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Christopher Columbus (d.1506) is born as is Amerigo Vespucci (d. 1512), explorers.
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Nicolas Copernicus (1473-1543) born.
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Georg Joachim Rheticus (1514-1574), a friend of Copernicus and the presumed author, provides an account of the heliocentric hypothesis in his Narratio prima (First Account).
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Ferdinand Magellan famously completes the first circumnavigation of the globe.
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Girolamo Fracastoro (1475-1553) provides one of the first descriptions of a new disease in a work entitled Syphilis, or the French Disease. As an aside, the Italians called it the French disease, the French called it Italian disease.
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Juan Luis Vives (1492-1540) in his On the Disciplines argues for the reform of education and a more receptive approach to skills traditionally associated with the craft and trade traditions.
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Peter Apian (1495-1552) and Fracastoro observe that the tail of the comet his year, later known as Halley's Comet, pointed away from the sun, a detail also recognized by Regiomontanus.
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Johannes Kepler's Rudolphine Tables, based on Tycho's data and his own laws of planetary motion, provide the most accurate astronomical tables up to that time.
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Pierre Gassendi, familiar with Kepler's astronomical tables, becomes the first to observe a transit of the planet Mercury across the disc of the sun. His data for Mercury were used by Boulliau in his Astronomia Philolaïca (Paris 1645).
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The Italian Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694) uses the microscope to observes capillaries joining arteries and veins. Malpighi showed in fine detail that blood circulates.