June 18 - Today In Science History

JUNE 18 - BIRTHS

Dudley R. Herschbach
(credit)	Born 18 Jun 1932. American chemist and educator who shared (with Yuan T. Lee and John C. Polanyi) the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1986. He pioneered the use of molecular beams to elucidate the processes of chemical reactions. This study of reaction dynamics details the sequence of events and energy states of the atoms and molecules.
Allan Rex Sandage
(credit)	Born 18 Jun 1926. U.S. astronomer who (with Thomas A. Matthews) discovered, in 1960, the first optical identification of a quasi-stellar radio source (quasar), a starlike object that is a strong emitter of radio waves. Although a strange source of radio emission, in visible light, it looked like a faint star. Yet this object was emitting more intense radio waves and ultraviolet radiation than a typical star.
Jerome Karle
(source)	Born 18 Jun 1918 Jerome Karle joined the staff of the Naval Research Laboratory in 1946, becoming their chief scientist for the Laboratory for the Structure of Matter in 1968. With Herbert A. Hauptman, he developed a "direct method" to make X-ray crystal diffraction measurements. This made possible the determination of such 3D crystal structures as hormone, vitamin and antibiotic molecules. Their important work earned the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Alexander Wetmore
(credit)	Born 18 Jun 1886; died 7 Dec 1978. American Frank Alexander Wetmore, whose first name was never used, became a prominent ornithologist and avian paleontologist, noted for his research on birds of the Western Hemisphere. Between 1910 and 1924, he worked for with the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, Department of Agriculture. In 1925, he was appointed Assistant Secretary, head of the Smithsonian's U.S. National Museum. From 1945 to 1952, he served as the sixth Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. Upon retiring, he continued his research at the Smithsonian Institution for another quarter century.
F.A.F.C. Went
(credit)	Born 18 Jun 1863. F. A. F. C. Went, was professor of botany and director of the Botanical Garden at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands where he initiated the study of plant hormones and advanced the study of botany in the Netherlands. With a modern, well-equipped laboratory of botany, he attracted a great many visitors from all over the world, many of them famous in their own right. His son, Frits Warmolt Went followed in his footsteps researching plant hormones, and became well-known for studying and naming auxins.
Alphonse Laveran
	Born 18 Jun 1845; died 18 May 1922. French physician, pathologist, and parasitologist. As a French military surgeon in Algeria, he discovered the parasite that causes human malaria in the red blood cells. He founded the medical field of protozoology, doing important work on other protozoal diseases, including sleeping-sickness and kala-azar. For this he received the 1907 Nobel Prize for medicine. From 1896 he spent the rest of his life as a researcher at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. In 1907, Laveran founded the Laboratory of Tropical Diseases at the Pasteur Institute and founded the Société de Pathologie Exotique in 1908. (Photo credit: BBC Hulton Picture Library)
William Lassell
(credit)	Born 18 Jun 1799; died 5 Oct 1880. William Lassell was a wealthy amateur English astronomer. He set up an observatory at Starfield, near Liverpool. England, He built his own 24" diameter telescope, and devised steam-driven equipment for grinding an polishing the speculum metal mirror. This telescope was the first of its size to be mounted "equitorially" to allow easy tracking of the stars. He discovered Triton, a moon of Neptune, and Ariel and Umbriel, satellites of Uranus. Later, Lassell built a 48" diameter telescope with th same design and took it to Malta for observations with clearer skies.

