glucose much the same way
the body generates energy using the Krebs Cycle.

80) Coelacanth - A living fish species thought to be extinct for 80 million years.

Hans Adolf Krebs (August 25, 1900 – November 22, 1981) was a German, later British medical doctor and biochemist. Krebs is best known for his identification of two important metabolic cycles: the urea cycle and the citric acid cycle. The latter, the key sequence of metabolic chemical reactions that produces energy in cells, is also known as the Krebs cycle and earned him a Nobel Prize in 1953.

He was born in Hildesheim, Germany, to Alma and Georg Krebs. His father, Georg, was an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. Hans went to school in Hildesheim and studied medicine at the University of Göttingen and at the University of Freiburg from 1918–1923. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Hamburg in 1925, then studied chemistry in Berlin for one year, where he later became an assistant of Otto Warburg at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Biology until 1930. He then returned to clinical medicine at the municipal hospital of Altona and then at the medical clinic of the University of Freiburg, where he conducted research and discovered the urea cycle.

Fun Facts: The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources recently surveyed 40,177 spe cies. Of that total,16,119 are now listed as threatened with extinction. This includes one in
three amphibians and a quarter of the world’s coniferous trees, as well as one in eight birds and one in four mammals.

81) Nuclear Fission - The discovery of how to split uranium atoms apart and produce vast amounts of energy.

Lise Meitner (November 7 or 17 1878 – October 27, 1968) was an Austrian-born, later Swedish physicist who studied radioactivity and nuclear physics.

Lise Meitner was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission, an achievement for which her colleague Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Meitner is often mentioned as one of the most glaring examples of scientific achievement that was ostensibly overlooked by the Nobel committee. A 1997 Physics Today study concluded that Meitner's omission was "a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist" from the Nobel.

Lise Meitner was born into a Jewish family as the third of eight children in Vienna, 2nd district (Leopoldstadt). Her father, Philipp Meitner, was one of the first Jewish lawyers in Austria. She was born on November 7, 1878 . She also shortened her name from Elise to Lise. It is not known why she did so.The birth register of Vienna's Jewish community lists Meitner as being born on November 17, 1878 but all other documents list it as November 7, which is what she used. Meitner was the second woman to earn a doctoral degree in physics at the University of Vienna.

Fun Facts: After Lise Meitner’s death, the 109th element on the Periodic Chart of Elements was named after her: “meitnerium.”

82) Blood Plasma - Plasma is that portion of human blood that remains after red blood cells have been sepa rated out.

Dr. Charles Richard Drew (June 3, 1904 – April 1, 1950) was an American physician and medical researcher. He researched in the field of blood transfusions, developing improved techniques for blood storage, and applied his expert knowledge in developing large-scale blood banks early in World War II. He protested against the practice of racial segregation in the donation of blood from donors of different races since it lacked scientific foundation. In 1943, Drew's distinction in his profession was recognized when he became the first African American surgeon to serve as an examiner on the American Board of Surgery.

He is often falsely credited with the "invention" of the blood bank. During World War I, Dr. Oswald H. Robertson of the US Army preserved blood in a citrate-glucose solution and stored it in cooled containers for later transfusion. This was the first use of "banked" blood. By the mid-1930s the Russians had set up a national network of facilities for the collection, typing, and storage of blood. Bernard Fantus, influenced by the Russian program, established the first hospital blood bank in the United States at Chicago's Cook County Hospital in 1937. It was Fantus who coined the term "blood bank."

Charles Richard Drew was born on June 3, 1904 in Washington D.C. to Nora and Richard Drew. Drew attended Meads Mill Elementary School, and began working as a paperboy selling copies of the Washington Times and Herald while attending school. Instead, he found work at construction sites. In 1918, he enrolled in Dunbar High School. Dunbar was a segregated high school that had a reputation for being one of the strongest Black public schools in the country. He also was an athlete. Drew’s athleticism won him a partial scholarship to Amherst College in Massachusetts. Drew’s sister, Elsie who was ailing with tuberculosis, died of pandemic influenza in 1920. This loss is said to have influenced him to study medicine.

