Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What years did Maria Sibylla Merian live?
Marrel's stepdaughter Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), daughter of the engraver Matthew Merian, who lived with Marrel and thus studied with Mignon, achieved distinction as a flower painter. Besides Merian, his other pupil was Ernst Stuven. He left two daughters when he died; Catharina and Anna.
Dorothea Maria Graff was born in Nuremberg as the daughter of the painters Maria Sibylla Merian and Johann Andreas Graff, and learned to paint from them and her sister Johanna Helena Herolt who was ten years older. In 1681 her mother returned to Frankfurt without her father, in order to live with her mother after her stepfather Jacob Marrel's death. Though Johann Graff joined his family later, in 1686 Merian left her husband and moved with her two daughters and her mother to a religious community of Labadists in Wieuwerd, Friesland. Johann Graff made various attempts at reconciliation but eventually returned to Germany. In 1691 the four women moved to Amsterdam, where they set up a studio painting flowers and botanical subjects, continuing Merian's work on "The Caterpillar Book". In 1699 Dorothea accompanied her mother to Surinam and they returned in September 1701.
Spirit, also known as MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover – A) or MER-2, is a robotic rover on Mars, active from 2004 to 2010. It was one of two rovers of NASA's ongoing Mars Exploration Rover Mission. It landed successfully on Mars at 04:35 Ground UTC on January 4, 2004, three weeks before its twin, "Opportunity" (MER-B), which landed on the other side of the planet. Its name was chosen through a NASA-sponsored student essay competition. The rover became stuck in late 2009, and its last communication with Earth was sent on March 22, 2010.
Margaret Theodora Meyer (September 1862 – 27 January 1924), also known as Maud Meyer was a British mathematician. She was one of the first directors of studies in mathematics, and one of the earliest members of the London Mathematical Society. In 1916, she was one of the first women to be elected a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Michigan State University, Kellogg Biological Station: Eminent Ecologist (1992)
Emma Martina Luigia Morano (29 November 1899 – 15 April 2017) was an Italian supercentenarian who, before her death at the age of 117 years and 137 days, was the world's oldest living person whose age had been verified, and the last living person to have been verified as being born in the 1800s. She remains the oldest Italian person ever and the second-oldest European person ever behind Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment.
She was born in Palestrina about 1255. Her father, Oddone Colonna, died when she was about two years old. Her mother, who was also named Margherita and who was the sister of Matteo Rosso Orsini and a pious woman, died when Margherita was probably a little over ten years old. Margherita was left in the care of her older brothers.
She surpassed the age of Venere Pizzinato in August 2014 and Dina Manfredini (who died in the United States) in August 2015, to become the oldest Italian person ever. On 13 May 2016, upon the death of American woman Susannah Mushatt Jones, Morano became the world's oldest living person and also the last living person verified to have been born before 1900. On 29 July 2016, she was presented with a certificate from "Guinness World Records" recognizing her as the oldest person alive. Festivities celebrating her 117th birthday on 29 November 2016 were broadcast live in Italy.
Michelangelo Merisi (Michele Angelo Merigi or Amerighi) da Caravaggio (, , ; 28 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian painter active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily from the early 1590s to 1610. His paintings combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, which had a formative influence on Baroque painting.
Johann III Bernoulli served from 1764 to 1787 as Director of the Old Observatory and was succeeded by Johann Elert Bode. Lambert fetched Bode to Berlin in 1773, in order to publish an almanac; after Lambert' death, Bode became the sole editor. The first edition of the "Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch" (for 1776) had already appeared by 1774, initiating the longest-lasting publication series in astronomy, lasting until 1959. By virtue of this medium, Berlin Observatory developed into an information source of prime importance within Europe. Originally Bode had the venerable Christine Kirch to assist him with the work on the calendar. In 1774, he married a granddaughter of one of her sisters; she was likewise entrusted with astronomical work in line with the Kirch family tradition. Christine Kirch died in 1782. As director of the observatory, Bode was able, through favors from Frederick William III of Prussia, to extend the till then rather third-class-equipped institution with a second observing level. When Bode entered a petition to this effect on 2 November 1798, space for observing within the tower was still limited to the third storey. The two storeys over it were united to a single spacious level. From there, the observing activities could be extended, once the calculated cost of 4465 Thalers and the plan was approved on 7 April 1800 and the required conversion was completed by June 1801. The construction work was supervised by Oberhofbaurat and Schlossbaumeister Bock.
