Alfred Russel Wallace centenary

Marie Curie won two and her daughter, Mme Joliot-Curie, won one as well! I had the pleasure of hearing the late Dorothy Hodgkin give a lecture about the structure of insulin in 1971.

Alan

That's pretty cool! The closest I ever got to a superstar scientist was when Lord Professor Robert Winston asked my brother for directions, and my brother texted me to tell me about it. :D Oh wait, there was this one time I saw Stephen Hawking in the cafeteria at uni - his nurse was feeding him and he kept dribbling food and it made me quite sad. :(

Anyway, by pure coincidence, I was reading the birds of paradise article in my (hardcopy!) Nat Geo magazine over lunch, and was pleasantly surprised to see this at the start:

"In New Guinea kangaroos climb trees, and butterflies the size of Frisbees dart through rain forests where egg-laying mammals scuttle across the muck. Frogs sport noses like Cyrano’s, and the rivers are full of rainbow fish.

Yet none of New Guinea’s wild wonders have fascinated scientists as deeply as the creatures that 19th-century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace called “the most extraordinary and the most beautiful of the feathered inhabitants of the earth”: the birds of paradise."

Birds of Paradise - Pictures, More From National Geographic Magazine
 
Back
Top