Science Projects And Inventions

"Blowing allowed for previously unparalleled versatility and speed of manufacture." Rosemarie Trentinella, Metropolitian Museum of Art It was the Syrians who first learned to blow molten glass through a hollow metal tube and shape it into intricate forms. Although the technique for producing glass had existed for about two and a half millennia, it was only in approximately "100 B.C.E. that the hazardous art of glassblowing—using glass melting at a few thousand degrees Fahrenheit—was mastered. Glassblowing is the process for forming glass into a desirable shape, and this ability to form iconic, practical, and elegant shapes out of glass has been of incalculable value and practical benefit to society. Glassblowing machines have now largely replaced the Syrian specialists, but the science behind the technique remains the same. Molten glass is first introduced to the end of a hollow tube. A bubble of air is then blown through the tube, and more...

"He [Papin] doth not think... that any thing better can be made for such things, as must be stew'd...." Denis Papin, Philosophical Transactions (1683-1775) There is a story that when French scientist and inventor Denis Papin (1647-1712) first demonstrated his wonderfully named "digester" to London's Royal Society in 1679, the device exploded. So another invention swiftly came into being: Papin's safety valve, which went on to have other applications. By 1682, a refined version of the steam digester proved excellent at cooking food and making nutritious bones soft and tasty. After a demonstration dinner at the Royal Society in that year, one guest, leading horticulturalist John Evelyn, noted in his diary that food served up from the digester was among "the most delicious that I have ever seen or tasted." Papin was an interesting character of diverse scientific interests. Trained in medicine as a young man, he had long been more...

The electric type-printing telegraph of Royal Earl House (1814-1895) looked like the offspring of a record player and a piano. Several intricate devices sat on the telegraph's wooden base above a keyboard whose keys were labeled with the letter to which they corresponded. Despite its looks, the machine was not musical. It did, however, rely on the steady beat of its underlying clockwork-generated electricity to produce a message printed on a strip of paper. House eventually shared his idea with Jacob Brett, a British electrical engineer, who built a working model. When a key on the machine's keyboard was pressed, an electric circuit would be temporarily broken at one of twenty-eight corresponding pins on an underlying rotating cylinder. The breaking of the circuit would stop the cylinder's motion, consequently stopping a synchronized electromagnet controlling the type-wheel. With the type-wheel halted on the proper letter, the connected apparatus then pressed a more...

While some fear the invasion of privacy contingent on DNA databases produced from DNA fingerprinting, it is undeniable that the technique has had a positive impact in areas such as forensics, paternity testing, and animal classification. After studying at Oxford University, biochemist Alee Jeffreys (b. 1950) became a professor in 1977 at the University of Leicester, where he worked on DNA variation and genetic evolution in families. He studied inheritance patterns of disease, specifically in what are called "mini-satellites," or areas of great genetic variation that occur in the human DNA sequence outside of core genes. In 1984, while studying mini-satellites in the DNA of seals, Jeffreys tested a probe made of DNA on samples from various different people using X-ray film. When he developed the film, he saw what he described as a "complicated mess." Upon closer examination, however, he realized that certain patterns occurred that varied greatly from more...

From the early 1990s, as Internet usage first began to proliferate, users quickly saw the potential for sharing music. But a combination of basic connection speeds and large file sizes made uploading and downloading a painfully slow process. As early as 1987, Germany's prestigious Fraunhofer Institute had been engaged in researching high-quality, low bit-rate audio coding: in short, how an audio file can be compressed in size without affecting its sound quality. The format they came up with in 1989 was called MPEG (Moving Picture Experts Group) Audio Layer III, or MP3. MP3 compression is a simple concept to understand—even if the process itself is highly complex. A compact disc (CD) stores its information digitally, in binary digits (bits); every second of stereo music contained on a CD consists of 1,411,200 bits. MP3 compression reduces the number of bits in a recording by taking out "unnecessary" information. It does this more...

