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Tag: Doodle

  • Facebook Photos Are About to Look More Like Snapchat

    Facebook, which already handles an unconscionable amount of photos on a daily basis, has been adding tools as of late to get people even more engaged.

    Now, you can expect the photos you see on the site to look at little more Snapchat-ty.

    Facebook is letting users doodle on photos from their iOS and Android apps.

    When you upload a new photo via mobile, Facebook now sports a “Doodle” option at the bottom right-hand corner.

    Clicking on it opens up a color palette and let’s you draw with your finger.

    Screen Shot 2015-10-07 at 10.48.23 AM

    Last month, Facebook updated its photo uploader on the web to allow users to easily add stickers, filters, and text.

  • Wassily Kandinsky: Abstract Artist Gets a Birthday Google Doodle

    Wassily Kandinsky, the Russian-born artist and theorist who is known as one of the key figures in abstract art, has been given his own Google Doodle on the site’s homepage in honor of his 148th birthday.

    Born 1866 in Moscow, Kandinsky studied law and economics at the University of Moscow. It was when he took a job as a professor at the University of Dorpat near the turn of the century that Kandinsky began painting in earnest.

    Most know Kandinsky for his abstract work, but he didn’t start out painting the complex pieces like the ones that serve as inspiration for today’s Google Doodle.

    in 1896, Kandinsky made a big career shift and left Moscow for Munich, where he would attempt to enroll in art school. In the decade that followed, Kandinsky’s style would begin to change – as colorful landscapes would give way to abstraction.

    In 1921, Walter Gropius asked Kandinsky to come to his Bauhaus school – an offer Kandinsky accepted. There, he taught classes, painted, and worked on theory.

    When the Bauhaus school was shut down by the Nazis in 1933, Kandinsky moved to Paris. He would later become a French citizen and stay in France until his death in 1944.

    Images via Wikimedia Commons (1) (2), Google

  • Leo Tolstoy: Russian Author Celebrated with Google Doodle

    Today, Google is honoring famous Russian author Leo Tolstoy with a Doodle documenting some of his most important works, novels like Anna Karenina and War and Peace.

    Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was born in Yasnaya Polyana in 1828 into Russian nobility. Both of his parents died when he was very young, and he spent his childhood in the care of relatives. In his early years he studied law for a bit, had some troubles with gambling, and eventually joined the army. He first achieved some sort of attention with semi-autobiographical works like Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth in the mid 1850s.

    Tolstoy is most widely known for his hefty works Anna Karenina and War and Peace, thought of by many as two of the greatest novels of all time. The former tells the story of a married woman and her affair with a wealthy Count and the latter tells the stories of multiple families through the lens of the Napoleonic Wars. War and Peace is considered one of the most important works of fiction of all time – as well as one of the longest.

    Today’s Doodle recognizes these two works, as well as The Death of Ivan Ilyich.

    Tolstoy is also remembered as a philosopher, short story writer, playwright, and essayist. Tolstoy died of pneumonia at a train station, at the age of 82.

    Google’s Doodle honors Tolstoy’s 186th birthday.

    Images via Google, Wikimedia Commons

  • Doodle 4 Google Competition Gets 11-Year-Old Audrey Zhang $30K Scholarship

    If you visit Google’s homepage in the U.S. today, you’ll see a very interesting doodle. That’s the winner for 2014’s Doodle 4 Google competition (the 7th such event). This pleasant doodle comes from 11-year-old Audrey Zhang from New York.

    Doodle 4 Google competition winner Audrey Zhang

    Google asked kids K-12 to tell it what they would invent to help make the world a better place. Over 100,000 doodles were submitted. There were 250 state finalists, 50 state winners, and 5 national age group winners.

    “To make the world a better place, I invented a transformative water purifier,” Zhang said. “It takes in dirty and polluted water from rivers, lakes, and even oceans, then massively transforms the water into clean, safe and sanitary water, when humans and animals drink this water, they will live a healthier life.”

    Beautiful.

