Nicolaus Copernicus' 540th Birthday

Today's Google doodle celebrates the birth of Nicolaus Copernicus, a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a theory that is considered a major event in the history of science...at a time when not much was known about space and way before the era of spacecrafts and satellites.

Asteroid 2012 DA14's Near Miss

Didn't realized that such a thing will be occurring until I found this gif doodle appearing on Google's homepage.

Apparently, on 23rd February 2012, a near-Earth asteroid with an estimated diameter of 50 meters (160 ft) and an estimated mass of 190,000 metric tons was discovered and named "2012 DA₁₄".

And calculations were made showing that this asteroid would pass by Earth just 27,700 km from its surface...Today on the 15th February 2013. What's more, this is probably the closest approach known for an object (of this size) to fly-by Earth.

Happy Valentine's Day 2013 & 154th Birthday to George Ferris

Today, Google is celebrating the 154th birthday of George Ferris (the inventor of the "Ferris Wheel") and Valentine's Day 2013 since they both happen to fall upon the same date.

To do this, they've designed and implemented a brilliant doodle that incorporates both the invention and a "machine" that randomly matches up various animals together, before finally depicting how those matched up animals spent their Valentine's Day.

Happy Chinese New Year 2013

Today, Google celebrates Chinese New Year 2013 with a classic "Snake" casual video game that originated during the late 1970s in arcades. However, it appears that the game's rules of dying upon hitting the boundaries of the play area and one's own tail does not apply. Google's version only ends when the time runs out.

Mary Leakey's 100th Birthday

In today's Google doodle spotlight is Mary Leakey, a British archaeologist and anthropologist, who discovered the first fossilized skull of an extinct ape believed to be ancestors of humans.