Feb-12th International Darwin Day 2016-The revolutionary English biologist

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection was a revolutionary challenge to Western civilisation in the 19th century. International Darwin Day, celebrated on 12 February, marks the birth of the English naturalist in 1809 and his influence on the advancement of science, education and human curiosity.

International Darwin Day celebrates the life of influential scientist Charles DarwinCreative Commons

 In the late 1990s, two Darwin enthusiasts, Chesworth and Stephens, co-founded an unofficial effort to promote Darwin Day. In 2001, Chesworth moved to New Mexico and incorporated the "Darwin Day Program". In 2004, the New Mexico Corporation was dissolved and all its assets assigned to the "Darwin Day Celebration", a non-profit organization incorporated in California in 2004 by Dr. Robert Stephens and others and the Mission Statement was expanded.
 

phylogenetic wheel of life.

• Darwin deliberately delayed the publication of On The Origin Of Species for more than two decades because he was nervous about how the research would be received by the public.
• Darwin married Emma Wedgwood, his first cousin, on 29 January 1839 at St Peter's Anglican Church in Maer in Staffordshire. The Darwins had 10 children in total, but two died in infancy and a third child, their daughter Annie, passed away aged 10.
• Of his surviving children, George, Francis and Horace became Fellows of the Royal Society, distinguished as an astronomer, botanist and civil engineer. Another son, Leonard, was a politician, economist and a mentor of the evolutionary biologist Ronald Fisher – who Richard Dawkins named "the greatest biologist since Darwin".
• At a young age, Darwin made a list of the positives and negatives of marriage. Pros included companionship – a wife was "better than a dog anyhow" – and cons included less reading time in the evening.
• Darwin belonged to a group called the Glutton Club at Cambridge in which members would meet to try unusual and exotic dishes. In the Galapagos, he drank fluid from the bladder of tortoises, which he described as "very slightly bitter".
• While travelling on the HMS Beagle, Darwin saw the atrocious consequences of human slavery at first hand, which he considered dire injustices of human rights. Some believe Darwin published On The Origin Of Species partly to encourage the abolition of slavery.
• Darwin was ill with seasickness during his voyage on board The Beagle. Forced to lie on his bed for the first few weeks of his journey, he deliberated as to whether he had made the right decision to board the vessel.
• For most of his life, Darwin was a conventional Christian and studied at the University of Cambridge to become an Anglican clergyman – shortly before The Beagle voyage. However, later in life, Darwin described himself as an agnostic.
• Darwin wrote about the emotional bonds between humans and the similarities between humans and animals. According to some scholars, passages in which the scientist addressed compassion and morality show he may have been influenced by Tibetan Buddhist texts.
• Darwin's health was often compromised by an uncommon combination of symptoms, some of which appeared to follow stressful situations. This led some psychologists to theorise that he had anxiety and panic disorders or agoraphobia, while others suggested he may have suffered from Crohn's disease or even chronic fatigue syndrome.

http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/international-darwin-day-2016
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PART2/8--Photos: Peering Back to the Big Bang & Early Universe(The Origin, History, Evolution & Future of the Universe)

The Big Bang theory proposes that the universe began as an extremely hot and dense dot only a few millimeters wide. It since grew over 13.7 billion years into the vast and cooler expanding cosmos that presently exists. An extension of the Big Bang model, inflation, poses that the universe initially expanded far faster than the speed of light and grew from a subatomic size to a golf-ball size almost instantaneously, shown in this diagram.

Astronomers Detect First Split-Second of the Universe picture of the infant universe. Colors indicate "warmer" (red) and "cooler" (blue) spots. The white bars show the "polarization" direction of the oldest light.

After Big Bang Came Moment of Pure Chaos, Study Finds

Credit: ESO

Snapshot from a computer simulation of the formation of large-scale structures in the universe, showing a patch of 100 million light-years and the resulting coherent motions of galaxies flowing toward the highest mass concentration in the center.

Star Observations Could Solve Cosmic Riddle

Credit: European Southern Observatory

The globular cluster NGC 6397 contains around 400,000 stars and is located about 7,200 light years away in the southern constellation Ara. With an estimated age of 13.5 billion years, it is likely among the first objects of the galaxy to form after the Big Bang.

New Model of the Early Universe

Credit: Alvaro Orsi, Institute for Computational Cosmology, Durham University.

The universe, 590 million years after the Big Bang, may have looked like this, according to computer simulations, with some stretches of dark matter (green) and galaxies with varying luminosity of star formation (yellow is brightest).

Credit: NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst (Arizona State University) and H. Yan (Spitzer Science Center, Caltech)

This image shows primordial dwarf galaxy candidates circled in green. Three enlargements at right show several dwarf objects that are at the limits of Hubble's present instrument capabilities in September 2004. The Hubble UDF is a small region of sky in the direction of the southern constellation Fornax. The faintest objects are less than one four-billionth the brightness of stars that can be seen with the naked eye. 

Explanation of Dark Matter Might Lie in Origin of Stars

Credit: Science

One scenario envisioning the creation of the earliest stars suggests that dark matter particles are very light and can zip through space more quickly. These warm dark matter models predict that dark matter formed long filamentary structures along which stars appeared like pearls on a string. In this simulation, a gas filament condenses and then fragments to form the first stars. The blue shading in this image reflects changes in the gas's density. 

