Welcome (back) to Weirdbeautiful.
Image-of-the-day today is the "Google Doodle" above, posted on the google homepage yesterday, in honour of the birth of Gregor Mendel, the "Father" of Genetics, who was born 189 years ago, on 20th July 1822. Posthumously famed for his ground-breaking experiments on the common pea, Pisum sativum, Mendel also conducted later experiments on bees.You can read an English translation of his famous pea paper "Versuche über Pflanzenhybriden" ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization") here - http://www.mendelweb.org/Mendel.html
the original German version is online here- http://vlp.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/library/data/lit29259?
According to the archives of the "Google style logo museum", Gregor Mendel is just one of a string of scientists and scientific events to be commemorated with a "google doodle", something which, I think needs a commemoration, or at least, recognition, of its own. Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Nikola Tesla have all been the subject of “google doodles” but so have many more obscure scientists- the Serbian geophysicist Milutin Milankovich, for example, the Chinese Rocket scientist Qian Xuesen and the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, as well as the botanists Josif Pančić and Tomitaro Makino and the Spanish naturalist and broadcaster Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente. The beautiful doodle in honour of Josif Pančić (below) references his discovery of the Serbian Spruce, Picea omorika.
Several scientific events have also been celebrated- the discovery of Buckminsterfullerene, (google doodle above) for example, Pi day and various astronomical events, such as the Perseid Meteor Shower, the anniversary of the first Moon Landing and the Hubble Telescope (below).
One subject not to have been commemorated in doodle-form is the final voyage of the Space Shuttle, which landed today for the "final" time, although it's hard to see how any diagram could surpass the picture below, taken by Bill Inglis for NASA (for image source, click [here])
There is a brief article about the end of the Space Shuttle's final voyage on the NASA website here-
the article title is "Crew Returns Home After Final Shuttle Mission".
Finally, cute story-of-the-week, meanwhile, is this article about a 12-year old African tortoise who was fitted with a wheel at Washington State University, after one of his legs had to be amputated for medical reasons. Click [here] for the full story.
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You can find more details about Google doodles [here]and [here] and about Dennis Hwang (the designer of many of them) [here]
