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Theodor Kocher and the Thyroid Gland

Theodor Kocher and the Thyroid Gland

On August 25, 1841, Swiss physician and Nobel Laureate Emil Theodor Kocher was born. Kocher received the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work in the physiology, pathology and surgery of the thyroid. Among his many accomplishments are the introduction and promotion of aseptic surgery and scientific methods in surgery, specifically reducing the mortality of thyroidectomies below 1% in his operations. Emil Theodor Kocher – Early Years Born in Bern,…
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Roger Wolcott Sperry’s Split-Brain Research

Roger Wolcott Sperry’s Split-Brain Research

On August 20, 1913, American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate Roger Wolcott Sperry was born. Sperry is known for his work with split-brain research. in particular for his study of functional specialization in the cerebral hemispheres. He was responsible for overturning the widespread belief that the left brain is dominant by showing that several cognitive abilities were localized in the right brain. “The objective psychologist, hoping to get at the physiological side…
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Taming Hurricane Debbie – Experiments in Weather Modification

Taming Hurricane Debbie – Experiments in Weather Modification

On August 18, 1969, intense and long-lived Hurricane Debbie was seeded with silver iodide as part of a weather modification experiment by Project Stormfury, which resulted in a fall of windspeeds by 31%. The hypothesis was that the silver iodide would cause supercooled water in the storm to freeze, disrupting the inner structure of the hurricane. Hurricane Debbie Hurricane Debbie formed on August 14 in the southern Atlantic Ocean and made its…
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Jerry R. Ehman, the Wow! Signal and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Jerry R. Ehman, the Wow! Signal and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

On August 15, 1977, a strong narrowband radio signal was received by the Big Ear radio telescope of the Ohio State University, United States, then assigned to a SETI project. Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman discovered the signal a few days later, while reviewing the recorded data and was so impressed that he circled the reading on the computer printout and wrote the comment Wow! on its side. Radio Astronomer Jerry R. Ehman…
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Aviation Pioneer Sir Geoffrey De Havilland and the Era of Jet Passenger Flight

Aviation Pioneer Sir Geoffrey De Havilland and the Era of Jet Passenger Flight

On July 27, 1882, British aviation pioneer and aircraft engineer Sir Geoffrey De Havilland was born. In 1909, he constructed his first machine and through trial and error and taught himself to fly. His Mosquito has been considered the most versatile warplane ever built. In 1943, he was one of the first to make jet-propelled aircraft, producing the Vampire jet fighter. De Havilland led the world in entering the era of jet passenger…
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Eugen Bleuler’s Research on Schizophrenia

Eugen Bleuler’s Research on Schizophrenia

On July 15, 1939, Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist Paul Eugen Bleuler passed away. Bleuler is best known for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness and for coining the terms “schizophrenia“, “schizoid”, “autism“, and what Sigmund Freud called “Bleuler‘s happily chosen term ambivalence“. He was one of the first psychiatrists to apply psychoanalytical methods in his research, and was an early proponent of the theories of Sigmund Freud.[4,5] Eugen Bleuler –…
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Paul Broca’s research in the Causes for Aphasia

Paul Broca’s research in the Causes for Aphasia

  On July 9, 1880, French physician, anatomist and anthropologist Paul Broca passed away. He is best known for his research on Broca’s area, a region of the frontal lobe that has been named after him. Broca’s Area is involved with language. His work revealed that the brains of patients suffering from aphasia contained lesions in a particular part of the cortex, in the left frontal region. This was the first anatomical…
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Stephen Mouton Babcock and the Babcock Test

Stephen Mouton Babcock and the Babcock Test

On July 2, 1931, American agricultural chemist Stephen Moulton Babcock passed away. He is best known for his Babcock test in determining dairy butterfat in milk processing, for cheese processing, and for the “single-grain experiment” that led to the development of nutritional science as a recognized discipline. He worked for 43 years at the University of Wisconsin, where he established a laboratory where he carried out pioneering research in nutrition and in…
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Do you speak ASCII?

Do you speak ASCII?

On June 17, 1963, the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, or short better known as ASCII code was published as ASA X3.4-1963 by the American National Standards Institute. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text. Most modern character-encoding schemes are based on ASCII, though they support many additional characters. ASCII was the most common character encoding on the World Wide Web until December 2007,…
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Johannes Fabricius and the Observation of Sunspots

Probably on June 13, 1611, Frisian astronomer Johannes Fabricius published his Narratio de maculis in sole observatis et apparente earum cum sole conversione (Account of Spots Observed on the Sun and of Their Apparent Rotation with the Sun), which counts as the first published description of sunspots. Nevertheless, sunspots have been discovered earlier, as the first record of a sunspot drawing dates back into the 12th century to John of Worcester in 1128. Johannes…
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