Science Projects And Inventions

Descriptions of Dr. Igor Gamow (b. 1936) depict him as a cross between Indiana Jones and Albert Einstein, a bold adventuring spirit driven by an enquiring scientific mind. Gamow's father was the physicist and cosmologist George Gamow, and his mother was a famous ballet dancer. The young Gamow held down jobs as diverse as horse-breaker and karate instructor before he finally succumbed to the lure of science and enrolled at the University of Colorado. He eventually gained a PhD in Microbiology and Biophysics and went on to lecture in these subjects, although his passion for adventure and the outdoors did not wane. It was while Gamow was investigating training at altitude that the idea for his sleeping bag came about. He envisaged a bubble that athletes living at high altitude could use to get the most out of their training. Altitude sickness occurs when a person ascends to a height more...

"Horseshoing, very likely, was invented by different nations about the same period...." Scientific American (1891) Horses have played central roles in the histories of various powerful empires, and their employment was boosted by the invention of the horseshoe. Protecting horses' hooves from wear and tear on hard or rough surfaces allowed for longer journeys when the horse was the common mode of transport and a domestic working animal. It also made them more effective when used in the cavalry as part of a military campaign. The precise date of its invention is unknown, but the Roman poet Catullus mentions a mule losing its shoe in the first century B.C.E. Evidence from Roman regions to the north of the Alps suggests that horses from what is now Germany may have been the first to use horseshoes regularly, from around 100 C.E. Over the years horseshoe design has improved from the "hipposandal" more...

"A computer who must make many difficult calculations usually has a slide rule close at hand." Pickett manual The slide rule is a mechanical device used to carry out complicated mathematical functions. It is based on two logarithmic scales that move parallel to each other and are aligned according to the desired calculation. To multiply two numbers, for example, the logs are added and raised to the power ten; to divide, the logs are subtracted. In 1620 Edmund Gunter (1581-1626), an English clergyman and Gresham College Professor of Astronomy, produced a logarithmic scale and used dividers to take off specific distances to do the calculations. William   Oughtred   (1574-1660), mathematician and rector of Albury, did away with the dividers by using two sliding Gunter rules side by side in circa 1622 and described his circular slide rule in Circles of Proportion and the Horizontal Instrument (1632). Sliding different distances more...

"The most important of my discoveries have been suggested to me by my failures." Sir Humphrey Davy The name of Sir Humphry Davy (1778-1829) will forever be associated with the famous safety lamp that he developed for miners, but his demonstration of the arc lamp in many ways was more significant. Considered one of the greatest British scientists, Davy became renowned for his mesmerizing public lectures, including his demonstration of the effects of laughing gas. In 1801 the twenty-two-year-old Davy was appointed as the director of the laboratory at the new Royal Institution in London, where he began his work in electrochemistry. It was here that he first discovered the principles behind what would eventually become the arc lamp. He used two sticks of carbon in the form of charcoal and connected each of them by wire to opposite terminals of a battery. When he held the two carbon "electrodes" more...

Stanislas Baudry (1780-1830) was the proprietor of a Parisian bathhouse; he was also a bus operator who provided clients with transportation to his spa. Baudry did not invent the horsedrawn bus—horsedrawn carriages of various kinds had long been in existence—but in 1826 he instigated the use of the term "omnibus," and he is therefore credited with inventing the omnibus as a concept. His inspiration came from the name of a hat-maker's shop (Omnes Omnibus, Latin for Everything for Everyone) that he regularly passed on his way to the baths. Baudry's concept of a means of transport available to all, regardless of social class, spread across the globe and evolved into various forms with varying numbers of horses, alternative seating configurations within the vehicle, and, no doubt, different tariffs depending on their clientele. The buses survived the test of time and eventually the horses were replaced by diesel engines. Latter-day concerns more...

Conrad Rontgen (1845-1923) was the first person to take X-ray photographs of a person, winning the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901. X-ray films are sometimes referred to as Rontgenograms in his honor. For the first time, surgeons could see shrapnel and bullets contained within the body. However, X-rays were two-dimensional. In order to see how deep an object was, a second X-ray picture, usually perpendicular to the first , had to be taken. X-rays also fail to image the body's soft tissues very well. Many techniques had been tried to improve the images produced by X-rays, but it was not until computer-assisted tomography (CAT) was developed that these problems were solved. Godfrey Hounsfield (1919-2004) devised the CAT scan in 1968, and by 1971 a prototype scanner was installed at Atkinson Morley's Hospital, Wimbledon, England, for use in clinical trials. In computer-assisted tomography, the X-ray tube is moved so more...

"We... believe that a hypersonic airplane could be a reality in the not too distant future." Dr. Steven Walker, DARPA Tactical Technology Office In the twenty-first century, speed seems to be of paramount importance. As well as improving the simple but inefficient turbine-based engine systems that drive rockets and planes, scientists have developed Supersonic Combustion Ramjet engines (scramjet) to allow much faster travel. Scramjets improve on ordinary engines by eliminating the need to carry a fuel oxidant. Instead, they use oxygen from the atmosphere to burn the onboard fuel, making them lighter, more efficient, and extremely fast. Scramjets have long been a theoretical possibility, but in 2002 scientists at the University of Queensland, Australia, and at the U.K. defense company QinetiQ successfully completed the first flight of a scramjet vehicle. Although the test simply demonstrated the technology and not a practical engine system, the vehicle reached Mach 7, which is more...

British mathematician and physicist James" Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879) was a giant of nineteenth- century science. Best known for his Maxwell equations, which were the best insight into electromagnetism of their day, his interests also included Saturn's rings and the human perception of color. It was this latter interest that led to the first color photograph in 1861. In the manner of a true showman, Maxwell revealed his photograph of a tartan ribbon at the Royal Institution in London. His studies of human vision, including the condition of color blindness, had led him to conclude that color images were possible using a "trichromatic process." He had arranged for his tartan ribbon to be shot by professional photographer Thomas Sutton, the inventor of the single-lens reflex camera. The images were black and white, but, critically, Maxwell had three such images taken through red, green, and blue filters, respectively. Having turned the images more...

"... chain mail makers, slowly going mad [while] they clipped together chain mail rings..." Ursula K. Le Guin, Tehanu(1990) Chain mail was originally called Just mail or chain in England and maille in France (the French word maille means "meshy" or "netted"). It was not until the 1700s that chain mail became its common English name. Mail is constructed from a series of links made from wire. These are bent into circles around a forming cylinder, and the finished links are welded or riveted into the form of a shirt. The result is a sturdy piece of armor that affords very effective protection from most cutting blows while at the same time being relatively lightweight and flexible. Chain mail alone could not protect against crushing injuries, however, and warriors therefore combined it with a gambeson, which was worn underneath the mail. This was a padded jacket made from layers of more...

The lithotripter gave the world a new, noninvasive way to treat kidney stones with little to no pain. Discoveries in aerospace engineering and research on shock waves in the 1970s led to the technology's birth. Early studies at the Dornier research group (founded by German engineer Claude Dornier) focused on aerospace technology. One- new phenomenon noted by Dornier scientists was the pitting effect that occurred in airplanes as they approached the speed' of sound. It was discovered that this was caused by shock waves created in front of droplets of moisture. This finding in 1974 was the beginning of a collaboration between Dornier engineers and hospitals, and led to the invention of clinical extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL). In 1980 this new technology was used to treat its first patient, using the Dornier HM1 lithotripter. The treatment of kidney stones begins with an X-ray to identify the localization of the more...