Lucy Australopithecus

1. Lucy was found by Donald Johanson and Tom Gray on the 24 November 1974, at the site of Hadar in Ethiopia when they had taken an alternate route on their way back using a Land Rover.
2. The skeleton was given the name “Lucy” during a celebration in the night of November 24, and the Beatles’ song “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” was playing over and over. 
3. The term hominid refers to a member of the zoological family Hominidae which encompasses all species originating after the human/African ape ancestral split, leading to and including all species of Australopithecus and Homo although these species differ in many ways, they share a suite of characteristics that define them as a group and the most conspicuous of these traits is bipedal locomotion, or walking upright.
4. As in a modern human’s skeleton, Lucy's bones are rife with evidence clearly pointing to bipedality. Her distal femur shows several traits unique to bipedality. The shaft is angled relative to the condyles (knee joint surfaces), which allows bipeds to balance on one leg at a time during locomotion. There is a prominent patellar lip to keep the patella (knee cap) from dislocating due to this angle. Her condyles are large and are thus adapted to handling the added weight that results from shifting from four limbs to two. The pelvis exhibits a number of adaptations to bipedality. The entire structure has been remodeled to accommodate an upright stance and the need to balance the trunk on only one limb with each stride. The talus, in her ankle, shows evidence for a convergent big toe, sacrificing manipulative abilities for efficiency in bipedal locomotion. The vertebrae show evidence of the spinal curvatures necessitated by a permanent upright stance.
5. Evidence now strongly suggests that the Hadar material, as well as fossils from elsewhere in East Africa from the same time period, belong to a single, sexually dimorphic species known as Australopithecus afarensis. At Hadar, the size difference is very clear, with larger males and smaller females being fairly easy to distinguish. Lucy clearly fits into the smaller group.
6. No cause has been determined for Lucy’s death. One of the few clues we have is the conspicuous lack of postmortem carnivore and scavenger marks. Typically, animals that were killed by predators and then scavenged by other animals (such as hyaenas) will show evidence of chewing, crushing, and gnawing on the bones. The ends of long bones are often missing, and their shafts are sometimes broken (which enables the predator to get to the marrow). In contrast, the only damage we see on Lucy's bones is a single carnivore tooth puncture mark on the top of her left pubic bone. This is what is called a perimortem injury, one occurring at or around the time of death. If it occurred after she died but while the bone was still fresh, then it may not be related to her death.
7. There are several indicators which give a fair idea of her age. Her third molars (“wisdom teeth”) are erupted and slightly worn, indicating that she was fully adult. All the ends of her bones had fused and her cranial sutures had closed, indicating completed skeletal development. Her vertebrae show signs of degenerative disease, but this is not always associated with older age. All these indicators, when taken together, suggest that she was a young, but fully mature, adult when she died.
8. IHO has replicas of Lucy‘s bones, which were produced in the Institute‘s casting and molding laboratories. The “real” Lucy is stored in a specially constructed safe in the Paleoanthropology Laboratories of the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Because of the rare and fragile nature of many fossils, including hominids, molds are often made of the original fossils. The molds are then used to create detailed copies, called casts, which can be used for teaching, research, and exhibits.
9. The hominid-bearing sediments in the Hadar formation are divided into three members. Lucy was found in the highest of these—the Kada Hadar or KH—member. While fossils cannot be dated directly, the deposits in which they are found sometimes contain volcanic flows and ashes, which can now be dated with the 40Ar/39Ar (Argon-Argon) dating technique. Armed with these dates and bolstered by paleomagnetic, paleontological, and sedimentological studies, researchers can place fossils into a dated framework with accuracy and precision. Lucy is dated to just less than 3.18 million years old.
10. Although several hundred fragments of hominid bone were found at the Lucy site, there was no duplication of bones. A single duplication of even the most modest of bone fragments would have disproved the single skeleton claim, but no such duplication is seen in Lucy. The bones all come from an individual of a single species, a single size, and a single developmental age. In life, she would have stood about three-and-a-half feet tall, and weighed about 60 to 65 pounds.
11. Australopithecus afarensis may have walked upright and looked somewhat human-like, but they were much smaller than we are. Lucy died as a young but fully grown adult, and stood only 1.1m (3.7ft) tall and weighed in at a paltry 29kg (64lb).
12. Lucy's cause of death cannot be determined. The specimen does not show the signs of post-mortem bone damage characteristic of animals killed by predators and then scavenged. The only visible damage is a single carnivore tooth mark on the top of her left pubic bone, believed to have occurred at or around the time of death, but which is not necessarily related to her death. Her third molars were erupted and slightly worn and therefore, it was concluded that she was fully matured with completed skeletal development. There are indications of degenerative disease to her vertebrae that do not necessarily indicate old age. It is believed that she was a mature but young adult when she died.

