Today in History – May 3, 1997 – Garry Kasparov, reigning World Chess Champion, wins first of six chess games against IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer. The event was the twentieth century version of John Henry’s “man against machine”. The event was viewed by millions of chess and computing fans who were able witness the competition [...]

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Today in History – April 29, 1998 – Ten percent of the Amazon rain forest is preserved. On this day, Brazil agreed to set aside about 25 million ha (62 million ac) of the Amazon rain forest for conservation in cooperation with the World Bank and the World Wildlife Fund. This initiative will  protect 10% [...]

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Today in History – April 26, 1986 – The Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded in the Ukraine and parts of Belarus, Russia; it was the world’s worst civil nuclear catastrophe. The steam explosion and fire sent a cloud of radioactive dust over much of Europe, releasing at least five percent of the radioactive core of the [...]

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Today in History – April 25, 1961 – Robert Noyce and Fairchild awarded patent for the integrated circuit. Jack Kilby at Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce at the small Fairchild Semiconductor start-up company were both working on the concept of an integrated circuit in 1958. Prior to this invention, only parts of a circuit – [...]

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Today in History – April 23, 1867 – Zoetrope is patented. Before we had movies, there were a number of devices that took advantage of the “persistence of vision” in using flashing still images to simulate moving images. The zoetrope did this by putting the images on a strip of paper  inside a cylinder with [...]

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