Current Affairs Science Projects And Inventions

"No invention of such far-reaching importance ...so quickly exerted influences [on] the national culture." U.S. government commission, 1931 It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a world without the motorcar. When German engineer Karl Benz (1844-1929) drove a motorcar tricycle in 1885 and fellow Germans Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900) and Wilhelm Maybach (1846-1929) converted a horse-drawn carriage into a four-wheeled motorcar in August 1886, none of them could have foreseen the effects of their new invention. Benz recognized the great potential of petrol as a fuel. His three-wheeled car had a top speed of just ten miles (16 km) per hour with its four-stroke, one- cylinder engine. After receiving his patent in January 1886, he began selling the Benz Velo, but the public doubted its reliability. Benz's wife Bertha had a brilliant idea to advertise the new car. In 1888 she took it on a 60-mile (100 km) trip from Mannheim to near Stuttgart. Despite having to push the car up hills, the success of the journey proved to a skeptical public that this was a reliable mode of transport. Daimler and Maybach did not produce commercially feasible cars until 1889. Initially the German inventions did not meet with much demand, and it was French companies like Panhard et Levassor that redesigned and popularized the automobile. In 1926 Benz's company merged to form the Daimler-Benz company. Benz had left his company in 1906 and, remarkably, he and Daimler never met. Due to higher incomes and cheaper, mass-produced cars, the United States led in terms of motorization for much of the twentieth century. This kind of movement has, however, come at a cost. Some 25 million people are estimated to have died in car accidents worldwide during the twentieth century. Climate-changing exhaust gases and suburban sprawl are but two more of the consequences of a heavy reliance on the automobile. 

The development of the firearm magazine was one of many improvements to weapons in the nineteenth century, and its creator's name is still recognized today by gun enthusiasts all over the world. Benjamin Hotchkiss (1826-1885) worked as a gunmaker in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1850s and 1860s. After the American Civil War the U.S. government had little interest in firearms, and like other famous firearm designers such as John Browning and Hiram Maxim, Hotchkiss moved to Europe to market his designs. He ended up in France in 1867 and set up a factory in St. Denis in 1875—the same year that he designed the bolt-action magazine rifle. The story goes that Hotchkiss was on a train from Vienna to Bucharest when he became engaged in a conversation with a Romanian army officer who suggested the idea that bolt-action rifles needed to be developed further for military use. Hotchkiss took this idea and designed a novel loading system for the bolt-action rifle, building upon earlier magazine concepts from inventors such as Valentine Fogarty and Christopher Spencer. The new magazine consisted of a spring-loaded sleeve inside a cylinder that was attached to the buttstock of the gun. Hotchkiss designed the gun so that when the trigger was pulled, the firing pin was released and the new cartridge could move into the receiver. Hotchkiss received a patent for his new model in 1876. Shortly afterward he sold these patent rights to the Winchester gun company, which began manufacturing the bolt-action magazine rifle in 1879. This gun, and further modifications of it, has been used extensively in the military and is also popular among hunters. 

The Haber process (sometimes called the Haber- Bosch process)—invented by the German chemist Fritz Haber (1868-1934) in 1908—may be the most important technological advance of the twentieth century. At that time, the main way of obtaining large quantities of ammonia was from naturally occurring saltpeter. Ammonia was an incredibly useful substance, with uses ranging from cleaning to fertilizer and explosives. But saltpeter could be difficult to harvest, with deposits occurring on the walls of caves, and making it required the large-scale decomposition of piles of animal dung. In the first decade of the twentieth century, increasing global agriculture was putting a large strain on the supplies of ammonia, and there were fears that the supply would not be able to keep up with the demand. What Haber created was a means of making ammonia that would make it a plentiful resource. He extracted hydrogen gas from methane and made it chemically react with nitrogen from the atmosphere. To do this he needed a catalyst—a substance that promotes certain chemical reactions. During his experiments he found that iron was the perfect catalyst and, by mixing the nitrogen and hydrogen under high pressure, in the presence of iron, he could make NHs (ammonia) in large quantities. Just two years after Haber's breakthrough, German chemist Carl Bosch (1874-1940) was able to commercialize the process in 1910, while working for the chemical company BASF—and suddenly German industry had plentiful supplies of ammonia. Fritz Haber won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918 for his work. These days more than 500 million tons of artificial fertilizer are produced worldwide using the Haber process. 