Fun Facts: Is all blood red? No. Crabs have blue blood. Their blood contains cop per in stead of iron. Earth worms and leeches have green blood; the green co mes from an iron sub stance called chlorocruorin. Many inverte brates, such as star fish, have clear or yellowish blood.

83) Semiconductor Transistor - Semi conductor material can be turned, momentarily, into a super conductor.

John Bardeen was born in Madison, Wisconsin, May 23, 1908.

He attended the University High School in Madison for several years, and graduated from Madison Central High School in 1923. This was followed by a course in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin, where he took extra work in mathematics and physics. After being out for a term while working in the engineering department of the Western Electric Company at Chicago, he graduated with a B.S. in electrical engineering in 1928. He continued on at Wisconsin as a graduate research assistant in electrical engineering for two years, working on mathematical problems in applied geophysics and on radiation from antennas. It was during this period that he was first introduced to quantum theory by Professor J.H. Van Vleck.

Professor Leo J. Peters, under whom his research in geophysics was done, took a position at the Gulf Research Laboratories in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Dr. Bardeen followed him there and worked during the next three years (1930-33) on the development of methods for the interpretation of magnetic and gravitational surveys. This was a stimulating period in which geophysical methods were first being applied to prospecting for oil.

Because he felt his interests were in theoretical science, Dr. Bardeen resigned his position at Gulf in 1933 to take graduate work in mathematical physics at Princeton University. It was here, under the leadership of Professor E.P. Wigner, that he first became interested in solid state physics. Before completing his thesis (on the theory of the work function of metals) he was offered a position as Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. He spent the next three years there working with Professors Van Vleck and Bridgman on problems in cohesion and electrical conduction in metals and also did some work on the level density of nuclei. The Ph.D. degree at Princeton was awarded in 1936.

From 1938-41 Dr. Bardeen was an assistant professor of physics at the University of Minnesota and from 1941-45 a civilian physicist at the Naval Ordnance Laboratory in Washington, D.C. His war years were spent working on the influence fields of ships for application to underwater ordnance and minesweeping. After the war, he joined the solid-state research group at the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and remained there until 1951, when he was appointed Professor of Electrical Engineering and of Physics at the University of Illinois. Since 1959 he has also been a member of the Center for Advanced Study of the University.

Dr. Bardeen's main fields of research since 1945 have been electrical conduction in semiconductors and metals, surface properties of semiconductors, theory of superconductivity, and diffusion of atoms in solids. The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded in 1956 to John Bardeen, Walter H. Brattain, and William Shockley for "investigations on semiconductors and the discovery of the transistor effect," carried on at the Bell Telephone Laboratories. In 1957, Bardeen and two colleagues, L.N. Cooper and J.R. Schrieffer, proposed the first successful explanation of superconductivity, which has been a puzzle since its discovery in 1908. Much of his research effort since that time has been devoted to further extensions and applications of the theory. Dr. Bardeen died in 1991.

Fun Facts: The first transistor radio, the Regency TR-1, hit the market on October 18, 1954. It cost $49.95 (the equivalent of $361 in 2005 dollars!). It wasn’t until the late 1960s that transistor radios became cheap enough for every one to afford one.

84) The Big Bang - The universe began with the giant explosion of an infinitely dense,atom-sized point of matter.

George Gamow was a Russian Empire-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He discovered alpha decay via quantum tunneling and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, star formation, stellar nucleosynthesis, big bang nucleosynthesis, nucleocosmogenesis and genetics.

Fun Facts: Gamow was an imposing figure at six feet, three inches and over 225 pounds but was known for his impish practical jokes. He was once described as “the only scientist in America with a real sense of humor” by a United Press International reporter.

85) Definition of Information - Information can both follow all mathematical and physical laws created to describe matter and act like physical matter.

Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001), an American electrical engineer and mathematician, was "the father of information theory".

