Afshad Mistri in 2005 -- before he joined Apple and before the arrival of the iPad (Photo: Frederic Larson/San Francisco Chronicle)

Nancy Luo didn’t expect an answer when she e-mailed Steve Jobs one Wednesday evening two summers ago. But less than a day later, an Apple emissary knocked on her door at the University of Chicago Hospitals.

It was Aug. 25, 2010, the last day of a long heatwave in Chicago. Luo — a second-year resident at the hospital’s internal medicine department — had been assigned the tricky task of figuring out whether a pilot program that put iPads in the hands of the hospi...

1901: Animation pioneer Walt Disney and nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg are born. So, if you’ve ever thought the Uncertainty Principle was a bit goofy, you may be onto something.

Disney was born in Chicago, but spent much of his childhood on a Missouri farm. He sold his first sketches to neighbors at age 7. Rejected for military service because he was too young, he drove a Red Cross ambulance at the end of World War I. He covered the entire vehicle with cartoons.

Disney went to work after the war as an advertising artist in Kansas City and sold his first animated cartoons. He went to Hollywo...