Featured image: Paul Allen (left) and Bill Gates, who co-founded Microsoft, pictured in 1984. Credit: Doug Wilson/Getty

Virtual bidding opened today on a trove of science-history treasures from the estate of Microsoft mogul Paul Allen. Some of the most prized pieces will be auctioned live next month in New York City, among them physicist Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter alerting then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Germans had discovered fissionable uranium; a spacesuit that was part of NASA’s Gemini IV mission, the first in which an astronaut ‘walked’ in space; and correspondence from the pioneering primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Louis Leakey.