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Dian Fossey was an American zoologist who completed an extended study of gorilla groups over a period of 18 years. She observed them daily for years in the mountain forests of Rwanda, initially encouraged to work there by famous paleontologist Louis Leakey.

Fossey enrolled in a pre-veterinary course in biology at the University of California, Davis and later transferred to San Jose State College. She subsequently received her PhD from Darwin College, Cambridge for a thesis entitled, “The Behaviour of the Mountain Gorilla” in 1976. Fossey became interested in Africa after seeing photographs and hearing about the continent from a friend who had been there. After taking out a loan in 1963, she embarked on a trip to Africa and met Dr. Louis Leakey.

Leakey talked to Fossey about the work of Jane Goodall and the importance of long term research of the great apes. By 1966, she gained the support of Dr. Leakey and carried out long-term research on the mountain gorillas. She began her field study in the Congo, but by 1967, political upheaval forced her to move to Rwanda. In 1967, she founded the Karisoke Research Center and became an international celebrity, bringing massive publicity to her cause of saving the mountain gorilla from extinction. She was brutally murdered on December 26, 1985.

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Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist. He is the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and the distinguished research chair at Waterloo’s Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.

Hawking is known for his contributions to the fields of cosmology and quantum gravity, especially in the context of black holes, and his popular works in which he describes his own theories and cosmology in general. These include the very popular science best-seller A Brief History of Time, which stayed on the British Sunday Times best-seller list for a record-breaking 237 weeks. His key scientific works to date have included providing, with Roger Penrose, theorems regarding singularities in the framework of general relativity.

Hawking also worked on the theoretical prediction that black holes should emit radiation, which is today known as Hawking radiation. His scientific career spans over 40 years and his books and public appearances have made him an academic celebrity and world-renowned theoretical physicist. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a lifetime member of the Pontifical Academy of Science.

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The Galilean moons are the four moons of Jupiter discovered by Galileo Galilei. They are the largest of the many moons of Jupiter and derive their names from the lovers of Zeus: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto.

The four moons were discovered when Galileo made improvements to his telescope, with a magnifying capability of 30x. He was able to see celestial bodies more distinctly than was ever possible before. This allowed Galileo to discover, sometime between December 1609 and January 1610, what came to be known as the Galilean moons.

On January 7, 1610, Galileo wrote a letter containing the first mention of Jupiter’s moons. At the time, he saw only three of them and he believed them to be fixed stars near Jupiter. He continued to observe these celestial orbs from January 8 to March 2, 1610. In these observations, he discovered a fourth body and also observed that the four were not fixed stars, but rather were orbiting Jupiter. The discovery of celestial bodies orbiting something other than Earth dealt a serious blow to the then-accepted Ptolemaic world system.

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Howard Hughes was an American aviator, industrialist, film producer/director, philanthropist, and one of the wealthiest people in the world. He gained fame in the late 1920s as a maverick film producer, making big budget and often controversial films like Hell’s Angels and The Outlaw.

As an aviator, Hughes set multiple world air-speed records, built the Hughes H-1 Racer and H-4 “Hercules” aircraft, and acquired and expanded Trans World Airlines. He was a lifelong aircraft enthusiast, pilot and self-taught aircraft engineer. The H-1 Racer features a number of design innovations: it had a retractable landing gear and all the rivets and joints were set flush into the body of the aircraft to reduce drag. On July 10, 1938, Hughes set another record by completing a flight around the world in just 91 hours, beating the previous record by more than four days.

Despite his contributions to aeronautics and his other professional accomplishments, Hughes is perhaps most widely remembered for his eccentric behavior and reclusive lifestyle in later life, evidently caused in part by a worsening case of obsessive-compulsive disorder. He insisted on using tissues to pick up objects, so he could insulate himself from germs. Hughes died on April 5, 1976 while on an aircraft en route to a hospital in Houston.

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The “Piltdown Man” is a famous hoax consisting of fragments of a skull and jawbone collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, a village near Uckfield, East Sussex in England. The fragments were thought by many experts of the day to be the fossilized remains of a hitherto unknown form of early human.

The significance of the specimen remained the subject of controversy until it was exposed in 1953 as a forgery, consisting of the lower jawbone of an orangutan combined with the skull of a fully developed, modern man. The Piltdown hoax is perhaps the most famous archaeological hoax in history. It has been prominent for two reasons: the attention paid to the issue of human evolution, and the length of time (more than 40 years) that elapsed from its discovery to its full exposure as a forgery.

The Piltdown Man hoax succeeded so well because at the time of its discovery, the scientific establishment had believed that the large modern brain had preceded the modern omnivorous diet, and the forgery had provided exactly that evidence. It has also been thought that nationalism and cultural prejudice also played a role in the less-than-critical acceptance of the fossil as genuine by some British scientists.