Some of the Universe's First Galaxies Discovered

Credit: M. Ouchi et al.

This is a composite of false color images of the galaxies found at the early epoch around 800 million years after the Big Bang. The upper left panel presents the galaxy confirmed in the 787 million year old universe. These galaxies are in the Subaru Deep Field.

Farthest Galaxy Found, Perhaps

Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon (Space Telescope Science Institute)

An artist's impression of an embryonic galaxy brimming with star birth in the early universe, less than a billion years after the Big Bang. This image was prompted by the discovery in 2008 of a young galaxy, called A1689-zD1, that was born about 700 million years after the Big Bang.

Violent Explosion Is Most Distant Object Ever Seen

Credit: A.J.Levan & N.R.Tanvir

Gamma-ray burst GRB 090423 is the small, very red source in the center of this image. The red color is indicative of its great distance — about 13.1 billion light years — since all the optical light has been absorbed by intergalactic hydrogen gas, leaving only infrared light. 

Black Holes Gave Our Baby Universe a Fever

Credit: Amanda Smith/IoA

A graph showing the temperature of the intergalactic medium when the universe was between one and three billion years old, overlaid on an artist's impression of the emergence of galaxies over the same period. The shaded region shows the range of possible temperatures measured from the team's data. The warming occurred at a time when the growth of galaxies was in full swing. 

 Mystery Swirls Around 'Dark Stars'

Credit: University of Utah

This artist's conception shows what an invisible "dark star" might look like when viewed in infrared light that it emits as heat. The core is enveloped by clouds of hydrogen and helium gas. A new University of Utah study suggests the first stars in the universe did not shine, but may have been dark stars.

Conditions for Universe's First Stars Recreated In Lab

Credit: David A. Aguilar (CfA)

The first primordial stars began as tiny seeds that grew rapidly into stars one hundred times the mass of our own sun. Seen here in this artist impression, swirling clouds of hydrogen and helium gases are illuminated by the first starlight to shine in the universe. 

New Sky Map Could Help Reveal How Universe Formed

Credit: ESA/ LFI & HFI Consortia

The microwave sky as seen by ESA's Planck satellite. Light from the main disk of the Milky Way is seen across the center band, while radiation left over from the Big Bang is visible on the outskirts of the image.

Earliest Galaxies Helped Lift Universe's Cosmic Fog

Credit: R. McLure/J. Dunlop/R. Ellis/B.Robertson/D. Stark [Full Story]

This is a true-color image from the part of the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field, released in 2010. It has allowed researchers to identify a new population of the most-distant known galaxies (white circles) present when the universe was less than 800 million years old. These galaxies may be responsible for ionizing intergalactic gas early in the universe's history. 

Early Universe Protocluster

Credit: Subaru/ P. Capak (SSC/Caltech)

This extremely distant protocluster represents a group of galaxies forming very early in the universe, about only a billion years after the Big Bang.

Oldest, Most Distant Galaxy Seen by Hubble

Credit: NASA, ESA

Shown here is the Hubble Space Telescope's photo of a candidate galaxy that existed 480 million years after the Big Bang (the z~10 galaxy) and the position in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF) where it was found. The galaxy is touted as the oldest, most distant one yet seen by Hubble. This field — called HUDF09 — is the deepest infrared image ever taken of the universe as of January 2011.

Deepest Image of the Sky Ever Obtained in the Near-infrared

Credit: NASA, ESA

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has made the deepest image of the universe ever taken in near-infrared light, released in 2009. The faintest and reddest objects in the image are galaxies that formed 600 million years after the Big Bang. The image was taken by the new Wide Field Camera 3 in the same region as the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (HUDF), which was taken in 2004 and is the deepest visible-light image of the universe.

Newfound Galaxy 480 Million Years After the Big Bang

Credit: NASA, ESA, Garth Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz) and Rychard Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz and Leiden University) and the HUDF09 Team.

Graphic: Hubble Telescope Deep Field Vision

Credit: NASA

This NASA graphic shows how astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to see deeper into the cosmos than ever before and hope to see even farther with the future James Webb Space Telescope.  

Hubble Telescope Zooms in on Oldest Galaxy

Credit: NASA, ESA, G. Illingworth (University of California, Santa Cruz), R. Bouwens (University of California, Santa Cruz, and Leiden University), and the HUDF09 Team

First Stars in the Universe Were Fast Spinners

Credit: A. Stacy, University of Texas.

This image depicts a simulation of the formation of the first stars showing fast rotation. These stars, which researchers called "spinstars," formed rig

CERN's Large Hadron Collider Creates Conditions Moments After Big Bang

Credit: CERN

Researchers calculated the weight of an antiproton, a finding that could shed light on the puzzle over what happened to all the antimatter that was created.

Mini Big Bang Created, Puzzling Results Too Explosive

Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Two gold nuclei collide in the center of this image, perhaps creating a new state of matter called the quark-gluon plasma, thought to have been the state.

Controversial Study Suggests Our Universe is One of Many

Credit: Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan

Some researchers think concentric ring patterns in measurements of the cosmic microwave background are evidence of a universe that existed before our own.

http://www.space.com/13219-photos-big-bang-early-universe