Shannon is famous for having founded information theory with one landmark paper published in 1948. But he is also credited with founding both digital computer and digital circuit design theory in 1937, when, as a 21-year-old master's student at MIT, he wrote a thesis demonstrating that electrical application of Boolean algebra could construct and resolve any logical, numerical relationship. It has been claimed that this was the most important master's thesis of all time.

Fun Facts: There are 6,000 new computer viruses released every month.

86) Jumpin’ Genes - Genes are not permanently fixed on chromosomes, but can jump from position to position.

Barbara McClintock (June 16, 1902 – September 2, 1992), the 1983 Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine, was an American scientist and one of the world's most distinguished cytogeneticists. McClintock received her PhD in botany from Cornell University in 1927, where she was a leader in the development of maize cytogenetics. The field remained the focus of her research for the rest of her career. From the late 1920s, McClintock studied chromosomes and how they change during reproduction in maize. Her work was groundbreaking: she developed the technique for visualizing maize chromosomes and used microscopic analysis to demonstrate many fundamental genetic ideas, including genetic recombination by crossing-over during meiosis—a mechanism by which chromosomes exchange information. She produced the first genetic map for maize, linking regions of the chromosome with physical traits, and demonstrated the role of the telomere and centromere, regions of the chromosome that are important in the conservation of genetic information. She was recognized amongst the best in the field, awarded prestigious fellowships, and elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1944.

Fun Facts: Barbara McClintock became the first woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. When she died in 1992,one of her obituaries suggested that she might well be ranked as the greatest figure in biology in the twentieth century.

87) Fusion - The opposite of fission, fusion fuses two atomic nuclei into one,larger atom, releasing
tremendous amounts of energy.

Lyman Strong Spitzer, Jr. (June 26, 1914 – March 31, 1997) was an American theoretical physicist.

He was born in Toledo, Ohio. He graduated from Phillips Academy in 1931, received his BA from Yale University in 1935, and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1938, where he was advised by Henry Norris Russell. He is one of the key figures of 20th century physics, who helped lay down the fundamentals of the physics of plasmas and the astrophysics of the interstellar medium. He founded the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, and in 1946, he envisioned what would eventually become the Hubble Space Telescope. One of his more famous students was George Field. Spitzer died in Princeton, New Jersey.

The NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is named after him. It studies the infrared sky from an Earth trailing orbit.

Fun Facts: As an alternative energy source, fusion has many advantages, including world wide long-term availability of low-cost fuel, no contribution to acid rain or green house gas emissions, no possibility of a run away chain reaction, by-products that are unusable for weapons, and minimum problems of waste disposal.

88) Origins of Life - The first laboratory re-creation of the process of originally creating life on Earth.

Stanley Lloyd Miller (March 7, 1930 - May 20, 2007) was an American chemist and biologist who is known for his studies into the origin of life, particularly the Miller-Urey experiment which demonstrated that organic compounds can be created by fairly simple physical processes from inorganic substances. The experiment used conditions then thought to provide an approximate representation of those present on the primordial Earth.

Born in Oakland, California, he studied at University of California (obtaining his B.S. in 1951) and then at University of Chicago where he received his Ph.D. in chemistry in 1954. While at Chicago, Miller was a student of Harold Urey.

Miller continued his research at California Institute of Technology (1954-1955) and then joined the department of biochemistry at Columbia University, New York where he worked for the next five years. He then returned to California where he was an assistant professor (1960-1962), associate professor (1962-1968), then full professor of chemistry at University of California, San Diego (from 1968).

His work dealt with the origin of life (and he was considered a pioneer in the field of exobiology), the natural occurrence of clathrate hydrates, and general mechanisms of anesthesia. He was a member of the National Academy of Science, and received the Oparin Medal. He was a participant in the pioneering Miller-Urey experiment. In the 1950s, Urey guessed that the early atmosphere of the Earth was probably like the atmosphere now present on Jupiter --i.e., rich in ammonia, methane, and hydrogen. Miller, working in his laboratory at the University of Chicago, demonstrated that when exposed to an energy source such as ultraviolet radiation, these compounds and water can react to produce amino acids essential for the formation of living matter. (Similar ideas had been suggested by Aleksandr Oparin in the 1920s.) Since then there have been objections that the early environment was possibly not as reducing as Miller and Urey assumed and Miller acknowledged this.