    “We quickly lost count of all the delightful elements of Audrey’s doodle,” Google said. “So in the spirit of this year’s theme, we asked Audrey to spend a day with the doodlers to turn her illustration into a moving animation. As an animator and director for a day, she made sure we twinkled each light and cleaned the water just right and took extra care for the illustration’s dragons—about whom she is also writing a novel.”

    Doodle 4 google segments

    If you’ll notice, on actual search results pages, Google shows a different doodle:

    Doodle 4 Google picture

    That’s actually an image from the main doodle, as you can see from the zooms above.

    You can see the animation in motion here:

    “We thought she might consider it a pretty cool gig, but alas, Audrey eventually had to fly back to New York with the $30,000 college scholarship and $50,000 Google for Education technology grant for her school,” Google said. “We were also so inspired by her doodle invention that google.org donated $20,000 in her name to charity:water toward providing clean water to schools in Bangladesh.”

    Here’s a look at the designs from the other four age group winners:

    You can find a gallery of the 50 state winners’ designs here and an album of the 250 state finalists’ designs here.

    Last year, contestants were asked to illustrate their “best day ever”. The award went to then-12-grader Sabrina Brady of Sparta, Wisconsin. Her doodle was called “Coming Home,” and featured a little girl happy to see her father coming home from war.

    doodle 4 google winner 2013

    She also won a $30,000 scholarship along with a Chromebook and a $50,000 tech grant for her school.

    Images via Google

  • Rachel Louise Carson Google Doodle Celebrates Environmentalist and ‘Silent Spring’ Author

    Today, Google is celebrating influential environmentalist Rachel Louise Carson, whose 1962 book Silent Spring is credited with exposing everyday Americans to the various environmental problems facing the country, and thus sparking the modern day environmental movement. Her work played a huge part in the ban of harmful pesticides like DDT, as well as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency.

    Carson began her career as a marine biologist and nature writer. She won a National Book Award in 1952 for her book The Sea Around Us, the second book in her “sea trilogy” that gained her fame in her early career. The preceding book Under the Sea Wind and its follow-up The Edge of the Sea were both popular, but nowhere near as popular as The Sea Around Us, which sold over 250,000 copies in the year of its publication.

    In the late 1950s, Carson became interested with the effects of pesticides on the environment, partly due to a letter published in the The Boston Herald that discussed the possible effects of aerial DDT spraying on local bird populations.

    A few years later, Carson would complete Silent Spring, widely thought of as one of the most important texts in the modern environmental movement. In Silent Spring, Carson argued that “pesticides” should really be called “biocides,” because they were in effect harming much more than the pests they were intended to.

    Not only did she call out pesticides, but she pointed a finger at various chemical companies, claiming that they were guilty of spreading misinformation to the public. Carson also suggested that humans were currently suffering from the poisons.

    DDT was one of Carson’s main targets in Silent Spring, and it was her book that eventually led to its ban. Silent Spring never called for the ban of all pesticides, but instead a more careful use and closer monitoring because they were no doubt affecting the environment. Even so, Silent Spring received a lot of blowback from the chemical industry. Most scientists who reviewed her work threw her their support, however. In some circles, Carson and her most famous work is still controversial to this day.

    Just a couple of years after the publication of Silent Spring, Carson died of a heart attack after a long battle with breast cancer. President Jimmy Carter posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom–the highest civilian award in the United States.

    Google honors her with a Doodle on what would be her 107th birthday.

    Images via Google, Wikimedia Commons

  • Mary Anning: Influential Paleontologist Honored with Google Doodle

    Mary Anning: Influential Paleontologist Honored with Google Doodle

    When it comes to paleontology, Mary Anning’s findings provide a bedrock. The British fossil collector and dealer, born in 1799, is said to have helped spark fundamental shifts in scientific thinking when it comes to prehistoric life. And today, Google is honoring her with a Doodle on their homepage.

    Today is the 215th anniversary of Anning’s birth in Lyme Regis, Dorset, England.

    Lyme Regis is where Anning would make most of her important findings, in the area’s Jurassic marine fossil beds. Her fossil searching usually occurred during winter in the Blue Lias cliffs, as that was the time that landslides would give way to new fossils.

