He delved further into lung development, spending his study leave in 1971 in a lab in the old Radcliffe observatory in Oxford.

ECONOMIST: Mont Liggins

Jonathan Betts, the Curator of Horology at the Old Royal Observatory, agrees.

BBC: Time to make history

The Queen's House (by Inigo Jones) was the first Palladian building in England and the park contains the Old Royal Observatory, the work of Christopher Wren and the scientist Robert Hooke.

UNESCO: World Heritage

He was evacuated from an 8, 000-foot observatory and taken in an old rickety ambulance to a small, dimly lit clinic, where a doctor examined him and said he would require life-saving surgery.

WSJ: Alan Alda wants scientists to cut out the jargon

Indeed, since it was ringed as an adult, and Manx shearwaters take four years to reach that exulted status, it must have been significantly over half a century old when researchers at the Copeland Bird Observatory in Northern Ireland checked its bona fides.

ECONOMIST: The oldest bird in the world

The European Southern Observatory is organising a public effort to measure the astronomical unit the old fashioned way, just for fun.

ECONOMIST: Transits of Venus

"We have taken a big step towards solving a century-old mystery, " said James Cronin of the University of Chicago, who, in 1991, conceived the observatory together with Prof Watson.

BBC: Black hole: A source of 'cosmic bullets'?