Transformers convert alternating current (AC) from one voltage to another without changing the frequency. When American William Stanley, Jr. (1858-1916) invented this master of conversion (based on an idea of Lucien Gaulard and John Dixon Gibbs) in 1885, he paved the way for televisions, computers, battery chargers, and lamps. As a result, Stanley was invited to go and work for the entrepreneur George Westinghouse. Transformers take advantage of Michael Faraday's principle of mutual inductance, which enables one coil to induce a current in another coil. The ratio between the input and output currents is determined by the number of loops in the two respective coils. Thus a current can be raised from low voltage to high voltage with relative ease, the significance of which is driven by the fact that a low voltage transmitted over a large distance will dissipate much of its energy, whereas high voltages retain most of their energy. As wonderful as it would be to have hundreds or even thousands of volts of current streaming through our walls, it would be very dangerous, and for this reason it was recommended that Stanley's invention be used to return the current to appropriate voltages. Had the current been transmitted at these lower voltages, it would have been leaking energy like a hosepipe made out of teabags. Stanley's transformers were first put to use in March 1886 when they powered businesses along the main street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. They were a huge success, and the basic design is still in use well over a hundred years since they first appeared, even though the appliances they power have themselves been transformed again and again. 

“[It will] make it easier and quicker for these Europeans to cut each others' throats." Anonymous acquaintance of Hiram Maxim American inventor Hiram Maxim (1840-1916) would have been much more famous had he won the battle with Thomas Edison over the credit for the invention of the electric light. But his other inventions proved to be just as important, at least in the development of firearms in the late nineteenth century. . Maxim first introduced the principle of his portable, automatic machine gun in an 1883 patent. Several features of Maxim's gun made it innovative. The action was completely automatic and the user needed only to keep his finger pressed on the trigger to fire the gun. The recoil energy of the shot was used to extract the old shell, reload a new one, and automatically fire. The gun had a single barrel that was surrounded by a jacket filled with water to cool the barrel after it was heated by firing. The gun was lighter and more portable than previous weapons. The U.S. government wasn't interested in buying Maxim's invention, so he took it to Europe where he was able to market it to both the English and the Germans. Maxim became a British citizen in 1901 and was knighted by Queen Victoria. His company, Vickers, Son, & Maxim, was very successful at marketing the deadly device throughout Europe, especially Germany The guns were licenced and manufactured by companies in Britain and Germany and the first of the so-called Maxims was delivered to the German navy in 1894. Both sides used Maxim machine guns during World War I. The Maxim guns evolved over the years to become even more effective, and served as the prototypes for today's modern machine guns. 

"What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan." Oliver Herford, writer, artist, and illustrator Being too hot must have been a major problem for people before the late 1800s. As soon as electrical power was introduced, inventors started to work on ideas for the electric fan. Dr. Schuyler Skaats Wheeler (1860-1923) was the American engineer responsible for creating the personal two-blade desk fan—an invention beloved of anyone who has ever held down an indoor job in the summer months. Invented by Wheeler at the tender age of twenty-two, the fan was made of brass, with no protective caging surrounding the rotating blades, resulting in a product that was both stylish and dangerous in equal measure. However, like most inventions of that time that used electricity, when they were first introduced these fans were the reserve of the rich and the powerful, It was not until the 1920s, when industrial advances meant that fan blades could be mass-produced from steel, that prices started to drop and the ordinary homeowner could afford one. Aside from his fan, Wheeler also became known for employing a large workforce of sightless people. He noticed that his sighted employees who were skilled at winding coil did so without ever looking at their hands. He blindfolded himself to see if he could wind coil without looking and found that, with a little practice, he could. The number of blind individuals in the population had increased as a result of World War I. Wheeler set up a department at his factory that employed only sightless men and women, putting them on a par with their sighted contemporaries. 