    Anning is credited with discovering the first correctly-identified ichthyosaur skeleton–which she found when she was only 12 years old. She also found the first two known plesiosaur skeletons, as well as the very frist pterosaur skeleton outside of Germany.

    The Lyme Regis Museum (who holds a Mary Anning celebration every Fall), sums up her contribution to science:

    Mary Anning’s discoveries were some of the most significant geological finds of all time. They provided evidence that was central to the development of new ideas about the history of the Earth. Her opinions were sought and she was acknowledged as an expert in many areas, including the rather unglamorous coprolites (fossil faeces). She played a key role in informing the work of her learned, male contemporaries, notably William Buckland, Henry de la Beche and William Conybeare. By the time of her death, geology was firmly established as its own scientific discipline.

    Mary’s contribution had a major impact at a time when there was little to challenge the biblical interpretation of the story of creation and of the flood. The spectacular marine reptiles that Mary unearthed shook the scientific community into looking at different explanations for changes in the natural world.

    But that doesn’t mean it was easy for Anning to get the recognition she deserved. It was still a man’s world at the time, and Anning was definitely an outsider in her scientific community.

    Below are the Blue Lias cliffs where Anning made her discoveries.

    In 1847, Anning died of breast cancer at the age of 47. Nearly 20 years later, Charles Darwin wrote about her in his literary magazine, calling her “Mary Anning: The Fossil Finder.”

    Images via Google, Wikimedia Commons (1) (2)

  • Rufous Hummingbird Gets Top Billing In Google’s Earth Day Doodle

    Google has an interesting doodle up for Earth Day. It’s animated, and it shows several different animals as you click. You can click the search icon to learn more about each one. The Rufous Hummingbird appears first.

    Here’s a closer look at one of those:

    Rufous Hummingbird

    You have to wonder if the hummingbird’s top billing is a nod to Google’s Hummingbird algorithm. Don’t worry. There are no Pandas or Penguins.

    In addition to the Rufous Hummingbird, you’ll find a Moon Jellyfish (Aurelia Aurita), a pair of Japanese Macaques, a Veiled Chameleon, a Dung Beetle, and a Puffer Fish.

    As you can see, there’s also a message on the Google homepage: “There’s no place like #MyBeautifulEarth. Share your photos for Earth Day.”

    Here are a few examples from Twitter:

    If you click Google’s hashtag link, you’re taken to a landing page at MyBeautifulEarth.WithGoogle.com. Here you’ll find numerous beautiful nature photos.

    These can be sorted by land, sea, sky and wildlife. There’s also a link to Time’s editor’s picks.

    Non-Twitter images via Google, Wikimedia Commons, Google

  • Percy Julian Honored With Google Doodle On His 115th Birthday

    Google is celebrating the life of Percy Lavon Julian with a doodle on its homepage today, his 115th birthday. He died from liver cancer in 1975 at the age of 76.

    Julian is known as a brilliant chemist, who emerged from the Jim Crow South to pioneer chemical synthesis of medicinal drugs and human hormones like progesterone and testosterone from plants. He is credited as the first to synthesize the natural product of physostigmine. His work is said to have “laid the foundation” for the steroid drug industry’s production of cortisone, other corticosteroids, and birth control pills.”

    In 1973, Julian became the second African-American to be inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. In 1990, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Three years later he was honored with a USPS stamp.

    Here’s a Nova segment about him:

    Read the Wikipedia article about him.

    One of Julian’s studies related to physostigmine is available here.

    Images via Google, YouTube

  • Dorothy Irene Height Honored With Google Doodle

    Dorothy Irene Height is being remembered with a Google doodle on her 102nd birthday (she passed away in 2010).

    Height was a civil rights and women’s rights activist, as well as an educator and administrator. She was the president of the National Council of Negro Women for forty years, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in ’94. She also received the Congressional Gold Medal ten years later.

    Her activism efforts were focused on African-American women, including topics like unemployment, illiteracy, and voter awareness.

