June 25

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  1593: Physician and archaeologist Michele Mercati dies. He was one of the first scholars to recognize prehistoric stone tools as human-made rather than natural or mythologically created thunderstones.

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  1671: Priest and astromomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli dies. He experimented with pendulums and falling bodies, discussed arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, and introduced the current scheme of lunar nomenclature.

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  1907: Nuclear physicist J. Hans D. Jensen born. He will share half of the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics with Maria Goeppert-Mayer for their proposal of the nuclear shell model.

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  1997: An unmanned Progress spacecraft collides with the Russian space station Mir.

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  2011: Computer scientist, mathematician, and engineer Annie Easley dies. She was a leading member of the team which develops software for the Centaur rocket stage, and one of the first African-Americans to work as a computer scientist at NASA.