Perhaps inspired by Kepler (and quoting Kepler's third law of planetary motion), Jonathan Swift's satire "Gulliver's Travels" (1726) refers to two moons in Part 3, Chapter 3 (the "Voyage to Laputa"), in which Laputa's astronomers are described as having discovered two satellites of Mars orbiting at distances of 3 and 5 Martian diameters with periods of 10 and 21.5 hours. Phobos and Deimos (both found in 1877, more than a century after Swift's novel) have actual orbital distances of 1.4 and 3.5 Martian diameters, and their respective orbital periods are 7.66 and 30.35 hours. In the 20th century, V. G. Perminov, a spacecraft designer of early Soviet Mars and Venus spacecraft, speculated Swift found and deciphered records that Martians left on Earth. However, the view of most astronomers is that Swift was simply employing a common argument of the time, that as the inner planets Venus and Mercury had no satellites, Earth had one and Jupiter had four (known at the time), that Mars by analogy must have two. Furthermore, as they had not yet been discovered, it was reasoned that they must be small and close to Mars. This would lead Swift to making a roughly accurate estimate of their orbital distances and revolution periods. In addition Swift could have been helped in his calculations by his friend, the mathematician John Arbuthnot. 
Voltaire's 1752 short story "Micromégas", about an alien visitor to Earth, also refers to two moons of Mars. Voltaire was presumably influenced by Swift. In recognition of these 'predictions', two craters on Deimos are named Swift and Voltaire, while on Phobos there is one named regio, "Laputa Regio", and one named planitia, "Lagado Planitia", both of which are named after places in "Gulliver's Travels" (the fictional Laputa, a flying island, and Lagado, imaginary capital of the fictional nation Balnibarbi). Many of the craters on Phobos are also named after characters in "Gulliver's Travels".
International Ecological Society: Distinguished Statistical Ecologist (1998)
Among the first scientists to explore the Muirkirk Deposit was Maryland state geologist Phillip Thomas Tyson. He brought some of the strange bones discovered in the iron mines to a meeting of the Maryland Academy of Sciences in 1859, where his colleagues identified them as dinosaurs. Paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh was also interested in Maryland fossils. In the winter of 1887, he sent John Bell Hatcher to search the iron mines. Hatcher recovered hundreds of fossils, including the remains of ancient turtles and crocodiles. In the 1890s, Smithsonian Institution scientists Charles Gilmore and Arthur Bibbins also visited Prince George's County, uncovering dinosaur teeth and other fossils that were added to the Smithsonian collection.
In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev published a periodic table of all known elements (he predicted several new elements to complete the table, and corrected some atomic weights). A few months later, Meyer published a revised and expanded version of his 1864 table independently, which was similar to that published by Mendeleev (Meyer had been sent a copy of Mendeleev's table earlier; Mendeleev had sent it to many well-known chemists of his day) and a paper showing graphically the periodicity of the elements as a function of atomic weight. Meyer, as well as other chemists, was doubtful about Mendeleev's periodic law, and he criticized Mendeleev for "changing existing elements' atomic weights, only regarding possibility of periodical law in its structure". However, Mendeleev's work received significant support, when the new elements were found as predicted and atomic weights accordingly.
Hypatia (born 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and astronomy. She is the first female mathematician whose life is reasonably well recorded. Hypatia was renowned in her own lifetime as a great teacher and a wise counselor. She is known to have written a commentary on Diophantus's thirteen-volume "Arithmetica", which may survive in part, having been interpolated into Diophantus's original text, and another commentary on Apollonius of Perga's treatise on conic sections, which has not survived. Many modern scholars also believe that Hypatia may have edited the surviving text of Ptolemy's "Almagest", based on the title of her father Theon's commentary on Book III of the "Almagest".
Cell, developmental, and reproductive biology have been a central part of the MBL's programs since the 1890s. Important discoveries in these fields at the MBL reach back to 1899, when Jacques Loeb demonstrated artificial parthenogenesis in sea urchin eggs; to 1905, when Edwin Grant Conklin first identified egg cytoplasmic regions that are programmed to form certain tissues or organs; to 1916, when Frank Rattray Lillie identified circulating hormones that influence sexual differentiation (Lillie, 1944). In the MBL's first two decades, cytologists Edmund Beecher Wilson, Nettie Stevens and others made connections between the chromosomes and Mendelian heredity, while Wilson's colleague at both the MBL and Columbia University, Thomas Hunt Morgan, launched the field of experimental genetics (Pauly, 2000:158). Keith R. Porter, considered by many to be a founder of modern cell biology due to his pioneering work on the fine structure of cells, including the discovery of microtubules, carried out research at the MBL starting in 1937 and directed the laboratory from 1975-77 (Barlow et al., 1993: 95-115).
