January 11

A second reflector was carried to London, shown to Charles II and examined by the Royal Society, which elected the unknown Cambridge professor a Fellow. The minutes say 11 January 1671: England began its year on 25 March, so this was 1672.

At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. — to Joseph Hooker The first friend he told. The botanist Hooker became his closest confidant for the next forty years.

Hong Xiuquan, a failed examination candidate who believed he was the younger brother of Jesus, proclaimed the Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace. His armies took Nanjing in 1853 and held it as their Heavenly Capital until Qing and provincial armies retook it in July 1864. Estimates of the dead run…

The first match billed as for the championship of the world, first to ten wins. It began in New York, moved to St Louis and ended in New Orleans. Johannes Zukertort led 4–1 after five games; Wilhelm Steinitz won 12½–7½, with ten wins, five losses and five draws.

Lennon wrote it as a slow Roy Orbison ballad; Martin had them speed it up. At the end of the session he told them over the talkback that they had just made their first number one. It was, in most of the music papers’ charts.

For about 4 billion dollars in shares, the country’s largest mortgage lender went to Bank of America. Countrywide’s losses would cost Bank of America far more than it paid.

The genome of the new coronavirus was posted online on 11 January 2020. Eleven months later an mRNA vaccine was going into arms outside a trial, a job that had taken years or decades for every earlier vaccine.

Yong-Zhen Zhang’s team in Shanghai sequenced the new coronavirus and the sequence was posted publicly through Edward Holmes on 10–11 January, days after the cause was identified. Vaccine design began from that file.