In 1828 Friedrich Wohler had showed that it is possible to synthesize urea. As urea is an organic molecule, many at the time thought it could only be made by living organisms. This led to recognition that there is no obvious difference between a physically produced and an organically produced molecule. Miller's experiment went slightly further by showing that basic biomolecules can be formed through simple physical processes, and that it was not impossible for the first stages of abiogenesis to have occurred on the early earth.

Fun Facts: There are 20 types of amino acids. Eight are “essential amino acids” that the human body can not make and must there fore obtain from food.

89) DNA - The molecular structure of, and shape of, the molecule that carries the genetic information for every living organism.

Francis Harry Compton Crick OM FRS (June 8, 1916 – July 28, 2004), Ph.D., was an English molecular biologist, physicist, and neuroscientist, and most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. He, James D. Watson and Maurice Wilkins were jointly awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material" .

Crick is widely known for use of the term “central dogma” to summarize an idea that genetic information flow in cells is essentially one-way, from DNA to RNA to protein. Crick was an important theoretical molecular biologist and played an important role in research related to revealing the genetic code.[3]

James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material". He studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University and subsequently worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England where he first met Francis Crick.

In 1956 he became a junior member of Harvard University's Biological Laboratories until 1976, but in 1968 served as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York and shifted its research emphasis to the study of cancer. In 1994 he became its President for ten years, and then subsequently served as its Chancellor until 2007. Between 1988 and 1992 he was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. He has written many science books, including the seminal textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968) about the DNA Structure discovery.

Fun Facts: If you straightened each strand of DNA from each cell in your body and lined them end-to-end, you’d have about nine million kilometers of DNA. That’s enough to reach to the moon and back 13 times!

90) Seafloor Spreading - The ocean floors slowly move, spread ing from central rifts, and carry the conti nents on their backs as they do.

Harry Hammond Hess (May 24, 1906 – August 25, 1969) was a geologist and United States Navy officer in World War II.

Considered one of the "founding fathers" of the unifying theory of plate tectonics, Rear Admiral Dr. Harry Hammond Hess was born on May 24, 1906 in New York City. He is best known for his theories on sea floor spreading, specifically work on relationships between island arcs, seafloor gravity anomalies, and serpentinized peridotite, suggesting that the convection of the Earth's mantle was the driving force behind this process. This work provided a conceptual base for the development of the theory of plate tectonics.

Hess entered Yale University as an electrical engineering major in 1923. After two years, he switched to geology, graduating with a B.S. degree in 1927. Hess then worked as an exploration geologist in Rhodesia for two years before beginning graduate studies at Princeton University. For his doctoral thesis, Hess studied an altered Virginia peridotite.

Fun Facts: The Pacific Ocean is slowly shrinking as the Americas slide west. Two hundred million years ago, the Atlantic Ocean didn’t exist.South America and Africa were joined, as were North America and Europe. The Atlantic is still spreading and growing. So is the Red Sea. In 150 million years, that currently skinny sea will be as wide as the Atlantic is now.

91) The Nature of the Atmosphere - The atmosphere is chaotic and unpredictable.

Edward Norton Lorenz (May 23, 1917 – April 16, 2008) was an American mathematician and meteorologist, and a pioneer of chaos theory. He discovered the strange attractor notion and coined the term butterfly effect.

Lorenz was born in West Hartford, Connecticut. He studied mathematics at both Dartmouth College in New Hampshire and Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During World War II, he served as a weather forecaster for the United States Army Air Corps. After his return from the war, he decided to study meteorology. Lorenz earned two degrees in the area from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he later was a professor for many years.

Fun Facts: Actor Jeff Goldblum played the role of Ian Malcolm in the Jurassic Park movies. Malcolm is a mathematician who specializes in the study of the chaos theory and refers to himself as a “chaotician.” A
central theme of these movies is proving that Malcolm’s chaos theories are right.

