1)Forever enshrined in scientific legend, the discovery of penicillin a group of antibiotics used to combat a variety of bacterial infections is really just a case of dirty dishes. Scottish biologist Alexander Fleming took an August vacation from his day-to-day work in the lab investigating staphylococci, known commonly as staph. Upon his return on Sept. 3, 1928, the perceptive scientist found a strange fungus on a culture he had left in his lab a fungus that had killed off all surrounding bacteria in the culture. Modern medicine was never the same.
2)Isaac Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642. Never the humble sort, he would have found the date apt: The gift to humanity and science had arrived. A sickly infant, his mere survival was an achievement. Just 23 years later, with his alma mater Cambridge University and much of England closed due to plague, Newton discovered the laws that now bear his name. (He had to invent a new kind of math along the way: calculus.) The introverted English scholar held off on publishing those findings for decades, though, and it took the Herculean efforts of friend and comet discoverer Edmund Halley to get Newton to publish. The only reason Halley knew of Newton’s work? A bet the former had with other scientists on the nature of planetary orbits. When Halley mentioned the orbital problem to him, Newton shocked his friend by giving the answer immediately, having long ago worked it out.
Halley persuaded Newton to publish his calculations, and the results were the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, or just the Principia, in 1687. Not only did it describe for the first time how the planets moved through space and how projectiles on Earth traveled through the air; the Principia showed that the same fundamental force, gravity, governs both. Newton united the heavens and the Earth with his laws. Thanks to him, scientists believed they had a chance of unlocking the universe’s secrets.
