Thread: Today in Science History -- April

April 1

1869

A westerner sees an adult giant panda for the first time, when local hunters bring the body of a panda to French missionary-naturalist, Pere Armand David in Moupin, China. Although he considered himself a follower of the animal-loving St. Francis, Pere David paid high prices for the bodies of unusual animals, thus encouraging their slaughter.

[url]http://www.kidsplanet.org/factsheets/giant_panda.html[/url]

April 2

1935

The first practical radar system is patented by England's Robert Watson-Watt.

Radar History:
[url]http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blradar.htm[/url]

April 3

1965

The "SNAP 10A," the first nuclear reactor in space, is launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, at 1:25 pm. It starts generating power 220 minutes later, upon an electric signal from scientists on Earth. The reactor stayed operable for 43 days, generating 500,000 watt-hours of electricity.

[url]http://www.atomicmuseum.com/tour/deliverysystems.cfm[/url]
SNAP 10A System:
SNAP 10A System for Nuclear Auxiliary Power (or Space Nuclear Auxiliary Power) is a nuclear powered electrical source On April 3, 1965, an ATLAS Agena D, launched from the Western Test Range, put a SNAP 10A into a nominal 1300km orbit, where it generated more than 500 watts of power for over 43 days. It used thermoelectric elements. The shutdown was by a spacecraft malfunction, not a problem with the SNAP.

April 4

1964

L.S.B. Leakey, John Napier, and Phillip Tobias report in Nature the discovery of a new hominid species, Homo habilis, in Olduvai Gorge.

[url]http://www.mnh.si.edu/anthro/humanorigins/ha/hab.html[/url]

Yikes! I missed the 5th!

April 5

1942

Racked with malaria, blood poisoning, and severe weight loss, Lt. Colonel Arthur F. Fischer furiously strips and grinds bark from cinchona trees that he has been growing for 20 years on Mindanao, the Philippines. This one group of trees is the world's only source of the antimalaria drug quinine that is not already in the hands of the fast-approaching Japanese army. When he learns on this day that Bataan is about to fall and that he will not be able to ship the bark back to his malaria-ridden compatriots there, Fischer races to extract what quinine he can. When Bataan does fall several days later, and Mindanao is about to fall next, Fischer takes two tins of seeds and flies to Australia on one of the last planes out of the Philippines. Trees from these seeds are still growing today.

April 6

1993

A huge radioactive cloud is launched and starts drifting over the Russian wilderness, after a tank of radioactive waste explodes at the secret military plant of Tomsk 7, 1700 miles east of Moscow. Government officials call it the worst, but not the only Russian nuclear accident since the April 1986 incident at Chernobyl. the blast prompts delegates from the world's richest nation meeting in Tokyo a week later, to agree that Russia needs urgent help with her nuclear waste, obsolete nuclear warheads, and crumbling nuclear reactors.

April 7

1795

The metric system is adopted by France, the country that created it.

[url]http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/metric.html[/url]

April 8

1862

An aerosol dispenser is first patented in the United States, by John D. Lynde of Philadelphia.

April 9

1981

The longest scientific name in history is published in Nature. It is the systematic name for human mitochondrial DNA; the substance contains 16,569 nucleotides, and the word contains 207,000 letters.