    Here’s what people are saying about her on Twitter:


    Image via Google, Wikimedia Commons

  • Spring Equinox Gets A Google Doodle (And Here’s A Look Back At Some Others)

    Spring Equinox Gets A Google Doodle (And Here’s A Look Back At Some Others)

    Google is celebrating the Spring Equinox, otherwise known as the first day of Spring, with an animated Google doodle. It features some ghost/Grimace-like person growing some flowers and assorted plant life before pouring water on his/herself and growing flowers out of his/her head. It’s probably easier if you just watch:

    Click the doodle, and you’ll be presented with one of Google’s now common quick answers telling you the date.

    Google has celebrated the Spring Equinox with doodles a couple times in the past.

    Here’s what they ran in 2012:

    And in 2009:

    Earlier this week, Google continued its annual tradition of showing users St. Patrick’s Day doodles.

    Images via Google

  • Holi (Festival Of Colors) Celebrated With Google Doodle

    As mentioned, Google is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with its annual doodle, but in India, it’s celebrating Holi (the festival of colors) with one.

    Holi is a spring festival also known as the festival of love, and has become popular throughout South Asia over the years. It’s primarily observed in Indian and Nepal.

    Google had this to say about it this morning.


    Here are some of the early results from Google’s link (a search on Google+):





    Image via Google

  • St. Patrick’s Day Gets Its Annual Google Doodle (And Here’s A Look Back At The Others)

    As usual, Google is celebrating St. Patrick’s Day with a Doodle. Google has been doing this just about every year since 2000.

    Here’s a look at Google’s past St. Patrick’s Day doodles:

    2013

    St. Patrick's Day

    2012

    2011

    2010

    2009

    null

    2008

    2007

    2006

    2005

    2004

    2002

    2001

    2000

    Google users are definitely celebrating the day too. “leprechaun,” “Saint Patrick’s Day,” “corned beef,” and “corned beef and cabbage” have all been appearing in Google’s top 20 “hot trends”.

    Images via Google

  • Crossword Inventor Arthur Wynne Gets A Google Doodle

    Arthur Wynne, inventor of the crossword puzzle, is the subject of a doodle on Google’s homepage today as it honors 100 years of crossword puzzles.

    It’s a fun one. It transforms into an actual playable crossword puzzle:

    Crossword Puzzle

    Have fun. See if you can decrease your productivity today as much as you did when they released the Pac-Man doodle.

    The British Wynne invented the crossword puzzle in 1913 while living in Cedar Grove, New Jersey. His puzzles would be included in the “Fun” section in the Sunday edition of the New York World. On December 21st, 1913, the puzzle was introduced with a diamond shape like this:

    Word-Cross-puzzle by arthur wynne

    It was actually referred to as a “word-cross puzzle”.

    The Washington Post has an interesting story about how Google initially built a different crossword experience, but had to rush to create a new one.

    Image: Wikimedia Commons

  • Grace Hopper Gets A Pair Of Google Doodles

    Google is showing a doodle on its homepage today honoring computer scientist Grace Hopper on what would have been her 107th birthday.

    Hopper, born in 1906, was a computer scientist and U.S. Navy rear admiral, who was one of the first Harvard Mark I computer programmers, and developed the first compiler for a computer programming language. She is also credited with conceptualizing the basis for the COBOL programming language and popularizing the term “debugging”.

    Hopper passed away in 1992. Here’s a 1984 photo of her (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons):

    Grace Hopper

    The doodle is animated, and shows Hopper entering commands into a supercomputer.

    The doodle appropriately comes during Computer Science Education Week, which is encouraging people to learn an hour of code (which Google is also promoting on its homepage). President Obama has also put out a video encouraging Americans to learn to code.

    Typically, Google shows a smaller version of its doodles on the search results pages, but today, Google is showing a different, simpler doodle for Hopper:

    Grace Hopper Doodle number two

    It’s worth noting that while Hopper was an American, Google is showing the doodle(s) throughout the world.

