Archives July 2013

The early calculating instrument we know as the abacus—consisting of a wooden frame supporting wires or rods on which wooden beads slide from side to side—was developed in Mesopotamia from a flat, sand-covered, stone counting board on which pebbles were moved. This aid to calculation was in use long before the adoption of the Hindu-Arabic numeral system and can be adapted to any numeral base. The abacus has a huge advantage over counting on the fingers of the hand, simply because it can be used to record very large numbers accurately. The easiest type of abacus to understand is the modern Western version that uses a base often. Here each wire carries ten beads and represents a decadal unit, that is one, ten, 100, 1,000 and so on. A number, say 617,483, can be represented by positioning the respective number of beads, on each wire, against one side of the more...

"What's important is that they are not designer babies. They are not per feet babies." Lord Robert Winston Preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) was a pioneering genetic test developed in the late 1980s to enable concerned parents to test for genetic disorders before they even got pregnant. British researcher Alan Handyside and his colleague Robert Winston(b. 1940) reported their new technique in 1989. It involved checking fertilized eggs for genetic disorders before they were implanted. Unaffected embryos were then implanted through conventional in-vitro fertilization (IVF) techniques. Before PGD was introduced, parents likely to pass on genetic disorders to their children had few options to prevent this. They could remain childless, adopt, or get pregnant with the risk of having to terminate apregnancy if genetic disorders were discovered. PGD allowed them to pick only unaffected embryos. The technique of PGD involves stimulating a woman's ovaries with hormones to increase egg production. The more...

Not everyone has their own award named after them. The Oskar Barnack award, given annually to photo journalists, was initiated in 1979tomarkthe hundredth anniversary of the birth of the man who invented the 35-mm still camera. Barnack (1879-1936) had the idea for it back in 1905, but it was not until 1913-1914, while he was working as head of development at the German camera company Leitz, in Wetzlar, Hesse, that he was able to transform his idea into reality. Traditional heavy plate cameras were cumbersome to use and required significant preparation before each shot. It was impossible to take a "quick snap" of anything. Barnack's camera was a tough metal box that could fit in a jacket pocket and used a new kind of film, adapted from Thomas Edison's 35-mm cine film. In 1914 Barnacktooka picture of a soldier who hadjust put up the Imperial Order for mobilization. This was more...

"Good iron is not hammered into nails, and good men should not be made into soldiers" Chinese proverb When people talk about iron, they generally mean wrought iron. This is one of three major materials whose base is iron ore—a common element that has the ability to combine with other elements and therefore occurs in many forms. In order to produce its wrought, or worked, variety, charcoal and ore are heated sufficiently to reduce iron oxide to iron without melting it. The final product contains slag and other impurities that keep it from corroding. First produced in around 2500 B.C.E, wrought iron is the oldest form of iron and gave the Iron Age its name. Its availability increased when blast furnaces proliferated throughout Western Europe in the fifteenth century, before its slightly younger relative, cast iron (the malleable form of which is nowadays used in pipes as well as machine and more...

"The Jacuzzi is to this generation what the drive-in movie was in the fifties." Mike Darnell, U.S. television executive As with so many inventions, the Jacuzzi®—the best- known brand of hot tub—was invented to fulfil la very practical need: in this case, the healthcare of a family member. The Jacuzzi family were Italian immigrants to the United States in the early 1900s who developed a strong company in the aviation industry, and then flourished by designing irrigation pumps. But it was not until 1948 that they began developing the technology that would make them world famous. Candido Jacuzzi (1903-1986) had a son who contracted rheumatoid arthritis and received hydrotherapy treatment in hospital. Wanting to bring his son home, he developed a hydraulic pump to replicate the boy's therapy, and for some years the pump was marketed as the J-300 therapeutic device. In 1968 third-generation family member Roy Jacuzzi developed the more...

Since the dawn of computers, people have wondered if they tan be made to show intelligence—to think in the way that humans think. Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace first debated the question when they worked together to create the first computer in 1835. By 1950, U.S. mathematician Claude Shannon was busy trying to figure out how computers could play a good game of chess. On the other side of the Atlantic, Alan Turing published his paper "On Computing Machinery and Intelligence," which considered the thorny problem of how you could actually tell if a machine was intelligent or not. In 1955, John McCarthy, of Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, proposed a conference to study the issue of intelligence research. In his proposal, he used the phrase "artificial intelligence" for the first time, and an entire field of study was born The 1956 Dartmouth Conference is now known as the defining moment more...

"[Their] only movement is the dancing of their fingers over the keys of their curious machines..." Sarah Campbell, The Times (February 8, 2007) The German inventor Karl Drais (1785-1851) is most famous for inventing the draisine or "running machine," one of the earliest forms of mechanized transport and a precursor of the modern bicycle. But in 1830 he also invented a keyboard system for recording speech that developed into what we now call a stenotype or shorthand machine. A stenotype (also called shorthand) machine consists of a keyboard of twenty-two letters and numbers that the operator, or stenographer, can press simultaneously to spell out whole syllables, phrases, or words in one action—like playing chords on a piano. Stenographers spell out syllables phonetically, that is by their sound rather than spelling. Broadly speaking, the left-hand fingers are used to produce the initial consonant, the right hand produces the final consonant, and more...

"The wire clip for holding office papers together has entirely superseded the use of the pin." Business, March 1900 Steel wire was still a relatively new concept in the mid- nineteenth century when an American, Samuel Fay, patented a wire ticket fastener that he used to attach labels to garments in 1867. When Fay mentioned as an aside in his patent application that his fastener was also useful for. holding together sheets of paper, his simple triangular-design wire fastener had unwittingly become the world's first bent-wire paper clip. Prior to this, the straight pin was the preferred method of attaching labels to garments. The paper clip, a single length of wire bent at either end to create a simple cross, speeded up the fastening of labels and resulted in less damage to the item being tagged. The destiny of the paper clip, however, was not to be found in the more...

A cochlear implant is a surgically implanted electronic device that provides a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf. It works by directly stimulating the auditory (hearing) nerves with electrical impulses. American William House (b. 1923) is credited with being the first surgeon to implant a cochlear-type device. In 1957 House saw an article by two French surgeons who had inserted an electrode into the auditory nerve of a deaf man and shown that he could perceive sounds when the nerve was stimulated. In 1961 House placed cochlear implants in three patients, who gained some benefits. After research into the best positioning of the electrodes, House created the first wearable implant in 1969. Despite hostile criticism and fears that electrical stimulation of the cochlea might destroy brain tissue or spread infections, by December 1984 cochlear implants had the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stamp of approval, and more...

“One tree-one life” is a slogan which can be seen inscribed and there. Both human beings and trees have been bound by a bond of association since ancient times. It is a common knowledge that carbon dioxide is released by man and is taken in by trees, while oxygen is released by trees which is needed by man. Trees supply food, furniture and shelter to man while the latter gives manure to trees, sow seeds, transplant them from place to place and water them. Man cannot live without corn, fruit, vegetable flowers and leaves. Trees cannot survive in the face of weeds from which man alone can save them. This indicates that both man and tree are dependent on trees, animals and people is responsible for a balanced eco-system. Trees are of much benefit clouds to us. Trees invite clouds and rain without which crops cannot be grown. They cool more...