Scientist of the Day

Isaac Peral y Caballero, a Spanish naval officer and engineer, was born on June 1, 1851, and died on May 22, 1895. But his significant date, the...

Royal Earl House, an American inventor, was born Sep. 9, 1814, somewhere in Vermont. Nothing is known about his life until 1845, when he turned up...

Edward Augustus Inglefield, an officer in the Royal Navy, died Sep. 4, 1894, at the age of 74. In 1818, two years before Inglefield was born, John...

Thomas Stanley, an English poet and writer of considerable wealth and privilege, was born Sep. 3, 1625, in Clothall, Hertfordshire. He seems to...

Romeyn Beck Hough, an American physician, botanist, and inventor, died on Sep. 2, 1924, at the age of 67.   Although formally trained in medicine a...

Martha, the last passenger pigeon on earth, died on Sep. 1, 1914, in her cage at the Cincinnati Zoo.  A specimen of Ectopistes migratorius, she was...

John Keill, a Scottish physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, died on Aug. 31, 1721, at the age of 49.

Frederick Law Olmsted, an American landscape architect, died on Aug. 28, 1903, at the age of 81.  He was arguably America's first landscape...

On Aug. 27, 1850, three graves were found were found on a remote icy stretch of Beechey Island in the North American Arctic archipelago. The...

Aratus of Soli, a Greek astronomical poet, lived from about 315 BCE to about 240 BCE. Soli was a town in Cilicia, on the southern coast of Anatolia...

William Herschel, a German/English astronomer, died on Aug. 25, 1822, at the age of 83. In the year 1800, Herschel was certainly the most famous as...

On Aug. 24, 2006, exactly 20 years ago today, a solar system body named Pluto, a happy planet for 76 years, was demoted and reclassified as a...