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JUNE 18 - DEATHS

Paul Karrer
(source)	Died 18 Jun 1971 (born 21 Apr 1889) Swiss chemist who investigated the constitution of carotenoids, flavins, and vitamins A and B₂, for which he shared the 1937 Nobel Prize for Chemistry (with Sir Norman Haworth of Great Britain). He studied plant pigments, particularly the yellow carotenoids, which are related to the pigment in carrots. He determined the chemical structure of the carotenoids (1930), showed that some of these substances are transformed into vitamin A in the animal body, then determined the structure of vitamin A itself. He also confirmed the constitution of vitamin C proposed by Albert Szent-Györgyi, showed lactoflavin to be part of the complex originally described as vitamin B2 , and studied vitamin E.
Harry Fielding Reid
(source)	Died 18 Jun 1944 (born 18 May 1859) U.S. seismologist and glaciologist who introduced the term "elastic rebound" in a report (1910) on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. His early career was as a glaciologist, but then the study of earthquakes became his most significant work. Reid was the first to establish that it is the fault that causes an earthquake, rather than a fault results from an earthquake. His elastic rebound theory, said that an earthquake occurs upon the sudden release of a large amount of stored energy after a long gradual accumulation of stress along a fault line. Later, modern science explained that Earth's surface consists of huge tectonic plates slowly moving relative to each other, and stress (elastic strain energy) gradually builds along their edges moving against each other.« After the Earth Quakes: Elastic Rebound on an Urban Planet, by Hough and Bilham.
Florence Bascom
(credit)	Died 18 Jun 1945 (born14 Jul 1862) Florence Bascom was an American geologist and teacher. She was the first woman to receive a doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. Two years later she launched the geology department at Bryn Mawr. Bascom was the first woman to work as a geologist for the U.S. Geological Survey and to be made a fellow of the Geological Society of America. Bascom was an expert in crystallography, mineralogy, and petrography. She is known for inventing techniques that used microscopic analysis in the study of the oil-bearing rocks. She died at age 82.
Arthur Edwin Kennelly
(source)	Died 18 Jun 1939 (born 17 Dec 1861) Irish-American electrical engineer who was a prominent contributor to the science of electrical engineering. For six years he worked for Thomas Edison at West Orange Laboratory, then branched out as a consultant. Upon his co-discovery (with Oliver Heaviside) of the radio reflecting properties of the ionosphere in the upper atmosphere, the stratum was called the Kennelly-Heaviside layer.
Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn
1908 (source)	Died 18 Jun 1922 (born 19 Jan 1851) Dutch astronomer who used photography and statistical methods in determining the motions and spatial distribution of stars. Such work was the first major step after the works of William and John Herschel. He tried to solve the questions of space density of stars as a function of distance from the sun, and the distribution of starts according to brightness per unit volume. Some of his results had lasting value, but some were superceded because he had failed to account for the interstellar absorption. In studies using proper motion to determine stellar distances, he discovered stellar motions are not random, as previously thought, but that stars move in two "star streams" (1904). He introduced absolute magnitude and colour index as standard concepts.
Per Teodor Cleve
	Died 18 Jun 1905 (born 10 Feb 1840) Swedish chemist and geologist who discovered the elements holmium and thulium. He was the thirteenth child in his family. In 1874, Cleve concluded that didymium was in fact two elements (this was proved in 1885 and the two elements named neodymium and praseodymium.) In 1879, he showed that scandium (discovered by Lars Nilson), was in fact the eka-boron predicted by Dmitri Mendeleev in his periodic table. Also in 1879, working with a sample of erbia that had all traces of scandia and ytterbia removed, he found two new earths, which he named holmium, after Stockholm, and thulium, after the old name for Scandinavia. (Holmium, too was a mixture. In 1886, Lecoq de Boisbaudran discovered that it contained the new element dysprosium.)



