Portal:History of science

The social history of viruses describes the influence of viruses and viral infections on human history. Epidemics caused by viruses began when human behaviour changed during the Neolithic period, around 12,000 years ago, when humans developed more densely populated agricultural communities. This allowed viruses to spread rapidly and subsequently to become endemic. Viruses of plants and livestock also increased, and as humans became dependent on agriculture and farming, diseases such as potyviruses of potatoes and rinderpest of cattle had devastating consequences.

Smallpox and measles viruses are among the oldest that infect humans. Having evolved from viruses that infected other animals, they first appeared in humans in Europe and North Africa thousands of years ago. The viruses were later carried to the New World by Europeans during the time of the Spanish Conquests, but the indigenous people had no natural resistance to the viruses and millions of them died during epidemics. Influenza pandemics have been recorded since 1580, and they have occurred with increasing frequency in subsequent centuries. The pandemic of 1918–19, in which 40–50 million died in less than a year, was one of the most devastating in history. (Full article...)

Ernst Haeckel, the great populariser of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, was the first to use a literal tree of life to express evolutionary relationships based on common descent. This version comes from his 1866 General Morphology; several different versions, some highly elaborate and artistic, are found in other Haeckel works. The icon of a tree of life has been used widely since that time; some modern versions include a tangled root system to represent the effects of horizontal gene transfer and symbiogenesis early in evolutionary history.

...that Einstein's famous letter to FDR about the possibility of an atomic bomb was actually written by Leó Szilárd?

...that geology was transformed in the latter part of the 20th century after widespread acceptance of plate tectonics?

...that the idea of biological evolution dates to the ancient world?

Portrait, 1695

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz or Leibnitz (1 July 1646 [O.S. 21 June] – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the invention of calculus in addition to many other branches of mathematics, such as binary arithmetic, and statistics. Leibniz has been called the "last universal genius" due to his knowledge and skills in different fields and because such people became much less common after his lifetime with the coming of the Industrial Revolution and the spread of specialized labor. He is a prominent figure in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He wrote works on philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, law, history, philology, games, music, and other studies. Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics and computer science.

In addition, he contributed to the field of library science by devising a cataloguing system whilst working at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, that would have served as a guide for many of Europe's largest libraries. Leibniz's contributions to a wide range of subjects were scattered in various learned journals, in tens of thousands of letters and in unpublished manuscripts. He wrote in several languages, primarily in Latin, French and German. (Full article...)

• 1743 – Coordinated scientific observations of the transit of Mercury are organized by Joseph-Nicolas Delisle

• 1854 – Birth of Paul Sabatier, French chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1941)

• 1855 – Birth of Léon Teisserenc de Bort, French meteorologist (d. 1913)

• 1879 – Death of James Clerk Maxwell, Scottish physicist (b. 1831)

• 1892 – Birth of J. B. S. Haldane, Scottish geneticist (d. 1964)

• 1906 – Birth of Fred Lawrence Whipple, American astronomer (d. 2004)

• 1944 – Death of Alexis Carrel, French surgeon and biologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1873)

• 1948 – Birth of William Daniel Phillips, American physicist, Nobel laureate

• 1952 – Birth of Vandana Shiva, Indian physicist

• 1992 – Death of Arpad Elo, American physicist and chess player (b. 1903)

• 2007 – China's first lunar satellite, Chang'e 1 goes into orbit around the Moon