A growing library of 1,223 verified facts about discoveries, inventions, art, rescue and service. Each one opens the full story.
Asked by Oliver Tambo to help when the exiled ANC was mistreating captured enemy agents, Albie Sachs helped draft a code of conduct that committed the movement to no torture and to trials instead of indefinite detention.
Read the full story →In 2005 Justice Albie Sachs wrote the Constitutional Court judgment that made South Africa the fifth country in the world to recognize same-sex marriage.
Read the full story →Ruth Arnon and her colleagues set out to cause a multiple sclerosis-like disease in animals; their molecule blocked it instead, and after nearly 30 years of work it became Copaxone.
Read the full story →In 1973 the mathematician Jacob Bronowski wrote and presented The Ascent of Man, a 13-part BBC series that told the history of science as a human adventure and set the pattern for science television.
Read the full story →As one of three UN truth commissioners, the Auschwitz survivor Thomas Buergenthal helped document the killings of El Salvador's civil war and recommend how the country should face them.
Read the full story →A founding judge of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, Thomas Buergenthal sat on the 1988 case that made states legally responsible for investigating and remedying forced disappearances.
Read the full story →In 1947 Robert Capa and his friends founded Magnum Photos, a cooperative owned by its photographers, who kept the rights to their pictures and were free to document history on their own terms.
Read the full story →On June 6, 1944, Robert Capa went ashore on Omaha Beach with the first-day assault and took the blurred, famous images that showed the world what the invasion of Normandy looked like.
Read the full story →Peter Goldmark's spinning-wheel color television lost the broadcasting race, but its small, simple cameras served hospitals and schools and later sent NASA's Apollo color pictures from space.
Read the full story →Annoyed by a Brahms concerto chopped across six 78 rpm discs, CBS engineer Peter Goldmark led the team that created the long-playing record in 1948.
Read the full story →Trying to make poker over the phone cheat-proof, Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali invented probabilistic encryption, the foundation of how data is protected online today.
Read the full story →In 1985 Shafi Goldwasser, Silvio Micali and Charles Rackoff showed how to prove a statement is true while revealing nothing else, an idea now used to protect privacy online.
Read the full story →In 1935, needing work, Gombrich wrote A Little History of the World for young readers in about a month; it was translated into 18 languages and became a bestseller again in English 70 years later.
Read the full story →Gombrich's The Story of Art (1950), written in plain language for young readers, has sold more than eight million copies in over 30 languages and taught generations how to look at art.
Read the full story →By forcing a 1978 gang rape case into France's highest criminal court, Gisèle Halimi sparked the debate that produced the 1980 law defining rape as any sexual penetration by violence, coercion or surprise.
Read the full story →In 1972 Gisèle Halimi won acquittal for a 16-year-old rape victim prosecuted for having an abortion, and in doing so helped bring down the law that had made her a criminal.
Read the full story →Through his clown Bip, his mime company and his Paris school, Marcel Marceau revived the art of mime and took it, without a single word, to audiences around the world for more than 60 years.
Read the full story →Before he was the world's most famous mime, Marcel Marceau forged papers and, dressed as a scout leader, guided Jewish children toward the Swiss border, using mime to keep them silent.
Read the full story →In the last year of her life, Curious George co-creator Margret Rey gave one million dollars each to the Boston Public Library and Beth Israel Hospital, and left the couple's whole literary archive to a public university.
Read the full story →The co-creator of Curious George thought star maps were too hard for beginners, so in The Stars: A New Way to See Them (1952) he redrew the constellations as shapes people could actually see in the sky.
Read the full story →Working with Clemens von Pirquet in Vienna, Béla Schick showed in 1905 that the immune system itself could make people sick, the insight behind the modern idea of allergy.
Read the full story →In 1913 Béla Schick published a simple skin test that showed which children were at risk of diphtheria, giving doctors a way to target protection against one of the deadliest childhood diseases.
Read the full story →In 1957 Alexei Abrikosov showed that in type-II superconductors magnetic field enters through a lattice of tiny quantum whirlpools, explaining the materials now used in MRI and accelerator magnets.
Read the full story →The Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Medical Research Foundation, founded in 2006, pays teams of scientists at many institutions to work together on new treatments for cancers such as melanoma, ovarian cancer and multiple myeloma.
Read the full story →Dr. Miriam Adelson, an Israeli physician, spent decades studying drug addiction as a medical disease, working with methadone pioneer Mary Jeanne Kreek at Rockefeller University in New York.
Read the full story →At MIT in 1977, Leonard Adleman’s job was to break the encryption schemes his colleagues Ron Rivest and Adi Shamir proposed; after he broke 42 of them, they found one he could not, and RSA became the world’s most widely used public-key system.
Read the full story →With Peter Howitt, Philippe Aghion built the first general-equilibrium model of growth through creative destruction, and used it to show why competition, research support and protection for displaced workers all matter for prosperity.
Read the full story →George Akerlof’s 1970 paper “The Market for ‘Lemons’”, rejected by several journals as trivial, showed that when sellers know more than buyers a market can collapse, explaining why warranties, brands and insurance rules exist.
Read the full story →In 1968 Zhores Alferov’s laboratory in Leningrad made the first semiconductor heterostructure laser that worked continuously at room temperature, the kind of device that now carries the internet through optical fibres.
Read the full story →By following transfusion patients and storing their blood for years, NIH physician Harvey Alter proved that an unknown virus, later named hepatitis C, was causing most hepatitis after transfusions, work that led to blood screening and, eventually, a cure.
Read the full story →“All of Israel are responsible for one another.”