Titian Peale

(Wikipedia) - Titian Ramsay Peale (November 2, 1799 – March 13, 1885) was a noted American artist, naturalist, entomologist and photographer. He was the sixteenth and youngest son of noted American naturalist Charles Willson Peale. Peale was first exposed to the study of natural history while assisting his father on his many excursions in search of specimens for the Peale Museum. The family moved to Germantown, Pennsylvania, outside of Philadelphia, where he began collecting and drawing insects and butterflies. Like his older brothers, Peale helped his father in the preservation of the museum's specimens for display, which included contributions from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Continued 

 

The Meteor procession of February 9, 1913

(Wikipedia) The meteor procession of February 9, 1913, was a unique meteoric phenomenon reported from locations across Canada, the north-eastern United States, Bermuda and from several ships at sea, including one off Brazil, giving a total recorded track of some 5659 miles (9105 km). The meteors were particularly unusual in that there was no apparent radiant, that is to say, no apparent point in the sky from which the meteors appeared to originate. The observations were analysed in detail, later the same year, by the astronomer Clarence Chant, leading him to conclude that as all accounts were positioned along a great circle arc, the source had been a small, short-lived natural satellite of the Earth. Continued

Pictured: "Meteoric Display of February 9, 1913, as seen near High Park. Drawn by Gustave (sic) Hahn" (Toronto Star)

 

Project Diana

(Wikipedia) Project Diana, named for the Roman moon goddess Diana — goddess of the hunt, wild animals and the moon — was a project of the US Army Signal Corps to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive the reflected signals. Today called EME (Earth-Moon-Earth), this was the first attempt to "touch" another celestial body.
From a laboratory at Camp Evans (part of Fort Monmouth), near Wall Township, New Jersey, a large transmitter, receiver and antenna array were constructed for this purpose. The transmitter, a highly modified SCR-271 radar set from World War II, provided 3,000 watts at 111.5 MHz in 1/4 second pulses, and the antenna (a "bedspring" dipole array) provided 24 dB of gain. Reflected signals were received about 2.5 seconds later, with the receiver compensating for Doppler modulation of the reflected signal. Continued 

 

Annie Jump Cannon

(Wikipedia) - Annie Jump Cannon (December 11, 1863 – April 13, 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures.
The daughter of shipbuilder and state senator Wilson Lee Cannon and his second wife, Mary Elizabeth Jump, Annie grew up in Dover, Delaware. Mary gave birth to two more daughters after Annie, in addition to the four stepchildren she inherited in the marriage. Annie's mother had a childhood interest in star-gazing, and she passed that interest along to her daughter. Continued 

The Dust Bowl: Tonight on PBS

Watch The Dust Bowl Intro on PBS. See more from The Dust Bowl.

Anatomy of a Hurricane

"It hit an iceberg and it sank"

(NYTimes) What doomed the Titanic is well known, at least in outline. On a moonless night in the North Atlantic, the liner hit an iceberg and disaster ensued, with 1,500 lives lost.
Hundreds of books, studies and official inquires have addressed the deeper question of how a ship that was so costly and so well built — a ship declared to be unsinkable — could have ended so terribly. The theories vary widely, placing the blame on everything from inept sailors to flawed rivets.
Now, a century after the liner went down in the early hours of April 15, 1912, two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the catastrophe. Continued

Leap Day

(Wikipedia) February 29, known as a leap day in the Gregorian calendar, is a date that occurs in most years that are evenly divisible by 4, such as 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016. Years that are evenly divisible by 100 do not contain a leap day, with the exception of years that are evenly divisible by 400, which do contain a leap day; thus 1900 did not contain a leap day while 2000 did.
Years containing a leap day are called leap years. February 29 is the 60th day of the Gregorian calendar in such a year, with 306 days remaining until the end of that year.
... There is a popular tradition that a woman may propose marriage to a man on February 29. Continued

Give Thanks? Science Supersized Your Turkey Dinner

(Wired) - Your corn is sweeter, your potatoes are starchier and your turkey is much, much bigger than the foods that sat on your grandparents' Thanksgiving dinner table.
Most everything on your plate has undergone tremendous genetic change under the intense selective pressures of industrial farming. Pilgrims and American Indians ate foods called corn and turkey, but the actual organisms they consumed didn't look or taste much at all like our modern variants do. Continued

Project Diana

(Wikipedia) Project Diana, named for the Roman moon goddess Diana — goddess of the hunt, wild animals and the moon — was a project of the US Army Signal Corps to bounce radio signals off the moon and receive the reflected signals. Today called EME (Earth-Moon-Earth), this was the first attempt to "touch" another celestial body.
From a laboratory at Camp Evans (part of Fort Monmouth), near Wall Township, New Jersey, a large transmitter, receiver and antenna array were constructed for this purpose. The transmitter, a highly modified SCR-271 radar set from World War II, provided 3,000 watts at 111.5 MHz in 1/4 second pulses, and the antenna (a "bedspring" dipole array) provided 24 dB of gain. Reflected signals were received about 2.5 seconds later, with the receiver compensating for Doppler modulation of the reflected signal. Continued

