She found a future in the internet’s past with a Tumblr blog of animated texts, a revolt against the clean minimalism of contemporary design aesthetics.

He developed a program that became a model for hospitals around the world, making it easier for poor Black patients to navigate an onerous bureaucratic system.

The Japanese chemist played a key role in the discovery of electricity-conducting plastics, largely by accident.

She challenged the conventional view that most head and neck cancers resulted from cigarette smoking and excessive alcohol consumption.

He was among the first to perform microscopic surgery in the 1970s and revolutionized techniques to treat traumatic injuries.

After working for a department store, she switched to archaeology and made important discoveries about prehistoric clothes and gender roles.

A German scientist, he developed a process for turning corpses into posable figures. His shows drew millions of visitors, and many detractors.

A self-taught ornithologist, he won a MacArthur fellowship for his precise, resplendent illustrations that appeared in definitive field guides to tropical songbirds.

An annual convention in the California desert offered a safe space for believers to discuss extraterrestrial encounters, crop circles and other paranormal phenomena.

He received a 1992 Nobel Prize for developing a theory that explained fundamental processes behind photosynthesis, respiration, oxidation and even how fireflies produce light.

In 1982, she led the research team that figured out how to genetically alter plants, a discovery that would eventually transform global agriculture.

His work paved the way for the discovery of the Higgs boson, which explained how particles acquire mass, solving one of the deepest mysteries in physics.

After his wife’s death while doing fieldwork, he rejected writing as a detached observer, setting off a profound shift in cultural anthropology.

The author of books like “The Possible Human,” she held workshops that drew on mythology, psychology and the experiential ethos of Esalen. But she refused to be called a guru.

A math whiz as a young man, he later blazed trails, both with his theoretical advances and his advocacy for minority students.

He built interfaces that allowed engineers, scientists and everyday people to solve difficult problems without having to write the underlying code.

In 1995, he and Thomas Bopp spotted, from different states, the same mysterious object in the sky. What turned out to be a comet was named after them: Hale-Bopp.

He mapped the herpes simplex virus genome, revealing how it invades cells. His work also helped lay the groundwork for potential vaccines and gene therapies.