92) Quarks - Subatomic particles that make up protons and neutrons.

Murray Gell-Mann (born September 15, 1929) is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles.

Among his many accomplishments, he formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU(3) flavor symmetry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He discovered the V-A theory of chiral neutrinos in collaboration with Richard Feynman. He created current algebra in the 1960s as a way of extracting predictions from quark models when the fundamental theory was still murky, which led to model-independent sum rules confirmed by experiment.

Gell-Mann, along with Levy, discovered the sigma model of pions, which describes low energy pion interactions. Modifying the integer-charged quark model of Han and Nambu, Fritsch and Gell-Mann were the first to write down the modern accepted theory of quantum chromodynamics although they did not anticipate asymptotic freedom.

Gell-Mann is responsible for the see-saw theory of neutrino masses, which produces masses at the inverse-GUT scale in any theory with a right-handed neutrino, like the SO(10) model.

He is also known to have played a large role in keeping string theory alive through the 1970s, supporting that line of research at a time when it was unpopular.

Fun Facts: The James Joyceline men tioned above is “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” in Finnegan’s Wake. Can you find that quote?

93) Quasars and Pulsars - The discovery of super-dense, distant objects in space.

Allan Rex Sandage (born June 18, 1926 in Iowa City, Iowa) is an American astronomer.

Allan R. Sandage was a famous scientist during the 1960's. Sandage graduated from the University of Illinois in 1948. By 1953 he earned his Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. Sandage was a student of the famed cosmologist Edwin Hubble, and effectively continued Hubble's research program from the first part of the 20th century into the second half. Throughout the 1950s and well into the 1970s Sandage was regarded as the pre-eminent observational cosmologist. Sandage has made seminal contributions to all aspects of the cosmological distance scale from local calibrators within the galaxy to cosmologically distant galaxies.

Antony Hewish (born Fowey, Cornwall, May 11, 1924) is a British radio astronomer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1974 (together with fellow radio-astronomer Martin Ryle) for his work on the development of radio aperture synthesis and its role in the discovery of pulsars. (Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Hewish's graduate student, was not recognized, although she was the first to notice the stellar radio source that was later recognised as a pulsar.) He was also awarded the Eddington Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1969.

His undergraduate degree at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge was interrupted by war service at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, and at the Telecommunications Research Establishment where he worked with Martin Ryle. Returning to Cambridge in 1946, Hewish completed his degree and immediately joined Ryle's research team at the Cavendish Laboratory, obtaining his Ph.D. in 1952. Hewish made both practical and theoretical advances in the observation and exploitation of the apparent scintillations of radio sources due to their radiation impinging upon plasma.

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, DBE, FRS, FRAS (born Susan Jocelyn Bell on 15 July 1943) is an astrophysicist who, as a postgraduate student, discovered the first radio pulsars with her thesis advisor Antony Hewish, for which he won a Nobel Prize.

The paper announcing the discovery had five authors, Hewish's name being listed first, Bell's second. Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize, along with Martin Ryle, without the inclusion of Bell as a co-recipient, which was controversial, and was roundly condemned by Hewish's fellow astronomer Fred Hoyle. Others, however, have noted that the prize was given to Ryle and Hewish for their work across the field of radio-astronomy as a whole, with particular mention of Ryle's work on aperture-synthesis, and Hewish's on pulsars.

Fun Facts: The more distant the quasar is, the redder its light appears on Earth. The light from the most distant quasar known takes 13 billion light-years to reach Earth. Thir teen billion light-years is how far away that quasar was 13 billion years ago when the light we now see first left the star and headed to ward where Earth is now. Quasars are the most distant objects in the universe.

94) Complete Evolution - Evolution is driven by symbiotic mergers between cooperating species.

Lynn Margulis (born March 5, 1938) is an American biologist and University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is best known for her theory on the origin of eukaryotic organelles, and her contributions to the endosymbiotic theory—which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed.

