Archives October 2013

Science is one of the greatest blessings in modern life. Scientific advancement has led to many important inventions. One of them is the computer. About a decade back, a computer was seen as a wonder machine. A few years later, this wonderful machine came closer to us as the Personal Computer l (PC) entered the household scene. The computer today plays a significant role in our  everybody's life. Computers are used practically everywhere. The use of computer in our country in the past two decades has taken a big jump. Today computers do much more than simply compute, super market scanners calculate our grocery bill while keeping store inventory; computerized telephone switching centres play traffic cop to millions of calls and keep lines of communications untangled, and Automatic Teller Machines (ATM) let us conduct banking transactions from virtually anywhere in the world. The extensive use of computers in all fields more...

"In 1918, 1 think it was that I made my first invention. I built a machine to throw rocks." Jacob Rabinow Jacob Rabinow (1910-1999) left Russia with his family during the Russian Revolution, arriving eventually in New York. After studying electrical engineering, he worked for the American National Bureau of Standards, where he began churning out inventions, which led to a staggering 230 U.S. patents. His first inventions were military and involved missile guidance systems, but he is probably best known for his "Reading Machine." Optical character recognition (OCR) had been around for some time. A commercial system was installed at the offices of Reader's Digest in 1955, but the results were often unpredictable. In 1960 Rabinow incorporated a new principle into the idea that would greatly reduce the errors made- by other reading systems. His machine was the first to include a "Best Match Principle," which compared the information more...

The first radio broadcasts made at the beginning of the twentieth century were based on the principles of amplitude modulation, or AM. Radio waves were broadcast at a specific frequency, and the receiver would detect amplitude variations before decoding the signal. Although poor in sound quality—primarily a deliberate technical limitation to deal with the sheer volume of AM radio stations—and prone to interference, it remained the dominant commercial mode for broadcast until the 1970s. In 1933, Edwin H. Armstrong (1890-1954) patented an alternative method for making radio broadcasts using frequency modulation—FM. The basic principle has the carrier wave modulated so that its frequency varies with the audio signal being transmitted. The main benefit of FM over AM is that it enables broadcasts to be received with a minimum of interference: assorted atmospheric conditions, such as thunderstorms, or surrounding electrical activity, such as car ignitions, can themselves create AM signals thus more...

"To really enjoy fake meat, you might have to forget ...the true origins of the stuff you're [eating]." Farhad Manjoo, Wired Magazine (2002) Meat substitutes are in increasing demand as more people reduce their meat intake or switch to vegetarianism. Edible mycoprotein, popularly known by the brand name Quorn™, offers a high-protein alternative to those consuming little or no meat. But vegetarianism was not on the minds of the U.K. pioneers of this food, who were seeking a ready source of protein against an anticipated global shortage. The solution came from the least exotic of locations—a, field near the small English town of Marlow where the mold species Fusarium venenatum was discovered in 1967; it was soon identified as a potential source of mycoprotein. Fungal extracts were assessed for human consumption by Rank Hovis McDougall (RHM) throughout the 1970s, and by 1980 large-scale production  technigues  had  been  mastered. Mycoprotein received more...

"Magnus magnes ipse est globus terrestris. [The whole Earth is a magnet]" William Gilbert, physician and natural philosopher The Chinese discovered the orientating effect of magnetite, a magnetic ore known as lodestone (or leading stone), as early as the fourth century B.C.E. and the earliest compasses were used for quasi-magical purposes. They consisted of a piece of lodestone floating on a stick in a bowl of water, which swung around so that it. always pointed in a consistent direction. It was another thousand years before they were used for navigation. Previously navigators in the northern hemisphere had used the North Star to indicate direction, and followed earlier maps, but the compass, which aligned with the North Star, was more useful because it could be used in all conditions.     Magnetic compasses work in this way because molten iron in the center of the Earth acts as a magnetic core, more...

"Chewing gum! A new and superior preparation of Spruce Gum." Chicago Daily Democrat, October 25, 1850 Chewing gum is widely regarded as an American phenomenon, but the practice of chewing a form of gum actually dates back to prehistory and Europe. Thousands of years later the ancient Greeks were chewing mastiche, a resin from the mastic tree, and the ancient Mayans were chewing chicle, a rubbery sap from the sapodilla tree. Native Americans chewed a gum made from the resin of spruce trees, and it was from this that-the American John Curtis invented his chewing gum. In 1848 he sold his "spruce gum" commercially, which started a fashion for the chewy substance. Gradually spruce gum was replaced by gum made from paraffin wax, which was then sweetened and sold by Curtis around 1848. Modern chewing gum came into being rather by accident. The Mexican general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna more...

"[No one has] affected the current good or the future welfare of mankind as much as Kary Mullis." Ted Koppel, on ABC's "Nightline" Kary Mullis (b. 1944) was working at Cetus Corporation in Emeryville, California, in 1985 when he worked out a way to duplicate a single piece of DNA into as many copies as were wanted. The technology that resulted from his idea was named polymerase chain reaction, or PCR. The technique could be done in a test tube with the aid of enzymes and temperature changes. After overcoming initial challenges in the laboratory, PCR took off as a huge technological advance in the study of molecular biology. Previously, 5,000 papers had been published on the subject. Not only did the technology provide scientists with a seemingly unlimited amount of DNA derived from something as small as a single strand, it also sped up the process by which they more...

"The challenge is to make toys that allow kids to create, experiment, and explore." Mitchel Resnick, MIT Media Lab Ole Kirk Christiansen was a humble carpenter from the small Danish town of Billund when he began making wooden toys for children in 1932. With Europe still in the grip of a depression and work as a carpenter hard to find, Christiansen's finely crafted toys proved hugely popular. In 1934 he formed his own company and named it Lego, a contraction of the Danish phrase leg godt, meaning "play well." In 1947 the company bought Denmark's- first plastic injection-molcfing machine and began to focus on plastic toys. By 1951 plastic toys made up half of the company's sales, although it was another eleven years until Ole, working with his son Godtfred, created the plastic blocks that became officially known as LEGO". Christiansen had first made plastic interlocking blocks in 1949. These more...

Nothing brings a community together like the collective glow of its televisions. In the spring of 1948, American  John  Walson  (1914-1993)  installed community antenna television, bringing the wonders of cable television to his customers. Walson and his wife Margaret, owners of the Service Electric Company of Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania, came up with cable television as a way to help their customers pick up signals blocked by nearby mountains. Walson decided to take his service literally to new heights by climbing to the top of a mountain and planting an antenna. Using cables and signal boosters, he connected the antenna to his appliance store. Along the way he dropped the signal directly off at his customers' homes, thus creating the first community antenna television system. Community antenna television, now known as Cable TV, is found in nearly 60 percent of U.S. homes and throughout Europe. The first cable systems consisted of more...

"Things are seldom what they seem /Skim milk masquerades as cream." Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, H.M.S. Pinafore Russian doctor Osip Krichevsky first produced powdered milk in 1802. It is made by drying or dehydrating milk until it forms a fine white powder. This can be achieved either by spraying a fine mist of milk into a heated chamber or by adding the milk in a thin layer to a heated surface, from which the dried milk solids can be scraped off. Freeze-drying is now used because it conserves more nutrients and the milk can be fortified to improve its nutritional value. The resulting powder can then be stored for long periods, because the dry environment means it is less prone to bacterial contamination that would spoil fresh milk. As well as its potential for long-term storage, powdered milk has several practical advantages over fresh milk. In the developing world, its more...