Born in 1906, computer scientist Grace Hopper invented the first compiler for computer programming language & was among the first programmers of the Harvard Mk1 computer.
@Sheril@lisamelton out of respect for this absolute legend, I shall nobly resist the urge to make any rear admiral jokes.
There should be statues of Grace Hopper in every major city, her life should be the subject of textbooks and movies. She was a total bad ass, perhaps one of the most important people to ever live.
Thanks to a poorly chosen font and some good natured fun, the The International Astronomical Union has officially named Venus' quasi-moon 2002VE as 'Zoozve'.
American mathematician and aerospace engineer Mary Jackson died #OTD in 2005.
In 1951 she started working at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), where she was a member of its West Area Computing unit and Jackson’s supervisor was Dorothy Vaughan. Despite early promotions, she was denied management-level positions, and in 1979 she left engineering and took a demotion to become manager of the women’s program at NASA.
First-ever transmitted Alzheimer’s cases reported in new study
"As children, they had received growth hormone taken from the brains of human cadavers, which used to be a treatment for a number of conditions that caused short stature. Now, decades later, they were showing signs of Alzheimer’s."
Social acceptability of psilocybin-assisted therapy for existential distress at the end of life: A population-based survey
Plourde et al., 2024
"The social acceptability of psilocybin-assisted therapy for existential distress at the end of life is rather high in Canada. These findings may contribute to efforts to mobilise resources and improve access to this emerging therapy in palliative and end of life care settings."
American physicist and chemist Katharine Burr Blodgett was born #OTD in 1898.
She was the inventor of a technique for making non-reflecting "invisible" glass, a material used in virtually all camera lenses & many other optical devices. She was also responsible for developing an instrument that can measure film thicknesses to within a few angstroms. She did research on methods of removing ice from airplane wings. She is also credited with the development of a new type of smoke screen.
Mars experiences moments where its moons cast shadows on its surface. But "eclipses" on the Red Planet are very different from those on Earth, and the footage is surreal: More from Science Alert: https://flip.it/zWSO8l #Science#Space#Mars#Eclipse
Earthrise is a photograph of Earth and part of the Moon's surface that was taken from lunar orbit by astronaut William Anders on December 24, 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission. #science#photography#christmaseve
Nearly two years ago, the underwater Hunga volcano in the South Pacific experienced an eruption so strong its caldera collapsed completely. A small team of scientists has partly mapped the magmatic system under the volcano from both before and after the eruption. Phys.org has more on what they found: https://flip.it/nhwv-e#Earth#Volcano#Science
Wow this is bad. Some Italian researchers decided there wasn't enough anti-right-to-repair hardware #DRM in the world already, and developed a way to physically profile and recognize individual battery cells that can be combined with classic DRM technologies to prevent non-OEM battery cells from working inside a device, even if the classic DRM portion is circumvented. Whyyyyyy?!