Science Projects And Inventions

"The idea seems so simple that its significance and importance is no longer appreciated." Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), mathematician In 1202 Leonardo Pisano (c.1170-c.1240), known as Fibonacci, published his seminal work Liber abaci ("Book of the Abacus") and thus popularized Hindu- Arabic numbers in Europe. Although born in Italy, Fibonacci grew up in what is modern-day Beja, Algeria. Taught by Arab teachers, Fibonacci came in contact with our modern numeral system, which was devised in ancient India yet virtually unknown in Europe. Until then the Roman numeral system had been prevalent throughout the continent. The system had been an improvement on the first recorded numbers found in Egypt—simple representative strokes for each digit, and a special symbol for ten—as well as the Greek (Attic) method of recording the first letters of the numeral names. In the Hindu-Arabic base ten system, on the other hand, the single digits were represented by symbols more...

"Prozac® enjoyed [a] career of renown... rumors... scandal... and finally a quiet rehabilitation." Peter D. Kramer, Listening to Prozac (1993) Prozac® is the registered trademarked name for fluoxetine hydrochloride, the world's most widely prescribed antidepressant. It was the first in a new class of drugs for depression called selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which work by increasing brain levels of serotonin, the neurotransmitter thought to influence sleep, appetite, aggression, and mood. Prozac® works by inhibiting re-uptake of the neurotransmitter (where it-is either destroyed or retrieved into the cell), thereby amplifying its levels. At Eli Lilly and Company, the team of inventors behind Prozac® included Bryan Molloy Ray Fuller, and David Wong. In the early 1980s it was known that the antihistamine diphenhydramine showed some antidepressant-like properties. As a starting point, the team took 3-phenoxy-3-phenylpropylamine (which is a compound structurally similar to diphenhydramine) and synthesized dozens of its derivatives. Fluoxetine hydrochloride more...

"[In] 1974, the first product with a barcode [chewing gum] was scanned at a checkout counter." Russ Adams, author The development of barcodes stemmed from comments made by a food-chain president to a university dean at the Drexel Institute of Technology, Philadelphia, in 1948, and overheard by graduate student Bernard Silver (1924-1962). The company wanted some sort of system to collect product information at the checkout automatically, but the dean had little interest in initiating such research. Silver decided that he and his friend Norman Woodland (b. 1921) should pursue a solution. Eventually the pair turned to a combination of movie soundtrack technology invented by Lee De Forest in the 1920s and Morse code dots and dashes; "I just extended the dots and dashes downward and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them," said Woodland. De Forest's film included a varying transparency pattern on its edge. When a more...

For thousands of years, men have been using specially created tools to shave facial hair. Sharpened, razorlike objects carved from metal or obsidian (a glasslike substance found in rock) have been found in Bronze Age sites across the globe. By the end of the nineteenth century, the straight, "cutthroat" razor was the most common shaving tool. These had dangerously sharp blades that required skill to use without cutting the skin. They also had to be constantly sharpened to remain effective. The first safety razor with a guard along the razor's edge was introduced in 1875 by the Kampfe brothers, but the blade still needed frequent sharpening. Astute American businessman King Camp Gillette (1855-1932) realized that if he could create a safe and simple shave without the inconvenience of having to sharpen the blade beforehand, his product could be of interest to every adult male in the world. His idea was more...

Charles Drew (1904-1950) is widely credited as the father of the modern blood bank. In 1937, Drew made the key discovery that separating red blood cells from the plasma (the liquid part of blood that can be given to anyone), and freezing the two separately, allowed blood to be preserved for longer and reconstituted at a later date. In February of 1941, Drew was appointed director of the first American Red Cross Blood Bank, and launched the "Plasma for Britain Project" where he collected thousands of units of plasma for the British war effort. From these samples the British Army established its own blood transfusion service, where dried and powdered plasma could be stored and turned into a liquid with the addition of sterile, distilled water. After the war, doctors who had seen the effectiveness of transfusion therapy in battle began to demand that blood be made available for treatment more...

The earliest lenses were made of circular pieces of rock crystal or semiprecious stone, such as beryl and quartz, which were ground and polished so that they produced a magnified image when looked through. The oldest known lens artifact was one made of rock crystal dating from around 640 B.C.E. and excavated in Nineveh, near the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. The most common form was circular and thicker in the middle than around the edge, and having both its front and back surfaces the same shape. The modern convex lens developed from the ancient Greek burning glass. Here a spherical vase of water would be used to concentrate the rays of the sun onto a small area, which heated up. The heat was used to ignite fires in temples or to cauterize wounds. The Iraqi mathematician and optics engineer Ibn Sahl (c 940-1000) wrote the treatise On Burning Mirrors more...

The Pitot (pronounced pea-tow) tube is an eighteenth- century invention still flying high amid twenty-first- century technology. Designed by French astronomer, engineer, and mathematician Henri Pilot (1695-1771), this deceptively simple device is essentially a differential pressure gauge and can be used for a variety of flow-rate or speed-measuring purposes. Pitot's pet interest was water flow, and his personal research led him to conclude that much of the accepted wisdom of the day was incorrect. He would not accept, for example, the prevailing theory that, other things being equal, the speed of flowing water increased with depth. His tube, demonstrated at the French Academy of Sciences in 1732, would show that he was right: it does not. As well as being used in a fixed position to determine the flow rate of a liquid or gas the  L-shaped tube may be attached to a boat or airplane to measure the craft's more...

“Vases and shards ...the true alphabet of archeologists in every country" Sir William Flinders Petrie, archeologist As applies to all early inventions, we do not know the name of the man or woman who invented pottery. No first potter carved his or her name or initials in the base of a pot to claim first prize. However, it has long been assumed that whoever the creative person was, he or she would have lived somewhere in the Near East of Asia. It was therefore something of an archeological shock when, in the 1960s, pots dating to around 10,000 B.C.E. were discovered on the Far Eastern side of Asia, thousands of miles away at Nasunahara on the island of Kyusu in Japan. These pots, found in caves, were made by nomadic hunter-gatherers, rather than settled farmers or urban dwellers. Just as important, the pots were made by firing or heating the more...

"[The artificial skin] is soft and pliable, unlike other substances used to cover burned-off skin." John F. Burke Human skin is a marvel of engineering. It is tough yet stretchy and pliable, and acts as an impermeable barrier against water loss, infection, and cell damage from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays. With this range of properties, it is a very difficult material to duplicate. John F. Burke, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States, was looking for a reliable skin replacement for the treatment of burn victims. Skin is usually grafted from other parts of the patient's body, but in cases where the burns cover 50 percent or more of the body, often there is not enough healthy skin to cover the damaged area. In the 1970s Burke teamed up with loannis V. Yannas, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who was studying a more...

Ever since the invention by Alhazen (965-1040) of the pinhole camera, which projected an image onto a surface, people sought a way of "fixing," and thus recording, that image. By accident, in 1727, the German chemist Johann Schuize discovered that a mixture of chalk, nitric acid, and silver darkened when exposed to sunlight, and the rate of darkening increased if more silver was added. By 1777 the Swedish chemist Carl Scheele had been able to fix, or make permanent, the results of this change using ammonia. Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) produced the first permanent photographic image in 1826. He first used a flat pewter plate covered with bitumen, but then quickly moved on to silver compounds. Louis Daguerre produced silvered images that were very delicate and could not be copied. Although the exposure time was about ten minutes, he managed to produce daguerreotypes of famous people such as Abraham Lincoln more...