Lynn Margulis attended the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, and received her Ph.D. in 1963 from UC Berkeley. In 1966, as a young faculty member at Boston University, she wrote a theoretical paper entitled The Origin of Mitosing Eukaryotic Cells. The paper however was "rejected by about fifteen scientific journals," Margulis recalled. It was finally accepted by The Journal of Theoretical Biology and is considered today a landmark in modern endosymbiotic theory. Although it draws heavily on symbiosis ideas first put forward by mid-19th century scientists and by Merezhkovsky (1905) and Wallin (1920) in the early-20th century, Margulis's endosymbiotic theory formulation is the first to rely on direct microbiological observations (as opposed to paleontological or zoological observations which were previously the norm for new works in evolutionary biology). The paper was initially heavily rejected, as symbiosis theories had been dismissed by mainstream biology at the time. Weathering constant criticism of her ideas for decades, Margulis is famous for her tenacity in pushing her theory forward, despite the opposition she faced at the time.

Fun Facts: Margulis and her writer/astronomer husband, Carl Sagan, are the ones who said: “Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networking (cooperation), and Darwin’s notion of evolution driven by
the combat of natural selection is incomplete.”

95) Dark Matter - Matter in the universe that gives off no light or other detectible radiation.

Vera (Cooper) Rubin (born 23 July 1928) is an astronomer who has done pioneering work on galaxy rotation rates. Her discovery of what is known as "flat rotation curves" is the most direct and robust evidence of dark matter.

After she earned an A.B. from Vassar College (1948) she tried to enroll at Princeton but never received their graduate catalog as women there were not allowed in the graduate astronomy program until 1975. She applied to Cornell University, where she studied physics under Philip Morrison, Richard Feynman, and Hans Bethe. There she earned a M.A. in 1951. Then in 1954 at Georgetown University she earned a Ph.D. under George Gamow.

Vera Rubin also has honorary Doctors of Science degrees from numerous universities, including Harvard and Yale. Rubin is currently a research astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. So far she has co-authored 114 peer reviewed research papers.

All four of her children have earned Ph.D.s in the natural sciences or mathematics: David (1950), Ph.D. geology, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey; Judith Young (1952), Ph.D. cosmic-ray physics, an astronomer at the University of Massachusetts; Karl (1956), Ph.D. mathematics, a mathematician at Stanford University; and Allan (1960), Ph.D. geology, a geologist at Princeton University

Fun Facts: NASA has tried to take a photograph of dark matter (some -thing no once can see or directly
detect) by combining X-ray telescope images from the ROSAT satellite with other satellite imagery; the photo shown at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/rosat/gallery/display/darkmatter. html is the result. It could be the first photo of dark matter.

96) The Nature of Dinosaurs - How dinosaurs really acted, moved, and lived.

Robert T. Bakker (born March 24, 1945, in Bergen County, New Jersey) is an American paleontologist who helped reshape modern theories about dinosaurs, particularly by adding support to the theory that some dinosaurs were homeothermic (warm-blooded). Along with his mentor John Ostrom, Bakker was responsible for initiating the ongoing "dinosaur renaissance" in paleontological studies, beginning with Bakker's article "Dinosaur Renaissance" in Scientific American, April 1975. His special field is the ecological context and behavior of dinosaurs. His book The Dinosaur Heresies first propelled him to popular attention.

Bakker has been a major proponent of the theory that dinosaurs were "warm-blooded," smart, fast, and adaptable. He published his first paper on dinosaur endothermy in 1968. He revealed the first evidence of parental care at nesting sites for Allosaurus. Bakker was among the advisors for the film Jurassic Park and for the 1992 PBS series, "The Dinosaurs." Bakker also observed evidence in support of Eldredge's and Gould's theory of punctuated equilibrium in dinosaur populations. In outline, he argues

Fun Facts: Giant Brontosaurus became the most popular of all dinosaurs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its name means “thunderlizard.” By 1970 some scientists claimed that “Brontosaurus”
should not be used since it referred to three different species: Apatosaurus, Brachiosaurus, and Camarasaurus. The argument continues, though it’s been 80 million years since any of the three thundered
across the earth.

