We may just be hearing a thing or two about the Royal Society over the coming year. It’s three and a half centuries since Hooke, Boyle, Newton, Wren and all your other favourite natural philosophers clubbed together into the learned society we still know and love today. Big plans are afoot to mark the anniversary over the coming year.

To kick off the semiseptcentennial celebrations, the RS yesterday launched a new web site. Trailblazing presents a Flash timeline of important papers to come out of the Society’s Transactions journal. Early papers include ‘Keeping a dog alive by blowing through its lungs with bellows’, and ‘Transfusion of blood from one dog to another’. One imagines there can’t have been too many stray canines left around Gresham’s College back in the 1660s. As the centuries move on, the discoveries get progressively less dog-based, culminating in recent pronouncements on geo-engineering and solar flares. Along the way, we learn about truly groundbreaking findings such as Maxwell’s electromagnetic theories, and the development of penicillin.

Sixty key papers are included, each with a short summary from an expert in the field. The full papers can also be browsed, for those who dare open PDFs.