"Defibrillators should be as common as fire extinguishers." Michael Tighe, saved by a portable defibrillator A defibrillator is a device that delivers an electric shock to the heart through the chest wall, with the aim of restoring a regular rhythm. It is used to treat ventriculat fibrillation, a condition where the heart muscle is no longer contracting in a coordinated fashion, thus preventing blood from being pumped around the body. If untreated, death frequently results. American cardiac surgeon Claude Beck (1894-1971) performed the first successful defibrillation procedure in 1947 at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Beck had been operating on a fourteen-year-old boy with a congenital heart problem, and had just closed the boy's chest when he suffered a cardiac arrest. Beck immediately reopened the chest and, after unsuccessfully massaging the heart by hand, tried out the defibrillator device that he was in the process of developing. Beck's more...

"If fall these cooktop[s] were laid out in a line, they would cover about three quarters of... the earth." Schott Schott, the German specialty glass producer, originally made glass ceramics for use in astronomical telescopes. In 1983 they introduced CERAN®, a glass- ceramic cooktop panel for halogen cooking. Hot and long-lasting, halogen bulbs were perfect for cooking, but their application in the kitchen had been limited by available cooktop materials. CERAN® brought the power of halogen bulbs to chefs everywhere. The cooktops contain reflectors beneath the bulbs to direct maximum heat to the cooktop surface. Everyday incandescent bulbs consist of a tungsten filament encased in blown glass that contains an inert gas, such as argon. Halogen bulbs are similar except that, instead of an inert gas, a halogen gas—usually iodine or bromine—is used. Using such gases ramped up the bulbs' light output and radiant heat, but also demanded a special more...

Many everyday objects are formed from polystyrene, such as pens, electrical equipment, and toys. This diversity of form comes from a relatively uninspiring molecular structure—a long chain of carbon atoms, each attached to a ring of six carbon atoms known as a phenyl group. When expanded with a gas such as pentane or carbon dioxide, it forms a light, foamlike structure ideal for packaging and insulation. The compound was first identified in 1839 by Eduard Simon of Berlin. He isolated an oily substance from tree resin that he named styrol, which, over time, thickened into a jelly. It was later discovered by Hermann Staudinger that the substance was a monomer, a type of molecule that, with heat, combines with others to create a plastic polymer. The polymerization process was joining together single units of the styrol to make a long chainlike molecule. The material found few applications until 1930 when more...

Television is traditionally vilified as being a vacuous, flashing goggle box—"chewing gum for the eyes." However, in the twenty-first century people are much more likely to be goggling at a computer screen than a television set. That is strange because, unlike the television, the computer did not originally include a screen. When they were first created, computers simply processed data from manually inserted punch cards. Save for some mechanical whirring, they gave no real visual clues as to what they were up to. To have even the most basic understanding of what a computer was doing at any given point in its processing, a person needed a fairly advanced degree in mathematics. Since the invention of the Graphical User Interface (GUI), that privilege has been accessible to everyone. The man who paved the way was Douglas Engelbart (b. 1925). Inspired by an essay by Vannevar Bush that he read in more...

“... with worn-out worm-eaten rotten bits of wood ...a savage mode of keeping accounts..." Charles Dickens, novelist Tally sticks, or tallies, are batons of bone, ivory, wood, or stone into which notches are made as a means of recording numbers or even messages. The archeological and historical records are rich in tallies, with the Lebombo bone as the earliest example. Found in a cave in the Lebombo Mountains in Swaziland and made from a baboon's fibula, it dates back to 35,000 B.C.E. Its markings suggest that it is a lunar phase counter, indicating an appreciation of math far beyond simple counting. Tally sticks became the primary accounting tool of medieval Europe, which was largely illiterate. During the 1100s King Henry I of England established the Exchequer to be responsible for the collection and management of revenues. To keep track of taxes owed and paid, split tally sticks were employed. Usually made more...