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Gemini 6A was a manned spaceflight in NASA’s Gemini program. It was the fifth manned Gemini flight, the thirteenth manned American flight and the twenty-first spaceflight of all time. It was the last United States spacecraft to be flown using batteries as the primary power source.

Gemini 6 was originally intended to be the first mission to dock with an Agena Target Vehicle. However, after a failure in the Agena Target six minutes after its launch, the mission was canceled. NASA decided to substitute an alternate mission: a meeting in space of two Gemini spacecraft. Gemini 6A would launch eight days after the launch of Frank Borman and Jim Lovell’s Gemini 7.

Walter Schirra and Thomas Safford made it into orbit three days later in the Gemini 6A. Using guidance from the computer as well as his own piloting, Schirra performed the space rendezvous with the companion spacecraft in orbit on the afternoon of December 15. Once in formation, the two Gemini capsules flew around each other, coming within a foot of each other, but never touching. One of Gemini’s primary goals – orbital rendezvous – had been achieved.

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Apollo 17 was the 11th manned space mission in the NASA Apollo program. It was the first night launch of a United States human spaceflight and the 6th and final lunar landing mission of the Apollo program. The mission was launched on December 7, 1972 and concluded on December 19.

One of the last two men to set foot on the Moon was also the first scientist-astronaut, geologist Harrison Schmitt. While Ronald Evans circled in America, Schmitt and Eugene Cernan collected a record 240 lbs of rocks during three Moonwalks. The crew roamed for 21 miles through the Taurus-Littrow valley in their rover, discovered orange-colored soil, and left the most comprehensive set of instruments on the ALSEP on the lunar surface.

The landing site for this mission was on the southeastern rim of the Mare Serenitatis, in the southwestern Montes Taurus. There area also contained a landslide, several impact craters, and some dark craters which could be volcanic. On this mission, the astronauts took a famous photograph of the Earth known as “The Blue Marble,” which shows almost the entire continent of Africa and Antarctica.

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Vanguard TV3 was the first attempt by the United States to launch a satellite into orbit around the Earth. It was a small satellite designed to test the launch capabilities of the three-stage Vanguard rocket and study the effects of the environment on a satellite and its systems in Earth orbit.

At its launch attempt on December 6, 1957 at Cape Canaveral, the booster ignited and began to rise but about two seconds after lift off, after rising about four feet, the rocket lost thrust and began to settle back down to the launch pad. As it settled against the launch pad, the fuel tanks ruptured and exploded, destroying the rocket and severely damaging the launch pad.

The Vanguard satellite was thrown clear and landed on the ground a short distance away but was damaged and could not be reused. It is now on display at the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. The exact cause of the accident was never determined with certainty, but the commonly accepted explanation is that low fuel tank pressure during the start procedure allowed some of the burning fuel to leak into the fuel system.

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Skylab 4 was the fourth Skylab mission and placed the third crew on board. It started with the launch of three astronauts on a Saturn IB rocket and lasted 84 days. Astronauts performed scientific experiments in the areas of medical activities, solar observations and other experiments.

The all-rookie astronaut crew had problems adjusting to the same workload level as their predecessors when activating the workshop. The crew attempted to hide on astronaut’s early motion sickness from flight surgeons. The crew’s initial task of unloading and stowing the thousands of items needed for their lengthy mission also proved to be overwhelming.

As the activation of Skylab progressed, the astronauts complained of being pushed too hard and the ground crews disagreed with them. During the course of the mission, this culminated in the crew announcing an unscheduled day off, mutinying against Mission Control by turning off the communications radio while getting some rest. After a radio conference to air frustrations, their workload schedule was modified, and by the end of their mission the crew had completed even more work than had been planned before the launch. These experiences provided important lessons in planning subsequent manned spaceflight work schedules.

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Scientific American is a popular science magazine published first weekly and later monthly since August 28, 1845, making it one of the oldest continuously published periodicals in the United States. It brings articles about new and innovative research to the amateur and lay audience.

It had a monthly circulation of roughly 555,000 US and 90,000 international as of December 2005. It is a forum where scientific theories and discoveries are explained to a broader audience. In the past, scientists interested in fields outside their own areas of expertise made up the magazine’s target audience. Now, the publication is aimed at educational general readers who are interested in scientific issues. The magazine was founded by Rufus M. Porter as a single-page newsletter and throughout its early years Scientific American put much emphasis on reports of what was going on at the US patent office.

The publication reported on a broad range of inventions that includes perpetual motion machines, an 1849 device for buoying vessels by Abraham Lincoln, and the universal joint which now finds a place in nearly every automobile manufactured. The magazine evolved into something of a “workbench” publication, similar to the 20th century incarnation of Popular Science.

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