Alexander Wetmore

(Wikipedia) Frank Alexander Wetmore (June 18, 1886 North Freedom, Wisconsin – December 7, 1978 Glen Echo, Maryland) was an American ornithologist and avian paleontologist. ... Wetmore began federal service in 1910, working for the Biological Survey of the Department of Agriculture.
In 1915, he researched the use of lead shot in causing death in waterfowl. His paleontological research led to his work on the fossil birds Palaeochenoides mioceanus and Nesotrochis debooyi.
In 1924, Wetmore joined the Smithsonian Institution as the superintendent of the National Zoological Park in Washington. In 1925, Wetmore was appointed assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, becoming secretary between 1945 and 1952. Continued

The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer

(NYTBR) “You know the story of the invention of the computer?” one character asks another midway through Jane Smiley’s best-selling 1995 novel “Moo.” The speaker, an animal scientist, dreams of striking it rich by pioneering a new dairy-farming technology. To that end, he hopes to pry major grant money out of the agricultural industry, and he wields the history of the computer as both cautionary tale and crowbar. “The short version,” he explains, “is that the guy at Iowa State who invented the computer in the late ’30s never patented a thing. . . . And the university . . . forgot about the old machine, and threw it out.” Continued

Photo: United States Department of Energy/Wikipedia

Benjamin Banneker: A Man of Exceptional Accomplishment

(Catonsville Patch) Drive a few minutes west of Catonsville and into the quiet community of Oella, and you will find a small gem of a museum and a staff deeply committed to telling the story of an amazing local man who dedicated himself to a life of discovery.
The son of an ex-slave, he sought to teach by his own example that a man can achieve whatever he wishes, regardless of the circumstances of his birth. He was a self taught astronomer, clock maker, mathematician, surveyor and successful farmer at a time in this country's history when African-Americans could be legally considered property, just as farm implements or livestock would be. Continued

Daniel Nathans

Daniel Nathans (October 30, 1928 – November 16, 1999) was an American microbiologist. ... Nathans served as President of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland from 1995 to 1996.
Along with Werner Arber and Hamilton Smith, Nathans received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978 for the discovery of restriction enzymes.He was also awarded with National Medal of Science in 1993. Continued

Francis Peyton Rous

(Wikipedia) (Francis) Peyton Rous (October 5, 1879 – February 16, 1970) born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1879 and received his B.A. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. He was involved in the discovery of the role of viruses in the transmission of certain types of cancer. In 1966 he was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work. Continued

Ether He Was the First or He Wasn’t

(Wired) 1846: Dentist William Morton uses ether to anesthetize a patient in Boston. It was not the first such use, but it began a train of events leading to the widespread adoption of ether for surgical anesthesia.
Dr. Crawford Long of Jefferson, Georgia, removed a tumor from the neck of James Venable under ether anesthesia March 30, 1842. (Long may have started using ether a year earlier while he was attending medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.) But Long, perhaps giddy with excitement or perhaps from experimenting with ether as a recreational drug (the “ether frolics”), did not rush to publish or patent his discovery. Continued

Image: Ether Monument, Boston, MA.

Graveyard DNA rewrites African American history

(NewScientist) Two of Christopher Columbus's shipmates were the first Africans to set foot in the New World, a study has found.
Using DNA analysis of human bones excavated from a graveyard in La Isabela, Dominican Republic – the first colonial town in the Americas – the new study adds weight to the theory that Africans crossed the Atlantic at least 150 years earlier than previously thought.
"African Americans have come to believe that their history began when the first slave ships docked in the mid-17th century, but our results suggest that it actually started far earlier, at the same time as the Europeans' history on the continent did," says Hannes Schroeder of the Centre for GeoGenetics at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, who did the analysis. Continued

Ancient whale skull found in Calvert Cliffs

(Baltimore Sun) Erosion along the Chesapeake Bay cliffs in Calvert County has exposed another ancient whale skull, and students from Harrisburg, Pa., were expected to help scientists dig the fossil from the heavy clay sediments. Only a small portion of the back of the skull is visible, said Stephen Godfrey of the Calvert Marine Museum in Solomons. But the Miocene-era fossil is probably 16 million years old, and likely belongs to an extinct family of small whales that swam in what were then Atlantic coastal waters teeming with marine life. Continued

George Stibitz

(Wikipedia) George Robert Stibitz (April 20, 1904 – January 31, 1995) is internationally recognized as one of the fathers of the modern digital computer. He was a Bell Labs researcher known for his 1930s and 1940s work on the realization of Boolean logic digital circuits using electromechanical relays as the switching element.
Born in York, Pennsylvania, he received his bachelor's degree from Denison University in Granville, Ohio, his master's degree from Union College in 1927, and his Ph.D. in mathematical physics in 1930 from Cornell University.
In November 1937, George Stibitz, then working at Bell Labs, completed a relay-based calculator he dubbed the "Model K" (for "kitchen table", on which he had assembled it), which calculated using binary addition. Bell Labs subsequently authorized a full research program in late 1938 with Stibitz at the helm. Their Complex Number Calculator, completed January 8, 1940, was able to do calculations on complex numbers. In a demonstration to the American Mathematical Society conference at Dartmouth College on September 11, 1940, Stibitz used a teletype to send commands to the Complex Number Calculator in New York over telephone lines. It was the first computing machine ever used remotely over a phone line. Continued

Aug. 26, 1883: Krakatau Erupts, Changes World … Again

(Wired) ... The final eruption also threw pumice an estimated 34 to 50 miles into the sky. Dust fell more than 3,000 miles away 10 days later. Islands of pumice floated on the oceans for months. Sulfur in the ash reacted with atmospheric ozone to scatter sunlight, causing vivid red sunsets around the world. Global temperatures dropped, and climate disruptions lasted five years. Continued