JUNE 18 - EVENTS

Solar neutrino count
(source)	In 2001, the result of experiments counting previously undetected, but theoretically predicted, solar neutrinos was announced by a collaboration of Canadian, American and British scientists led by Arthur McDonald. They detected all three types of solar neutrinos (electron, muon and tau), using the SNO (Solar Neutrino Observatory) consisting of 9,456 photomultiplier tubes lining a stainless steel tank containing 1,000 tons of heavy water (D₂O) 6800-ft deep in a nickel mine at Sudbury, Ontario, Canada. The combined results agreed with the total flux calculated using the standard computer model of the Sun, thus finally confirming the long-standing theory accounting for the various nuclear reactions taking place within the Sun.« [Image: external view of the SNO's photomultiplier array during detector construction.]
Killer bee
	In 1993, the first lab test was released in Arizona confirming a bee involved in a fatal on attack on a small dog at a Tucson home was an Africanized honey bee. Because of their more intense defensive swarming behaviour, such non-native bees earned the name "killer bee" in the media. Arizona was the second state to be invaded, less than three years after this species spread north into Texas from Mexico. Since the fifties, the bees had extended their range northward through Central America. Their original source was from cross-breeding with tropical African bees imported into Brazil for experimental work.
First American woman in space
	In 1983, at 7:33 am EDT, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched on its own second flight. This was the seventh shuttle mission, and the first to carry a woman crew member. Sally K. Ride, mission specialist, became America's first woman in space. During the mission, two communications satellites deployed (ANIK C-2 for TELESAT Canada and PALAPA-B1 for Indonesia). Canisters in the cargo bay held variety of experiments including ones studying effects of space on social behavior of ant colony in zero gravity. Ten experiments mounted on Shuttle Pallet Satellite (SPAS-01) performed research in forming metal alloys in microgravity and use of remote sensing scanner.
First genetically engineered vaccine
(source)	In 1981, the first genetically engineered vaccine was announced: the first effective subunit vaccine for any animal or human disease using gene splicing. It was designed to prevent hoof and mouth disease (FMD). The work was done by the U.S. Dept of Agriculture scientists who by 1975 had discovered that injection of VP3 (a protein derived from a portion of the coating of FMD virus) confers immunity to the disease. In 1980, the USDA team turned to recombinant DNA technology, and collaborated with scientists from Genentech, a private company. They inserted a bioengineered plasmid containing the gene for VP3 into Escherichia coli bacteria which grew obeying orders from the guest DNA, mass-producing the VP3 proteins for the vaccine.
First Large Solid Fuel Rocket
	In 1965, the first large solid-fuel rocket - a Titan 3C - rocket was launched into orbit. Compared to a liquid-propellant rocket, a solid-propellant rocket has fewer parts, simpler construction, is safer and more reliable, and yet it can develop greater power (thrust) than a liquid-propellant rocket of the same size. Many military and NASA payloads have been put into orbit with the generations of this launch vehicle family.
Rolls Royce
	In 1935, the Rolls Royce trademark was registered in the U.S.
Amelia Earhart Flies Atlantic
(source)	In 1928, aviator Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic Ocean. She had accepted the invitation of the American pilots Wilmer Stultz (1900-29) and Louis Gordon to join them on the transatlantic flight. The crossing from Newfoundland to Wales took about 21 hours. Amelia Earhart went on to establish herself as a respected role model, tirelessly demonstrating that young women were as capable as men in succeeding in their chosen vocations. In 1935 she crossed the Atlantic solo in record time: 13 hr 30 min.
Mercury lamp
	In 1912, a patent was issued for a mercury vapor lamp to Peter Hewitt (U.S. No. 1,030178).
Children's carriage patent
	In 1889, black American inventor W.H. Richardson was issued two patents for a "Child's Carriage" (U.S. Nos. 405,599 - 600) In 1886, he had already also patented a "Cotton Chopper". The Inventive Spirit of African Americans: Patented Ingenuity, by Patricia Carter Sluby.
Moon
	In 1178, about an hour after sunset - as chronicled by the English monk, Gervase of Canterbury - a band of five eyewitnesses watched as the upper horn of the bright, new crescent Moon "suddenly split in two. From the midpoint of this division a flaming torch sprang up, spewing out... fire, hot coals and sparks... The body of the moon, which was below writhed... throbbed like a wounded snake." In 1976, a geologist suggested that this was consistent with the location and age of the 22-km lunar crater Giordano Bruno. However, such asteroid impact would have ejected debris causing an astonishing meteor shower, which was never reported. Now the sighting of 1178 is attributed to perhaps an exploding meteor that just happened to line up with their view of the Moon.