On This Day (April 25)

[MSFixR]

• 1599 - Oliver Cromwell, English statesman born. (d. 1658) (Cromwell was an English military and political leader best known for his involvement in making England into a republican Commonwealth and for his later role as Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland. He was one of the commanders of the New Model Army, which defeated the royalists in the English Civil War. After the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell dominated the short-lived Commonwealth of England, conquered Ireland and Scotland, and ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658.)
• 1719 – Robinson Crusoe, a novel by English author Daniel Defoe about a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, was first published.
• 1744 - Anders Celsius, Swedish astronomer died. (b. 1701) (Celsius was a Swedish astronomer. Celsius was born in Uppsala in Sweden. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. Celsius founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. His thermometer had 100 for the freezing point of water and 0 for the boiling point. The scale was reversed by Carolus Linnaeus in 1745, to how it is today.)
• 1792 – The guillotine was first used to carry out capital punishment in France, with crowds marvelling at the machine's speed and precision. (Highwayman Nicolas J. Pelletier was the first person so executed.)
• 1792 - "La Marseillaise" (French national anthem) is composed by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle.
  
  
  Roberto Alagna singing the Berlioz arrangement
  
  
• 1829 - Charles Fremantle arrives in the HMS Challenger off the coast of modern-day Western Australia prior to declaring the Swan River Colony for the United Kingdom.
• 1840 - Siméon-Denis Poisson, French mathematician died. (b. 1781) (Poisson distrubution in statistics)
• 1898 – Spanish-American War: The United States retroactively declared war on Spain, stating that a state of war between the two countries had already existed for the past couple of days.
• 1900 - Wolfgang Ernst Pauli, Austrian-born physicist, Nobel Prize laureate born. (d. 1958) (Pauli was an Austrian theoretical physicist noted for his work on spin theory, and for the discovery of the exclusion principle underpinning the structure of matter and the whole of chemistry.)
• 1953 – Molecular Structure of Nucleic Acids: A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid by molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick was first published in the scientific journal Nature, describing the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.
  
  
  The structure of part of a DNA double helix
  
  
  Animation of the structure of a section of DNA.
  
  
• 1961 - Robert Noyce is granted a patent for an integrated circuit.
• 1983 – Cold War: Replying to her letter in which she expressed her fears about the tensions between the Soviet Union and the United States, Soviet leader Yuri Andropov invited American schoolgirl Samantha Smith to visit Moscow, Leningrad and the Artek Young Pioneer camp.

Picture of the Day



A horehound bug (Agonoscelis rutila) on a horehound bush. A. rutila sucks the sap of the horehound plant, causing wilting of new shoots. Although they usually attack horehound, they may also swarm on a variety of other trees and shrubs.