97) Planets Exist Around Other Stars

Michel G. E. Mayor (born 12 January 1942) is a Swiss professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Geneva.

Together with Didier Queloz in 1995 he discovered 51 Pegasi B, the first extrasolar planet orbiting a sun-like star, 51 Pegasi.

After studying Physics at the University of Lausanne Mayor obtained his doctorate in Astronomy at the Geneva Observatory in 1971. Among other places, he worked at the observatory at Cambridge, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Chile and an observatory in Hawaii.

By 1998 he had co-authored more than 200 scientific publications. From 1989 to 1992 he was involved in scientific research at ESO, from 1988 until 1991 he worked on the study of galactic structure with the International Astronomical Union, and from 1990 until 1993 he was with the Swiss Society for Astrophysics and Astronomy.

Didier Queloz (born February 23, 1966) is a Geneva-based astronomer with a prolific record in finding extrasolar planets. He is understudy to Michel Mayor.

Didier Queloz was a Ph.D. student at the University of Geneva when he and Michel Mayor discovered the first exoplanet around a main sequence star. Queloz performed an analysis on 51 Pegasi [1]using radial velocity measurements (doppler effect), and was astonished to find a planet with an orbital period of 4.2 days. He had been performing the analysis as an exercise to hone his skills. The planet, 51 Pegasi b, challenged the then accepted views of planetary formation, being a hot jupiter or roaster.

Fun Facts: If only one star in ten has planets (and current knowledge indicates that atleast that many do), if the average star with planets has atleast three, and if only one in every hundred are rocky planets in life-sustaining or bits (and recent discoveries indicate that to be the case), then there are at least 300,000 planets capable of supporting life in our galaxy alone!

98) Accelerating Universe - Our universe is not only expanding; the rate at which it expands is speeding up, not slowing down as had been assumed.

Saul Perlmutter (born 1959) is an astrophysicist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences., and was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2003. He is of Jewish descent.

Perlmutter graduated from Harvard magna cum laude in 1981 and received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 1986. Perlmutter's PhD thesis was on searching for Nemesis candidates under Richard A. Muller.

Fun Facts: A new $20 million tele scope is being built at the South Pole to study and explain why the universe is accelerating, since this discovery violates all existing theories about the birth and
expansion of the universe. The telescope will become operational in 2007.

99) Human Genome - A detailed mapping of the entire human DNA genetic code.

James Dewey Watson (born April 6, 1928) is an American molecular biologist, best known as one of the co-discoverers of the structure of DNA. Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins were awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discoveries concerning the molecular structure of nucleic acids and its significance for information transfer in living material".[3] He studied at the University of Chicago and Indiana University and subsequently worked at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory in England where he first met Francis Crick.

In 1956 he became a junior member of Harvard University's Biological Laboratories until 1976, but in 1968 served as Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York and shifted its research emphasis to the study of cancer. In 1994 he became its President for ten years, and then subsequently served as its Chancellor until 2007. Between 1988 and 1992 he was associated with the National Institutes of Health, helping to establish the Human Genome Project. He has written many science books, including the seminal textbook The Molecular Biology of the Gene (1965) and his bestselling book The Double Helix (1968) about the DNA Structure discovery.

J. Craig Venter is an American biologist, and businessman. Venter founded The Institute for Genomic Research and was instrumental in mapping the human genome. He was listed on Time Magazine's 2007 and 2008 Time 100 list of the most influential people in the world.

Venter is an ex-surfer and a Vietnam war veteran. According to Time, it was not always evident that he would become a transformative figure, particularly when he was a boy; according to his biography, A Life Decoded, he was said to be never a terribly engaged student, having Cs and Ds in his eighth grade report cards.

Fun Facts: If the DNA sequence of the human genome were compiled in books, the equivalent of 200 volumes the size of a Manhattan telephone book (at 1,000 pages each) would be needed to hold it all.

Hope you enjoy reading this book.