Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977, it supports research while actively running a range of conservation programs to protect chimpanzees and the environment.

Goodall studied chimpanzees in great detail, learning how they lived in groups, problem solved and interacted with their environment. She discovered that chimpanzees had the mental capacity to not only use simple tools but to actually make them as well, something that was previously thought to be uniquely human.

Unlike most researchers, Goodall named the animals that were part of her studies, normally numbers were assigned in order to remove the possibility of the researcher becoming attached to the subjects. Her unique methods stood out and were at times subject to criticism.

Goodall’s work is similar to that of Dian Fossey, a famous American zoologist who completed a long study of Gorillas in Rwanda, releasing a book titled ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ which later went on to become a well known movie.

Goodall is a strong supporter of animal rights and has been part of many animal rights organizations. She was the president of Advocates for Animals from 1998 to 2008.

Galileo was a ground breaking astronomer, physicist, mathematician, philosopher and inventor. Among his inventions were telescopes, a compass and a thermometer.

Galileo enrolled to do a medical degree at the University of Pisa but never finished, instead choosing to study mathematics.

Galileo built on the work of others to create a telescope with around 3x magnification, he later improved on this to make telescopes with around 30x magnification.

With these telescopes, Galileo was able to observe the skies in ways previously not achieved. In 1610 he made observations of 4 objects surrounding Jupiter that behaved unlike stars, these turned out to be Jupiter’s for largest satellite moons: Io, Callisto, Europa and Ganymede. They were later renamed the Galilean satellites in honor of Galileo himself.

The discovery of these moons was not supported by the scientific principles of the time and Galileo had trouble convincing some people that he had indeed discovered such objects. This was similar to other ideas put forward by Galileo that were very controversial at the time.

The Geocentric model of the universe which was embraced by earlier astronomers had the Earth at the center of the universe with other objects moving around it. Work by Galileo, Nicolaus Copernicus and Johannes Kepler helped to supercede this theory with the more accurate heliocentric model. Such a view of the universe differed strongly with the beliefs of the Catholic Church at the time and Galileo was forced to withdraw many of his ideas and even spent the final years of his life under house arrest.

Galileo refused to believe Kepler’s theory that the moon caused the tides, instead believing it was due to the nature of the Earth’s rotation (helping prove that even the smartest people can make mistakes).

Famous Galileo quotes include: “In questions of science the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”

“See now the power of truth; the same experiment which at first glance seemed to show one thing, when more carefully examined, assures us of the contrary.”