Science Projects And Inventions

"I wanted to create a vision of Invisibility.... This is a kind of augmented reality." Susumu Tachi Thanks to Japanese research, the twenty-first-century soldier may soon be blending invisibly into the background. The man behind optical camouflage, Susumu Tachi (b. 1946), is a professor at Tokyo University, where he works on the "science and technology of artificial reality." Ironically, since he now works to make things invisible, Tachi previously developed a robotic guide dog for the blind. The optical camouflage developed by Tachi and his research team works by filming the background environment and projecting it onto a coat worn by the test subject. However, this is no average coat. It is covered in thousands of tiny beads that reflect light back to its source, therefore rendering the coat invisible. This is the theory, but in reality the system is still far from perfect and in great need of cutting more...

“... the luminous Alto display, covered with images and graphical fonts, was a revelation." John Markoff, New York Times (April 3,2003) There are many contenders for the title of first ever "personal computer." However, it was Xerox PARC in 1973 that was responsible for creating perhaps the most innovative design in computer history—a personal computer as we would recognize it today. The Alto, named after the Californian Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) where it was created, was made up of a cabinet (containing a 16-bit custom-made processor and disk storage), a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, and even the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get graphical user interface featuring windows and clickable icons. The Alto was designed primarily for research and had to be compact enough to fit in an office, but powerful enough to support a user interface while being able to share information between machines. This led it to feature groundbreaking innovations more...

"It was a paradise for scientists. In Los Alamos, whatever you wanted, you got." Joseph Rotblat, physicist During World War II the United States used an unprecedented $2 billion to feed an ultra-secret research and development program, the outcome of which would alter, the relationships of nations forever. Known as the Manhattan Project, it was the search by the United States and her closest allies to create a practical atomic bomb: a single device capable of mass destruction, the threat of which alone could be powerful enough to end the war. The motivation was simple. Scientists escaping the Nazi regime'-had revealed that research in Germany had confirmed the theoretical viability of atomic bombs.' In 1939, in support of their fears that the Nazis might now be developing such a weapon, Albert Einstein and .others wrote to President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) warning of the need for atomic research. more...

"I'm an optimist, but an optimist who carries a raincoat...." Harold Wilson, former British Prime Minister It was a Scottish chemist, Charles Macintosh, who gave us one of the most widely recognized names, the Mackintosh, the eponymous and essential waterproof coat. He invented, not the coat, but the waterproof material from which such garments are made. Macintosh's experiments began with waste products from the process of creating gas from coal. Initially he extracted ammonia from the waste products to make a violet-red dye. This process left a further waste product, called coal-tar naphtha. Macintosh began to experiment with this as a solvent, quickly realizing its waterproof qualities. He began to coat a thin material with it, but encountered two problems: the rubber was sticky, and it had a terrible odor. He combated the first problem by pressing two sheets of the fabric together, with the rubber In the middle, which more...

"As an accumulator of power, [the] press surpasses anything that has yet been invented...." Scientific American (Jan 1864) Joseph Bramah (1748-1814), an inventor and locksmith born in Yorkshire, England, developed and patented the hydraulic press in 1795. He also invented a beer engine (1797), a papermaking machine (1805), a machine for printing bank notes with sequential serial numbers (1806), and a fountain pen (1809). Hydraulic presses are widely used in industry for tasks that require a large force. Their capacity can range from 1 ton, or less, to more than 10,000 tons. The machine depends on Pascal's principle, which is that pressure throughout a closed system is constant. Typically it has two cylinders and pistons of differing cross-sectional areas joined by a length of small- diameter tubing. A fluid, such as oil, is displaced when either piston is pushed inward. The small piston displaces a smaller volume of fluid than more...

"Shell are made of cast iron... and are sent flying toward the enemy camp from an eruptor." Jiao Yu and Liu Ji, Fire Dragon Manual(c. 1368-1398) During the Chinese Song Dynasty (circa 960-1279), artillery engineering exploded, as it were, with the development of the ancestor of the cannon: flame- throwing "fire lances" made of bamboo. When gunpowder at one end was ignited, it forced sand, lead pellets, or shards of pottery at the enemy. When metal later replaced bamboo, probably in the early 1100s, these lances became "fire tubes" or "eruptors." The oldest record of them is a painting, dated to 1128. The early Chinese cannons could throw a ball about 50 yards (45 m). A century later they had become powerful enough to breach city walls, and were made of bronze. According to the historian of Chinese technology Joseph Needham, cannon warfare took a great step forward with the more...

"The first stone... fell with such weight and force upon a building that a great part... was destroyed." Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo(c.1298) The word catapult came from two Greek words: kata, meaning "downward," and pultos, which refers to a small circular shield. Katapultos was taken to mean "shield piercer." The weapon was said to have been invented in 399 B.C.E. in the Sicilian city of Syracuse and, according to Archimedes, was. derived from a composite bow, which was similar to the crossbow. Early catapults had a central lever with a counterweight at the opposite end to the projectile basket. Torsion-powered catapults entered into common use in Greece and Macedon around 330 B.C.E. Alexander the Great used them to provide cover on the battlefield as well as during sieges. The Chinese, Greeks, and Romans used various types of catapults. The ballista, built for Philip of Macedon, was similar more...

Dating back to 1839, the daguerreotype is one of the oldest known forms of photography. It was the first process that did not require excessively long exposure times, making it ideal for portrait photography. Louis Daguerre (1787-1851) had been trying since 1829 to capture the images he viewed through his camera obscura, a wood box that produced an image on a sheet of frosted glass via a lens at one end. In 1839, after a decade of painstaking work, he presented his daguerreotypes to a joint session of the Academic des Sciences and the Academic des Beaux-Arts. The pictures included images of shells, fossils, and a dead spider, photographed through a microscope. The process for developing the pictures was long and laborious. The plates had to be prepared from a sheet of copper coated with a thin layer of silver. The silver surface had to be polished until it was more...

"I was famous for my kites; and my sleds were the envy... of all the boys in town." Margaret Knight Margaret Knight(1838-1914) was one of the first American women to be awarded a patent. She was a prolific inventor from the age of twelve, when an accident in a textile mill prompted her to design a safety feature to protect workers from the looms. The flat-bottomed paper bag, however, is her most widely remembered invention, as it endures to this day. Knight was working in a paper-bag factory after the American Civil War when she saw the need for a different kind of bag. The factory produced flat bags, more like envelopes, which were unsuitable for bulky items. Square, flat-bottomed bags could be made, but only by hand. Although she had little education, Knight—after studying the factory machinery—built a working wooden prototype of a machine at home. Understanding that she more...

As recently as the 1950s, people with sight clouded by cataracts would slowly go blind with no hope of a cure. Today, in most cases, a cataract sufferer's eyesight can be restored to what it was when they were a teenager in an operation taking just thirty minutes. The man responsible for this incredible breakthrough was British ophthalmologist Harold Ridley (1906-2001), although he had to battle for this achievement to be recognized by his peers. During World War II Ridley treated pilots with injuries caused by shards of Perspex® from their cockpits being lodged in the eye. He noticed that the Perspex® did not react with the eye and realized that, its inert quality, combined with its lightness and optical properties, made it ideal for the construction of replacement lenses for damaged eyes. He confided this information to optical scientist John Pike, who helped design and make the first-ever intraocular more...