Tag: Google doodle

Happy Birthday Amelia Earhart!

Amelia Earhart is honored by Google with a birthday Doodle.

One of the world’s most famous pilots, Amelia Earhart was one of the first female pilots who sought to break endurance records and prove women pilots were just as tough and capable as the men. In 1937 she took off from Papua New Guinea in an attempt to circumnavigate the globe by following the equator.  She disappeared then, and her body was never recovered. However, she was still an important figure in aviation, perhaps more so than any living pilot might have been. And now, Amelia Earhart has found herself on a Google Doodle.

Earhart was born July 24, 1897, in Kansas, but didn’t take her first flight until 1920 in Long Beach, California. Earhart was instantly smitten with flight and dedicated herself to her new career; within two years, she was breaking aviation records and by 1927, she flew across the Atlantic.

The Google Doodle shows Earhart climbing into a Lockheed Vega 5b, the plane that made her famous. She joins artists, authors, musicians, and scientists in the pantheon of people who have gotten their own Google tributes.

Google Pays Tribute To Howard Carter with New Doodle!

Image Source: Google

Today, Google visually unveils some wonderful things itself to celebrate the 138th birthday of archaeologist, Howard Carter. Carter was a celebrated Egyptologist, who gained lasting fame with the 1922 discovery of the tomb and the subsequent, laborious excavation. The homepage Doodle depicts just a few of the thousands of objects that were removed from the tomb — a process that took the better part of a decade and stirred the public imagination.

Image Source: Wikipedia

The famed explorer is known for his discovery of the 18th-dynasty of Tutankhamun’s tomb, more than 3,000 years after the boy king was laid to rest. Tutankhamun’s tomb is the most intact pharaoh’s grave ever found in the Valley of the Kings.

Carter secured his place in history when he made the monumental discovery on November 4, 1922. The finding was a long time coming; Carter had worked as an archaeological excavateur for 30 years prior to stumbling upon the four-room chamber that contained the pharaoh’s mummy.

The unearthing of the entrance to the burial chamber took months, and the recovery of the more than 600 groups of precious treasures took close to a decade.

After the finding, Carter retired from working in the field and chose instead to work for museums and private collectors. He died of lymphoma in 1939 at 64 years old.

The First Person Account:

The Discovery:

The Tomb

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz Google Doodle Gets Wavy!

heinrich rudolf hertz

Today’s Google Doodle honors German Physicist Heinrich Rudolf Hertz who is probably best known for the unit of measurement that bears his name.

Hertz’s experiments in electromagnetism paved the way for wireless communications, as he was the first scientist to prove the existence of electromagnetic waves. His early research served as an expansion of the theory of electromagnetism proposed by Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Maxwell proposed that light itself was a series of electromagnetic waves and this prompted Hertz to construct his own apparatus to generate electromagnetic radiation.

Hertz did this in 1886 with a radio wave transmitter using a high voltage induction coil, a condenser, and a spark gap.

But he also had to detect the waves, so he built a receiver to detect the oscillating current. This was visible through the sparks across the spark gap. In later experiments with electromagnetic waves, Hertz determined that the radiation’s velocity was the same as light’s velocity and that radio waves’ reflection and refraction was also the same as light.

The “Hertz,” a universal measure of frequency, was established in 1930.

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates what would be his 155th birthday, Hertz Died at the age of 36.

Google Doodle Celebrates The Father of Geology, Nicolas Steno!

 

A new Google Doodle today honors the 374th birthday of the Danish anatomist Nicolas Steno, the man widely regarded as the father of modern geology.

The new inanimate Doodle features the Google logo with letters sketched out of three to five layers of earth, depending on the height of the letter and links to search results on Steno.

It is a fitting tribute for the man whose life’s work on rock layers and fossils largely led to the study of geology as we know it today. Intrigued by a shark’s tooth fossil embedded in rock, he set out to learn how one solid object could be found inside another solid object, such as a rock.

He determined that fossils formed when particles in water drifted down and formed layers over objects. Steno hypothesized that the layers of rock are arranged in a time sequence, with the oldest layers on the bottom and the newest on top. His theory became known as Steno’s law of superposition.

Born Neils Stensen in Copenhagen, he was also known as Nicholas Stenonis or Nicholas Steno. He left him home in 1660 to study medicine in Italy, where he became involved with a body of researchers following Galileo’s mathematical approach to science.

Following his geological discoveries, Steno left science, became a devout Catholic, and ministered in Germany, Denmark and Norway. Pope John Paul II beatified Steno in 1988, bringing him one step closer to sainthood.

Google has honored many notable mathematicians and scientists with their patented Doodles, including:

What do you think of the Steno Google Doodle? Let us know in the comments!