  • Halloween Witch Casts A Variety Of Spells Over Google Doodle

    Google has tapped a “Halloween witch” for some fun with today’s homepage doodle. It’s an interactive one, which lets you choose different combinations of ingredients to drop into the witch’s brew for a variety of different spells, which let you interact with the doodle in different ways. I wouldn’t exactly call it a game, but I guess it has game-like elements, including an exercise in zombie whac-a-mole.

    Halloween Witch'

    Halloween Witch

    Halloween Witch

    Halloween Witch

    Halloween Witch

    Halloween Witch

    The following video adequately demonstrates what you’ll get with the doodle.

    When you click the search button, you’re directed to a search for “halloween witch,” which displays the following Knowledge Graph result – one of Google’s Halloween “easter eggs”.

    Halloween Witch google knowledge graph easter egg

    Google elected to display its own eater egg image for this. Sometimes these Knowledge Graph results draw from Google Image Search. I prefer the Witches artwork by Hans Baldung displayed in the Witchcraft Wikipedia entry that Google draws some of its Knowledge Graph info from.

    witches by baldung

    Witches: Wikimedia Commons

  • John Wisden, ‘The Little Wonder’ Gets A Google Doodle

    Cricketer John Wisden is getting the Google Doodle treatment in the UK today, on what would be his 187th birthday.

    At 5’6″, Wisden was known as “The Little Wonder”. He was a member of three English cricket teams (Kent, Middlesex and Sussex), who played in the world’s first overseas cricket tour. He was a right-handed bowler, and occasional wicket-keeper.

    In 1864 he launched the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack after retiring from the sport. The publication is considered the “Bible of Cricket,” and is published annually. It has also been referred to as the world’s most famous sports reference book.

    Wisden was also a businessman, having opened a cricket equipment business in Leamington Spa as well as a cricket and cigar shop in Leicester Square in London.

    Wisden died of cancer when he was fifty-seven years old.

  • ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech Gets Google Doodle

    ‘I Have A Dream’ Speech Gets Google Doodle

    It was on this day in 1963 that Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, calling for an end to racism. That makes today the 50th anniversary.

    Google is celebrating the occasion with a doodle on its homepage (pictured above).

    This certainly isn’t the first time Google has honored Dr. King. The search engine has been regularly offering doodles on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Here are those from the last two years:

    2013

    MLK Doodle

    2012

    MLK Doodle

    The year before that, Google celebrated the day with its employees engaging in community service.

    On Tuesday, Google put up a blog post about a new online experience called “March on Washington” developed by Organic and Unit9 for the National Park Foundation. The experience lets users listen to the recording of Dr. King’s speech, while looking at photography from the event.

    March on Washington

    “One of the most powerful abilities of the web is that it connects people from all over the world in new ways,” wrote Associate Product Manager Max Heinritz. “In ‘March on Washington,’ you can also virtually join this historic event by recording yourself reciting Dr. King’s words. Then, you can play back other participants’ recordings as a crowd-sourced narrative of voices, hearing the timeless message repeated back from people all over the world.”

    i have a dream speech - martin luther king jr.

    Image of King: Wikimedia Commons, All other images via Google

  • Erwin Schrödinger And His Cat Honored With Worldwide Google Doodle

    Google is paying tribute to Erwin Schrödinger with its homepage doodle today, as it honors the Austrian quantum physicist on what would have been his 126th birthday. The Nobel Prize winner was born on this day in in 1887 in Vienna, where he would also die on January 4th, 1961.

    Schrödinger is known for having created the basis of wave mechanics through his work in quantum theory. He formulated what is known as the Schrödinger equation, which shows how the quantum state of a physical system changes with time, among other notable achievements in the field.

    He won the Nobel Prize for Physics for the formulation of the equation in 1933.

    Erwin Schrödinger

    Schrödinger is also well known for his paradoxical thought experiment, “Schrödinger’s Cat”. The experiment, which was developed in 1935, involves a cat, which could be both alive and dead, depending on something that occurred earlier in time. Here’s a look from IDTIMWYTIM:

    Schrödinger wrote numerous works about various fields of physics, including statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, electrodynamics, physics of dielectrics, general relativity, cosmology and color theory. He also wrote about philosophy and theoretical biology.

