Science Projects And Inventions

Liposuction is a cosmetic technique in which excess fatty tissue is suctioned from beneath the skin. It was first developed in 1974 by Italian gynecologist Giorgio Fischer (b. 1934) who found that he could remove fat through tiny incisions with an electrical rotating scalpel connected to a cannula that was attached, in turn, to a suction device. The procedure was initially developed to remove excess fat to make abdominal surgery easier. A major drawback was that patients often suffered considerable blood loss. Four years later, French plastic surgeon Yves-Gerard Illouz was the first to recognize the potential of liposuction as a cosmetic procedure. He used a blunt- tipped cannula, which resulted in fewer complications and a shorter recovery time. In the early 1980s the procedure was introduced to the United States, but the high failure rate damped enthusiasm. In 1985 Dr. Jeffrey Klein, a Californian dermatologist, solved the problerri with more...

"It was effectively ironclad against bullets, and could at a pinch cross a thirty-foot trench..." H.G. Wells, The Land Ironclads, 1908 In the early 1900s, the stalemate of trench warfare sparked military powers to look for alternative methods of breaking through enemy lines. Before World War I, motorized vehicles were still uncommon, and the current designs were unsuitable for combat. It was the British military, in 1914, that created the first tanks. They included tracks to make moving over muddy terrain easy and were fitted with internal- combustion engine, bulletproof casing, and mounted, revolving machine guns. Surprisingly it was the navy rather than the army that oversaw the deployment of the new war vehicles during World War I. Before being put into service, the first tanks were demonstrated to two future British prime ministers— David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. Amazed at the machines' ability to mow through barbed wire more...

To those few weeks spent on the highest point of my native land I owe many happy years of work...” C. T. R. Wilson, on receiving the Nobel Prize in 1927 In September 1894, Charles Thomson Rees Wilson (1869-1959) climbed to the summit of the Scottish mountain, Ben Nevis. He was so impressed by the effects of sunlight upon the clouds that he decided to try to reproduce them in his laboratory. His work was based on that done by John Aitken, the engineer who had created artificial clouds in a laboratory container. Aitken had found that if you put water vapor into a glass jar, a cloud would form if the air was unfiltered— that is, dusty. The water molecules in the air were treating the dust particles as tiny nucleation points onto which they could condense, forming a cloud. Air pressure inside the container could be reduced by more...

Electronic paper has many of the properties of paper; thin, flexible, and readable from a wide angle, but it also has the distinct advantage of being reusable. In the 1970s Xerox PARC had developed a personal computer, and Nicholas K. Sheridon had the task of developing a display that improved on the then very dimly lit cathode ray displays. In 1974 Sheridon developed the Gyricon, which—although it was never used as a monitor because the PC project was dropped—formed the foundations of e-paper. The Gyricon, Greek for rotating image, consists of a thin, flexible sheet of plastic peppered with oil-filled wells containing small beads. Each bead, colored white on one half and a contrasting color (usually black) on the other, is charged with positive and negative ends that corresponded to the two colors. When an electrical current is applied to the Gyricon, the beads rotate in a predicted manner displaying more...

If you can make the photons of a laser light that hits atoms have more energy than those that leave the atoms, then the atoms get colder. The trick is to tune the energy of a laser photon to a value that is slightly below that of the energy of an electronic transition in the atom. Due to the Doppler red-shift of the photons, those atoms moving toward the beam absorb more photons than those moving in the opposite direction. Emitted photons leave the atom in random directions, and the result is a general loss of momentum and kinetic energy. The atoms get colder because temperature is proportional to the kinetic energy. The atoms need to be at very low concentrations. The idea, was first suggested in 1975 by Theodore Hansch and Arthur Schawlow at Stanford University in California. Ten years later, Steven Chu of AT&T Bell Labs put it more...

"The first magnetic slurry coating on the first disk drive was poured... from a Dixie cup." Barry Rudolph, IBM vice president For most of the twentieth century, the primary medium for data entry, storage, and processing was the punched card. In the 1930s, IBM hired teacher and inventor Reynold B. Johnson (1906-1998) to develop the IBM 805 test-scoring machine to convert pencil marks on forms into punched cards. Twenty years later, Johnson led the team that developed the technology that made the vast majority of punched cards obsolete—the hard disk.      Unlike punched cards and magnetic tape, in which data must be accessed sequentially, hard disk drives provide access to all data almost simultaneously. Some computers in the late 1940s stored data on the outside of magnetic drums, but this left most of the internal space unused. Johnson and his team sought to store data on a stack of more...

“.. you don't have to think about it... you just wear it and it takes orders directly from your muscles.” Robert A. Heinlein, novelist The powered exoskeleton is a good case of life imitating art. Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 novel Starship Troopers described warriors in powered suits. The idea was used again in the Marvel Comic Iron Man, with a man inside a powerful homemade iron suit. The idea struck a chord, and General Electric took up the task of turning it into reality. By 1965 they had produced "Hardiman," the first powered exoskeleton. The idea behind the device was to produce a robot that reacted to the natural muscle movements of the wearer, It was designed to act like a "second skin," albeit one that weighed as much as a car. Hardiman was a 3/4-ton monster, designed to lift 1,500 pounds(680 kg). Unfortunately the team never managed to get more...

In 1923 Juan de la Cierva (1895-1936) pioneered the first autogyro. These machines appear superficially similar to helicopters, but with a single unpowered rotor. Early autogyros were less maneuverable than helicopters and were unable to take off or descend vertically. The invention of the autogyro predated the helicopter and so paved the way for vertical flight. Autogyro rotors are not powered, unlike those of a helicopter, and thus work in a similar way to spinning "helicopter" seed pods such as those of the box elder tree, Acer negundo. These seeds are aerodynamically shaped to spin as they fall, allowing the seed to disperse much further; autogyro rotors autorotate in the same way. The power or thrust of the autogyro comes from a powered propeller (or in later designs a jet engine) meaning that most do require some takeoff runway, but normally only tens of feet. As they can land in more...

"By being able to see... all the genes, all the genetic variation, we can readily pick out answers." Eric Lander, a human genome project leader There are about 30,000 different genes in human DNA. Different cells in the body, although having identical DNA, switch on and off different genes, depending on what is needed to build that particular cell. Studying which genes are active in a cell is a useful way to find out what makes it function, and helps identify what has gone wrong when it is not functioning properly. In 1989 U.S. scientist Stephen Fodor presented a technique that was to revolutionize DNA analysis. He created a DNA microarray—a glass slide with up to 500,000 different strands of DNA attached to it. When a gene is switched on in a cell, a complementary copy of that gene's information (called messenger ribonucleicacid, or mRNA) is produced by the cell. more...

"... if you had a multiplayer game that exceeded sixteen, you might as well call it massive." Raph Koster, Sony Online Entertainment Few people today remember the simpler multiplayer creations that started the craze for shared gaming. The likes of Everquest, World of Warcraft, and even Second Life owe their existence to those who saw how much fun it would be for gamers to be able to interact with many others in an alternate reality on the Internet. Two of the pioneers of Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) gaming were Kelton Flinn and John Taylor, who together founded the games company KESMAI. Although several text-based multi-user dungeon (MUD) games had existed since the late 1970s, they worked on a huge step forward—a graphic-based massively multiplayer game: Air Warrior. Released in 1987, Air Warrior was a World War II flight-combat simulator that many people, hundreds' at a time, could play together online- more...