Google Doodle Honors Bob Noyce, Inventor of the Microchip

If I said the name Bob Noyce to you, odds are you won’t know who he is.  I didn’t, until I clicked through on Google’s Doodle of the day today.  Today’s Google Doodle is a giant semiconductor.  As it turns out, Google has changed its home page to honor the inventor of the microchip, Robert “Bob” Noyce.  Today would have been Bob Noyce’s 82nd birthday, and as it turns out, he was one of the titans behind the rise of the American computer industry.

Dubbed The Mayor of Silicon Valley, Bob Noyce founded not one, but two revolutionary companies:  Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel.  He is also credited alongside Jack Kilby as the inventor of the microchip semiconductor, AKA the backbone of the modern computer and the entire computing industry.  He was also one of the first titans of Silicon Valley, and one of the most powerful men in the technology industry at the time of his death in 1990, if only from a sheer vision standpoint.  After all, Noyce was nicknamed Rapid Robert by his classmates at Grinnell College and MIT, so you know he had a sharp mind and no hint of sloth.

Not bad for a guy from Grinnell, Iowa, huh?

Honoring The Two-Time Nobel Prize Winner Marie Curie On Her 144th Birthday!

 

To honor one of the most enduringly inspiring scientists ever to grace a lab, France and Poland declared 2011 to be the Year of Marie Curie.

Now, Google joins the welcome pageant of prominent tributes.

The California company’s search-engine home page on Nov. 7 celebrates the 144th anniversary of Madame Curie’s birth with a pastel-colored “Google Doodle” so evocative of her era.

Curie is the latest science figure to join Google’s pantheon of “Doodled” researchers, including Thomas Edison and “father of genetics” Gregor Mendel and “Vitamin C” scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi.

The laurels accorded Curie are numerous and still accumulating a century after she won her second Nobel Prize — the first of only two people ever to win the prize in multiple fields (the other being Linus Pauling). She was also the first woman ever to win the Nobel, and the first researcher to win in multiple sciences (physics and chemistry). But the breadth and depth and influence of her career — as well as the triumphs and tragedies of her life — paint a much fuller picture of the groundbreaking figure who in a 2009 New Scientist poll was voted “the most inspirational woman in science.”

Born in Warsaw in 1867 as Maria Sklodowska, Curie left her native Poland after she was deemed too poor to marry her would-be fiance, future esteemed mathematician Kazimierz Zorawski. So with her sister’s help, she relocated to France in the 1890s, studying at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and meeting her scientific “soulmate,” Pierre Curie. As they both studied the science of magnetism, they discovered, too, their own personal magnetic attraction.

Together, Marie and Pierre Curie did pioneering work in radioactivity (a term she coined), working with uranium, isolating radioactive isotopes and discovering the elements radium and polonium — the latter named for her native land.

The Curies shared in the 1903 Nobel for physics, bringing them fame as side by side, they grew their professional and personal lives. They had two daughters before Pierre’s untimely death when he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle on a rainy street in 1906.

Rendered “wretched” and lonely by the tragedy, Marie Curie poured herself into her work, becoming the first woman to become a Sorbonne professor. In 1911, Curie received her second Nobel, this time for chemistry.

Several years later, during World War I, Curie helped set up mobile field hospitals that featured primitive X-ray equipment to help detect shrapnel in soldiers. She worked in the field with her teenage daughter Irene, who — with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie — would later win the 1935 chemistry Nobel for her work on artificial radioactivity.

Exposed to so many radioactive materials throughout her career, Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia in 1934.

In addition to her many honors, she founded the Curie Institutes in France and Poland; co-founded the Warsaw Radium Institute; and headed the Pasteur Institute.

Curie’s accomplishments in the lab led to her being interred (with her husband) at the Pantheon, Paris — the first woman so honored based on her work.

Curie helped forever change not only how science thought about radioactivity, but also how the world perceived women in science.

Happy birthday, Madame Curie.
Watch the Live Google Doodle Here
 

Happy 226th Birthday John James Audubon!

 

April 26 marks the 226th birthday of ornithologist John James Audubon. Celebrating this lover of birds, Google has created a custom doodle featuring birds from across North America.

Audubon was born in what is now Haiti and spent much of his youth in France. He arrived in America in 1803 and lived on a farm owned by Quaker relatives in Pennsylvania. Here, Audubon fell in love with nature and spent much of his time exploring and studying his surroundings.

Audubon’s , Birds of North America, featured 435 realistic life-sized painting of the wildlife he observed while traveling the continent. The project was so costly that the young naturalist traveled to Europe for funding and delivered for-pay lectures in France and Britain. Eleven years in the making, the catalog was completed in 1838.

In 1905, an environmental conservation society formed, taking Audubon’s name. Today, the Audubon Society is one of the oldest groups of its kind.

Learn more about John James Audubon here:

http://www.squidoo.com/audubon