Science Projects And Inventions

The principle of bearings has been around for as long as the Pyramids of Giza. Bearings enable easy smooth movement between two objects, and the builders of the pyramids applied this principle by using rolling tree trunks laid under planks to move heavy loads in the construction of these wonders of the ancient world. Early bearings were linear (allowing movement in a straight line, like the opening and closing of a drawer) and were made of wood, stone, sapphire, and glass. However, advances in technology demanded new and improved bearings to allow smoother mechanical movement. In 1907 Swede Sven Wingquist (1876-1953) patented a design for a multi-row self-aligning ball bearing. Made of steel to lower friction, the bearing comprised two rows of balls in a concave raceway. Wingquist's design was structurally superior to earlier bearing designs and was rotary—allowing motion around a center, such as in wheel axles. Self-alignment meant more...

Captain George Manby (1765-1854) is perhaps most famous for his invention of the Manby Mortar, which was a device to help rescue people from shoreline shipwrecks. However, he is also heralded as the father of the modern fire extinguisher, which in itself has helped to save many thousands of lives. Fire extinguishers in one form or another predate Manby's invention, and there is some debate over the design of the first, extinguisher, although one of the earliest recorded ones was designed and used in 1723 by Ambrose Godfrey. But Godfrey's device consisted of a receptacle containing a fire-extinguishing liquid and a chamber of gunpowder with a series of fuses attached. When the fuses were lit, the gunpowder exploded and scattered the liquid. They were not widely used, although there is an account of them being used to put a fire out in London in 1729. Captain Manby's 1818 invention was more...

"He is praised as an innovator, yet he is also maligned as derivative and labeled a mere craftsman." Freyda Spira, historian As a decorative technique, etching had been in use for many years before the birth of Daniel Hopfer (1470- 1536), possibly since antiquity. His innovation was to apply the method to printmaking. The etching process begins by covering a metal plate with a waxy material called a ground. Lines are then scratched into the ground with a needle to expose bare metal where the artist wants lines to appear on the print. The plate is then washed with (or dipped into) acid, which cuts into the exposed metal, leaving lines etched in the plate. The longer the plate is submerged, the deeper the incision, and the darker the lines will appear on the print. For a more sophisticated finished print, the process can be repeated to allow for different more...

"If the grace of God miraculously operates, it probably operates through the subliminal door." William James, psychologist In 1859 German doctor Alfred Wilhelm Volkmann (1800-1877) built the first tachistoscope, a device capable of influencing subliminal thought by flashing pictures for as little as ten milliseconds. Using mechanical shutters similar to those used in cameras, Volkmann exposed people to images of emotive words. The people would not notice them consciously, yet subconsciously they would  project the corresponding emotions onto a subsequent image. However, because of their mechanical nature the shutters can't be controlled with perfect precision, and hence flashtube tachistoscopes were developed. Tiese use mirrors in a large box and a small lamp that goes from complete darkness to extreme brightness and back in a few milliseconds. The person looking into the viewing hole gets the impression that every image appears in the same spot, which allows the person conducting the more...

Some of the earliest known examples of maps—in the form of Babylonian tablets—are Egyptian land drawings and paintings discovered in early tombs. However, in 1961 a town plan of Catalhoyuk in Turkey was unearthed, painted on a wall. Featuring houses and the peak of a volcano, it is around 8,500 years old. The sixth-century tablet known as Imago Mundi shows Babylon on the Euphrates, with cities on a circular land mass, surrounded by a river. Some maps are known as T and O maps. In one, illustrating the inhabited world in Roman times, T represents the Mediterranean, dividing the continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and O is the surrounding Ocean. The T and O Hereford Mappa Mundi of 1300, drawn on a single sheet of vellum, includes writing in black ink and water painted green, with the Red Sea colored red. Greek scholars developed a spherical Earth theory using astronomical more...

Bioethanol is a high-octane alcohol produced from sugar or starch and is considered an important alternative fuel to petroleum-based products. One of the first fuels used in the automobile business, it was used extensively during World War II in Germany, the United States, Brazil, and the Philippines. After the war, bioethanol was generally replaced by cheaper petroleum-based fuels. Brazil has been the worldwide leader of bioethanol development since the 1973 oil crisis, with the initiation  of the Brazilian  Alcohol   Program (PROALCOOL), whose aim was to produce bioethanol to combine with gasoline. Sugar cane was to be used as the source of bioethanol, and in the first phase of the project (from 1975 to 1979), distilleries were attached to existing sugar mills. In the later phase of the project, autonomous distilleries were built for bioethanol production. The 1979 crisis, when the price of crude oil soared following the Iranian Revolution, more...

"Since ICSI has been introduced... more than 95 percent of males can father their own genetic child." Paul Devroey and Andre van Steirteghem, 2004 Intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, is the process whereby a single sperm is injected into an egg. It is helpful when infertility is linked to sperm problems, such as difficulties with the sperm penetrating the egg or low sperm count. Its success rates are equal to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and it is recommended to more than half of all couples having IVF treatments. Andre van Steirteghem (b.1940) and colleagues from Vrije Universiteit Brussels were behind the technique. After the birth of Louise Brown, the first successful "test tube" baby IVF was used to treat many couples with fertility problems, but it was found to be least effective in cases of male factor infertility. This began the exploration of new procedures of assisted fertilization. Van Steirteghem's more...

The first webcam in the world was born from the desire of computer science students at Cambridge University, England, for fresh coffee. Having only a single coffee pot situated at some distance from the computer labs meant that a freshly brewed supply soon ran out. To overcome this difficulty Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky had the idea of focusing a camera on the coffee pot. A computer with a simple frame grabber was connected to a camera, which was focused on the coffee pot. Jardetzky wrote a server program that collected images from the camera every three minutes, while Stafford-Fraser developed the software to run on the computers of all the members of the "Trojan Room coffee club." Connecting to the server then provided an up-to-date, icon-sized image of the pot on-screen. The camera was connected to the Internet in 1993 and became a popular symbol of the early World more...

"It is a wretched business to be digging a well just as thirst is mastering you." Titus Maccius Plautus, playwright An aqueduct is any artificial conduit for the delivery of water, though the term is often misunderstood to refer only to the arches sometimes used to enable these channels to span low ground. Ancient civilizations on the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile diverted water from these great rivers for irrigation, but the paucity of supply in Minoan Crete encouraged the development of complex storage and distribution systems for the first time in the second millennium B.C.E. It is the Romans who are best known for their innovative water supply systems. Between 312 B.C.E. and 226 C.E. the Romans constructed eleven major aqueducts to provide Rome with water. Aqueducts did not become commonplace again until the late nineteenth century, when rising populations in the United Kingdom outgrew local water sources, and engineers more...

Since its infancy, modern computer memory, namely RAM, has suffered from a fundamental problem. It remembers things when it has power, but pull the plug out and its carefully held pattern of Os and 1s fades and dies. The traditional solution is to use disks or tapes to save the contents of the computer's memory more permanently but these have disadvantages. They are slower than RAM, and their motors and other moving parts use more electricity and do not like being shaken around. In 1967 Simon Sze and Dawon Kahng invented a transistor that could remember a programmed state even without power. They programmed their "floating gate transistor" by forcing electrons onto a part of the transistor that was normally electrically isolated—the floating gate. When the power was turned off, this electrical charge was trapped, potentially for years. While memory chips based on Sze and Kahng's invention were produced, they more...