    Several of Google’s recent doodles have been science-oriented, including one earlier this month honoring Maria Mitchell, the first American professional female astronomer and DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin, so the Schrödinger doodle joins an ever-growing list of science tribute from the technology giant.

    Google is showing the Erwin Schrödinger doodle on its homepages around the globe. The Breaking Bad fans out there might be interested to know that according to Google’s Knowledge Graph, people who search for Erwin Schrödinger also search for Werner Heisenberg.

  • Maria Mitchell Google Doodle Honors First Female Professional Astronomer

    Today, Google is honoring Maria Mitchell with a really cool Doodle that shows the first American professional female astronomer using a telescope to look to the sky – presumably in hunt for “Miss Mitchell’s Comet,” which she would discover in 1847.

    Mitchell was born in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts and raised in the Quaker faith. She most likely benefitted from the Quaker’s belief in intellectual equality – getting the same type of education that her brothers received. Mitchell started pursuing astronomy at an early age. By age 12, Mitchell had already helped her father to calculate an annular eclipse. In 1836, Mitchell took a job as the first librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum, and she ended up working there for 18 years.

    And in 1847, she made a big discovery. Using a telescope, she spotted a coment that would later be named “Miss Mitchell’s Comet.” For this discovery, she was awarded a gold medal by the King of Denmark.

    The Maria Mitchell Association describes the rest of her life, which focused on being an educator:

    After achieving her fame, Maria was widely sought after and went on to achieve many great things. She resigned her post at the Atheneum in 1856 to travel throughout the US and Europe. In 1865, she became Professor of Astronomy at the newly-founded Vassar College.

    Maria was an inspiration to her students. It was Vassar College that Maria felt was truly her home. She believed in learning by doing, and in the capacity of women to achieve what their male counterparts could. “Miss Mitchell” was beloved by her students whom she taught until her retirement in 1888, due to failing health. She died in 1889, and was buried next to her parents in Nantucket’s Prospect Hill Cemetery.

    Today’s Google Doodle celebrates what would be her 195th birthday.

  • Rosalind Franklin, DNA Pioneer, Gets a Google Doodle

    Today, Google is using their homepage real estate to honor British biophysicist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin with a Doodle. Franklin’s studies on DNA, RNA, and viruses helped later scientists (most notably Watson and Crick) better understand the structure of these basic molecular structures.

    Franklin was born into a wealthy family in Notting Hill, London in 1920. She excelled in science from and early age, and when she was 18 began to study chemistry at Newnham College, Cambridge. Franklin worked in a series of labs and also as a research officer at the British Coal Utilization Research Association. In 1951, Franklin began work at King’s College in London at the MRC’s Biophysics unit.

    Franklin’s DNA modeling was used by Watson and Crick when they built their DNA model in 1953, but her contributions often go overlooked. In fact, the first real mention of Franklin’s impact on those DNA studies didn’t come until 25 years after the fact.

    For this, she was never even nominated for the Nobel Prize.

    Franklin died in 1958 of ovarian cancer, among other complications. It’s thought that her early development of such cancer (in her 30s) can be explained by her exposure to X-ray radiation, but it’s known that her family had a history of cancer as well.

    Today’s Google Doodle celebrates what would be her 93rd birthday.

    The Doodle shows Franklin looking at a double helix structure, as well as an X-ray diffraction image on DNA taken under her direction known as Photo 51.

  • Franz Kafka Google Doodle Hits The U.S.

    Franz Kafka Google Doodle Hits The U.S.

    As previously reported, Google is celebrating the birthday of acclaimed writer Franz Kafka. The doodle went live yesterday on the other side of the world, when it became July 3rd, and now it’s up here in our neck of the woods.

    The doodle specifically honors “Die Verwandlung,” or “The Metamorphosis,” one of Kafka’s most well-known and influential stories, which was first published in 1915. Our own Josh Wolford discusses The Metamorphosis and Kafka’s life, death and legacy more here.

    Other well-known works include: “Der Process” (The Trial), and “Das Schloss” (The Castle).

    Take a look at some more recent Google Doodles here.