first announced their discovery of DNA 50 years ago

Planet Empeg have all heard this story before, but during the thirteen years I've lived in Cambridge I've only once seen scientists burst into a pub and announce a discovery. I was having a quiet pint in the Castle Inn with my astronomer friend Phil, when a bunch of other astronomers burst in. "You know how Capella is a spectroscopic binary?" cried one. -- "Well, yes?" said Phil. -- "Well, now it isn't! It's an optical binary!"

Turns out they'd just invented optical aperture synthesis.

(A spectroscopic binary, Phil subsequently explained, is a binary star where the two stars are so close together that they look like one star, and the only reason we can tell it's binary is from Doppler shifts as they orbit each other. An optical binary is one where we can look at it and see two distinct objects.)

Peter