Science History

While James Watson and Francis Crick are rightfully celebrated for discovery of the double-helical structure of DNA, recognition of others has been inconsistent. Rosalind Franklin has practically been beatified, even though she never pieced together what she was looking at.  Maurice Wilkins, the ‘third man of the double helix’, who was at King's College London with Rosalind Franklin, gets much less credit, in some sense because he thinks they should have found it first. "To think that Rosie had all the 3D data for 9 months  &  wouldn't fit a helix to it and there was I…

Everyone has heard of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a stand-off over missiles off the shores of America. It's considered a highwater mark during a Cold War culture that was concerned about mutual assured destruction. Outside testing, nuclear weapons have not been detonated since 1945 but there have been ‘disturbing near misses in which nuclear weapons were nearly used inadvertently’ owing to miscalculation, error or sloppy practices.  Not once, but nearly 13 times since 1962 - and the risk of nuclear weapons being detonated today is higher than people know. Dr. Benoit Pelopidas, of the…

Harvard Divinity School Professor Karen L. King believes that an ancient Coptic fragment, the first-known explicit reference to a married Jesus Christ, is authentic, and supports the argument with an article in Harvard Theological Review. The fragment, announced at the International Coptic Congress in Rome in 2012, contains a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in which Jesus speaks of “my wife” and so it was informally given the title The Gospel of Jesus's Wife. Here is the translation: DOI: 10.1017/S0017816014000133 "My wife" is obviously a big deal. It was always a target of…

In 2011, Rice Religious Studies graduate student Grant Adamson was doing a summer internship at Brigham Young University and tackled something that no one had been able to do in a hundred years - he deciphered 1,800-year-old letter from an Egyptian solider serving in a Roman legion in Europe. While young people always think their situation is exceptional and previous generations just don't understand, the letter shows the Roman soldier had many feelings similar to what some soldiers feel today. The private letter was sent home by Roman military recruit Aurelius Polion and was originally…

We all know the story of Albert Einstein’s “cosmological constant,” or lambda, which he invented, then retracted in shame ("Then away with the cosmological constant!"), and then in 1998, with the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe, it came back with a vengeance as the mathematical representation of 'dark matter'.  But surprisingly, the story continues to live on through new discoveries. In 1917, a year after his general theory of relativity was published, Einstein decided to try to apply the field equations of gravitation to the entire…

Alchemy, which most people have at least heard of, along the lines of 'the quest to turn lead into gold', is getting rehabilitated. In one paper, anyway. Alchemy, like chemistry, had 'chem' at its core. Chem derives from Khem ('black land'), which was the name for what we call Egypt, due to the dark alluvial soil provided by the flooding Nile each year. Egypt was well known to Greeks and Romans but it wasn't until the 8th century that Arab Muslims, having conquered it in the previous century, re-introduced the science from their new state to Europe, a state which they called Al-Khem. This…

A forensic team has tackled a famous case from 1930 - the ‘Blazing Car Murder’ , which sounds like it came right out of the plot of a Sherlock Holmes novel. On November 6th, 1930, a man was murdered in a car fire in in Hardingstone, Northamptonshire. Alfred Rouse was convicted of the crime and hanged at Bedford Gaol in March 1931. Home Office-appointed pathologist Bernard Spilsbury and another local pathologist, limited by the science and technology of their day, were unable to identify the victim due to the burns, but they reported that lavender colored material and light brown hair…

The Battle of Raphia occurred in 217 BC near modern Rafah during the Syrian Wars. It was documented by Polybius and the orders of battles listed tens of thousands of foot soldiers, thousands of cavalry and elephants on both sides, making it the only known battle between Asian and African elephants.  On one side was Ptolemy IV, the King of Egypt, and on on the other was Antiochus III the Great, the King of the Seleucid Kingdom, which was formed after Alexander the Great died and his empire was divided, and covered lands from Persia to northwest India. With the rise of taxonomy…

In 1855, a specimen of the brain of mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss was taken and preserved. But the over 150-year-old slice of his brain, which scientists had long been examining in the belief that it was Gauss's brain, turns out to not be his brain at all. Instead, the preserved specimens of the brains of Gauss and Göttingen physician Conrad Heinrich Fuchs, a medical scholar and founder of the University of Göttingen's anatomical pathology collection, were switched, probably soon after the death of both men in 1855, says  Renate Schweizer, a neuroscientist at…

Technology may not seem like more of a woman's world than science, but in some ways it is - Ada Lovelace is revered by computer programmers and is well-known in popular culture, while Laura Bassi, the first women to forge a professional scientific career, is basically unknown outside physics. Laura Bassi was born in Bologna in 1711 and rose to celebrity status across the globe, gaining a reputation as being the best physics teacher of her generation and helping to develop the discipline of experimental physics.She was the "woman who understood Newton", even more of a fascination then because…