Marie-Josephine Clarice Gaudette (25 March 1902 – 13 July 2017) was the oldest living person in Italy from the death of Emma Morano, who was the oldest living person in the world and the oldest Italian person ever on 15 April 2017 until her own death three months later. Gaudette was born in Manchester, New Hampshire, United States, and was the oldest living person born in the US from the death of Susannah Mushatt Jones on 12 May 2016 and the oldest emigrant from the US ever.
Historian Alwyn Ruddock claimed to have found evidence that the navigator Giovanni Cabot ('John Cabot') who discovered North America in 1497 {received backing from the Italian community in London for his voyage to North America. In particular, she suggested he found a patron in the form of Fr. Giovanni Antonio de Carbonariis, an Augustinian friar who was also the deputy to the papal tax collector Adriano Castellesi. Ruddock suggested that it was Carbonariis, who certainly accompanied Cabot's 1498 expedition and who was on good terms with the King, who introduced the explorer to Henry VII for the discovery expedition. Beyond this, Ruddock claimed that Cabot received a loan from an Italian banking house in London 'to go and discover new lands'.
In their book "The Maria Paradox: How Latinas Can Merge Old World Traditions with New World Self-esteem" (1996, G. P. Putnam), Rosa Maria Gil and Carmen Inoa Vazquez credit Stevens with introducing the concept of marianismo, citing the "ground-breaking essay written by Evelyn P. Stevens in 1973". They also discuss use of the term by academicians such as Sally E. Romero, Julia M. Ramos-McKay, Lillian Comas-Diaz, and Luis Romero. In their book, Gil and Vazquez use it as applicable across a variety of Latino/a cultures.
The Sun 1,447,959 -7%
Upon America's entry into World War I on April 6 of 1917, "LV-71" continued to operate as she had for the past several years. On August 6, 1918, exactly one year and four months after the United States' declaration of war on Germany, the lightship was on station off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, when her crew sighted the American cargo ship SS "Merak" sinking nearby. The "Merak" had been sailing off Diamond Shoals from New York City to the West Indies when Commander Waldemar Kophamel, of the submarine "U-140", attacked her with torpedoes. One of "Merak"s crewmen spotted the wake of a torpedo, so the ship took to evasive maneuvers and grounded in the process. The Germans then surfaced and began bombarding the Americans with a deck gun, but the ship's crew successfully escaped without being harmed. "LV-71" rescued the survivors; her skipper Master Walter Barnett then sent out a warning to alert friendly ships in the area of a U-boat's presence in the vicinity of the lightship. The signal was intercepted by "U-140," which quickly returned to the scene and sank "LV-71" with gunfire after letting her twelve-member crew and the survivors of the "Merak" row towards shore in a lifeboat. The two sinkings occurred about twelve miles off the coast; residents of the nearby town of Hatteras could hear the sounds of the naval gunfire. "LV-71" was the first and only United States lightship sunk by enemy action.
From 1685 onwards Merian, her daughters and her mother lived with the Labadist community, who had settled on the grounds of a stately home – Walt(h)a Castle – at Wieuwerd in Friesland. They stayed there for three years and Merian found the time to study natural history and Latin, the language in which scientific books were written. In the moors of Friesland she observed the birth and development of frogs, and collected them to dissect them. Merian stayed with the community until 1691.
In 1690, Merian's mother had died. A year later, she moved with her daughters to Amsterdam. In 1692, her husband divorced her. In Amsterdam the same year, her daughter Johanna married Jakob Hendrik Herolt, a successful merchant on Surinam, originally from Bacharach. The flower painter Rachel Ruysch became Merian's pupil. Merian made a living selling her paintings. She and her daughter Johanna sold flower pictures to art collector Agnes Block. By 1698 Merian lived in a well-furnished house on Kerkstraat.
In 1617, Merian married Maria Magdalena de Bry, daughter of the publisher, and was for a time associated with the de Bry publishing house. In 1620, when Oppenheim was destroyed by fire during the Spanish occupation, they moved back to Basel, but three years later returned to Germany, this time to Frankfurt. They had four daughters and three sons, including Matthäus Merian the Younger. Maria Magdalena de Bry died in 1645 and the following year Matthäus married Johanna Catharina Hein. Five years later, Matthäus died, leaving his wife with two small children, Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (born 1647) who later became a pioneering naturalist and illustrator and a son, Maximilian, who died before his third birthday.
In 1715, Merian suffered a stroke. Despite being partially paralysed she continued her work. Maria Sibylla Merian died in Amsterdam on 13 January 1717 and was buried four days later at Leidse kerkhof.
The death register lists her as a pauper. Her daughter Dorothea published "Erucarum Ortus Alimentum et Paradoxa Metamorphosis", a collection of her mother's work, posthumously.