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Today's featured article Lise Meitner (1878–1968) was an Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist who was instrumental in the discovery of nuclear fission and protactinium. In 1905, she became the second woman from the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate in physics. She spent much of her scientific career at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry in Berlin. In 1938 she fled Nazi Germany and moved to Sweden. That year, chemists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann demonstrated that isotopes of barium could be formed by neutron bombardment of uranium. Meitner and her nephew Otto Robert Frisch correctly interpreted their results and worked out the physics of this process, which they named "fission". The discovery led to the development of atomic bombs and nuclear reactors during World War II. Meitner did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery of fission, which was awarded to Hahn alone, but she received many other honours, including the posthumous naming of element 109 as meitnerium in 1997. (Full article...) Recently featured: Battle of Mount Austen, the Galloping Horse, and the Sea Horse John Silva Meehan 2009–10 Notts County F.C. season On this day... February 8: Feast day of Saint Josephine Bakhita (Catholicism); Military Foundation Day in North Korea (1948) South Carolina Highway Patrolmen before the Orangeburg Massacre 421 – Honorius declared Constantius III to be his co-emperor of the Western Roman Empire. 1250 – Seventh Crusade: The Ayyubid Sultanate of Egypt defeated and captured King Louis IX of France at the Battle of Fariskur. 1575 – William of Orange founded Leiden University, the oldest university in the Netherlands. 1960 – The official groundbreaking of the Walk of Fame took place in Hollywood, Los Angeles, in California. 1968 – Law enforcement officers in Orangeburg, South Carolina (pictured), fired into a crowd of college students who were protesting segregation, killing three and injuring twenty-seven others. Jack Lemmon (b. 1925) Valerie Thomas (b. 1943) A. Chandranehru (d. 2005) Mary Wilson (d. 2021) More anniversaries: February 7 February 8 February 9

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