Google's Doodle of Lucy on her 41st Anniversary 

http://www.diretube.com/uploads/articles/a48dfa40.jpg

Sources:

https://iho.asu.edu/about/lucys-story
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/lucy-the-australopithecus-how-related-are-we-to-this-32-million-year-old-hominid-a6745801.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/who-is-lucy-the-australopithecus-afarensis-google-doodle-discovery-a6745696.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus)
http://www.diretube.com/uploads/articles/a48dfa40.jpg

The Boolean Man - George Boole

1. Today is the 200th birthday of George Boole, the man famous for his Boolean logic, was an English mathematician, educator, philosopher and logician. He worked in the fields of differential equations and algebraic logic, and is best known as the author of The Laws of Thought which contains Boolean algebra.
2. He was born on 2 November 1815 at Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England.
3. His legacy was Boolean logic, a theory of mathematics in which all variables are either "true" or "false", or "on" or "off". 
4. The mathematician became one of the founding fathers of modern computer science and engineering – despite never finishing school  but it took him several years to master calculus as he had no tutor. 
5. His system of Boolean Logic paved the way for modern electrical engineering and computer science  and his ideas were put to use more than 70 years after his death when Victor Shestakov at Moscow State University in Russia proposed using the system to design electrical switches, according to the Scientific American. 
6. He was a polymath having learned French, German, Latin and Greek.
7. He founded a school when he was just 19 in the year 1839 and also in 1840.
8. He became the first professor of mathematics at the newly founded Queen’s College, Cork (now University College Cork) in Ireland in 1849. 
9. Boole was awarded the Keith Medal by the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 1855 and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1857. He received honorary degrees of LL.D. from the University of Dublin and Oxford University.
10. He died of fever-induced pleural effusion on 8 December 1864 (aged 49) at Ballintemple, County Cork, Ireland and was buried in the Church of Ireland cemetery of St Michael's, Church Road, Blackrock (a suburb of Cork City). There is a commemorative plaque inside the adjoining church.
11. Boolean algebra is named after him, as is the crater Boole on the Moon. The keyword Bool represents a Boolean datatype in many programming languages, though Pascal and Java, among others, both use the full name Boolean.[33] The library, underground lecture theatre complex and the Boole Centre for Research in Informatics[34] at University College Cork are named in his honour. A road called Boole Heights in Bracknell, Berkshire is named after him.
12. Google honored him today, 2 November 2015, for his  11001000th birthday with a doodle.

Sources:

George Boole: Five things you probably didn’t know about the man behind today's Google Doodle 
George Boole: How mathematical genius's Boolean logic led to the digital age 
George Boole

Rachel Louise Carson

1. Carson was born on 27 May 1907 to Maria Frazier (McLean) and Robert Warden Carson, an insurance salesman at Springdale, Pennsylvania, just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh.

   

   Rachel Carson, author of Silent Spring. Official photo as FWS employee. c. 1940. (wikipedia)

2. Carson attended Springdale's small school through tenth grade, graduated in 1925 at the top of her class of forty-five high school students in nearby Parnassus, Pennsylvania, originally studied English but switched her major to biology in January 1928 and due to financial reasons was forced to remain at the Pennsylvania College for Women (today known as Chatyham University) and later on graduated magna cum laude in 1929.
3. Carson took a summer course at the Marine Biological Laboratory and continued her studies in zoology and genetics at Johns Hopkins in the fall of 1929 and became a part-time student assistant in Raymond Pearl's laboratory working with rats and Drosophila for her tuition, completed a dissertation project on the embryonic development of the pronephros in fish and earned a master's degree in zoology in June 1932.
4. Carson intended to continue for a doctorate but was forced to leave Johns Hopkins in 1934 for a full-time teaching position due to family reasons and in 1935, her father died suddenly making financial situations more difficult while she took care of her aging mother.
5. Carson got a temporary position at the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries at the urging of her undergraduate biology mentor Mary Scott Skinker and her temporary task was to managed fifty-two seven-minute programs series entitled "Romance Under the Waters" that focused on aquatic life and was intended to generate public interest in fish biology which was never done by several writers before her.
6. Carson outscored all other civil service exam applicants when she took it and became the second woman to be hired by the Bureau of Fisheries for a full-time, professional position, as a junior aquatic biologist in 1936.
7. Carson wrote five books with the last one posthumously published. The titles of these books are as follows: 1) Under the Sea-wind - first edition was in 1941, Carson’s first book and her personal favorite; 2) The Sea Around Us - first edition was in 1951, based on post World War II geographical and oceanographic studies of the sea, which also won the National Book Award in 1952; 3) The Edge of the Sea - first edition was in 1955, is a practical guide to identifying sea inhabitants; 4) Silent Spring - first edition was in 1962,demonstrated pesticides could cause cancer and that their agricultural use was a threat to wildlife, particularly to birds; and 5) The Sense of Wonder - published posthumously, Carson's philosophy about adults and their child's inborn sense of wonder about the natural world.
8. The book "Silent Spring" led to a worldwide ban of DDT, a colourless and crystalline organochloride with insecticidal properties, and pesticides which was formalized under the Stockholm Convention, but its limited use in disease vector control continues to this day and remains controversial.
9. Carson was also credited with being an inspiration for the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency which is a US government agency focused on protecting human health and the environment.
10. Carson died on 14 April 1964 at the age of 56 due to heart attack having battled breast cancer for many years.
11. Carson's birth centennial was on 2007 and on Earth Day last 22 April 2007, the "Courage for the Earth: Writers, Scientists, and Activists Celebrate the Life and Writing of Rachel Carson" was released as "a centennial appreciation of Rachel Carson's brave life and transformative writing" which was a collection of thirteen essays by prominent environmental writers and scientists.
12. Carson was posthumously awarded on 9 June 1980 the Presidential Medal of Freedom which is the highest civilian honor in the United States.

Screenshot of Google's doodle for the Rachel Louise Carson's 107th birthday depicting her surrounded by a variety of sea creatures and birds which highlights her love for nature.

References:

Rachel Carson
The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson
Rachel Louise Carson birthday: Environmentalist author of 'Silent Spring' whose work led to pesticides ban
Google celebrates American marine biologist Rachel Louise Carson's 107th birthday with a doodle
Wild thing! Google Doodle celebrates nature author Rachel Louise Carson's birthday