It sounds rather like an exercise bicycle from the 1950s but the cyclotron is actually the grandfather of today's most powerful particle accelerators. Having originally studied chemistry, Ernest Lawrence (1901-1958) switched to physics and received his PhD from Yale University in 1925. At this time, scientific insights into the nature of matter were starting to yield interesting results. In Cambridge, England, Ernest Rutherford had been using atomic particles as projectiles with which to bombard atoms. By 1919 he had succeeded in bombarding the nucleus of a nitrogen atom and getting it to absorb a helium nucleus, creating oxygen. This kind of work, however, was reaching a technical limit. The atomic particles from naturally radioactive materials were too few and did not have the energy required to pursue the experiments that Rutherford wanted to perform. In 1927 he issued a plea to physicists to find methods to produce a "copious supply" of high-energy particles. Lawrence answered the call and, just two years later, in 1929, came up with the idea that would quickly become the cyclotron. He was inspired to experiment with a magnetic field that would force charged particles to travel in a circular trajectory. This would make the particles pass through the same accelerating magnetism over and over again. In 1931 his first model was ready for production. His first cyclotron was a relatively simple device, measuring just a few inches across,that could accelerate hydrogen ions to much higher energies than were achievable before by any method. The new field of high-energy physics had finally arrived. 

"... embryonic stem cells were a researcher's dream. Now they're a political hot potato." Frederic Golden, commentator Stem cells are cells that have the ability to differentiate into a diverse range of cell types, creating the potential for the cells to be used to grow replacement tissues. American developmental biologist James Thomson (b. 1958), from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine, won the race to isolate and culture human embryonic stem cells. On November 6, 1998, the journal Science published the results of Thomson's research, describing how he used embryos from fertility clinics (donated by couples who no-longer needed them), and developed ways to extract stem cells and keep them reproducing indefinitely.  With the ability to develop into any one of the 220 cell types in the body, stem cells hold great promise for treating a host of debilitating illnesses, including diabetes, leukemia, Parkinson's disease, heart disease, and spinal cord injury. They also provide scientists with models of human disease and new ways of testing drugs more effectively in living organisms. But for all the hopes invested, progress has been slow. It has not helped that stem cell research has been steeped in controversy, with different groups questioning the ethics of harvesting stem cells from human embryos. In 2007 Thomson and Shinya Yamanaka, from Kyoto University, Japan, both independently found a way to turn ordinary human skin cells into stem cells. Both groups used just four genes to reprogram human skin cells. Their work is being heralded as an opportunity to overcome problems including the shortage of human embryonic stem cells and restrictions on U.S. federal funding for research. 

"In 1941 virtually no metallurgist in the U.S. had seen a piece of ductile titanium..." First International Titanium Conference, 1968 Reverend William Gregor discovered titanium as a metal oxide in 1791. Isolating pure titanium proved a herculean task, first done 100 years after its oxide was found. Matthew Hunter of Rensselaer Polytechnic University in the United States accomplished the task, netting miniscule quantities of the metal. Titanium was recognized as strong, light, and resistant to corrosion. The applications for such a metal were nearly infinite, but there was no way to extract large amounts of it. Then, in the early 1930s, metallurgist William Kroll (1889-1973), while working for the German company Siemens & Halske in his native Luxemburg, developed a multi-step process capable to producing the metal in large quantities. The rise of the Nazi party drove Kroll from Luxemburg to the United States, working for the U.S. Bureau of Mines, and the United States seized control of Siemens & Halske's 1938 German patent rights to the so called "Kroll process" under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Kroll retained his rights, secured a U.S. patent in 1940, and continued his work on titanium. It was soon widely used in military and space programs. Using a modified Kroll process, DuPont made bulk quantities of titanium available in 1948 and soon titanium became popular with the aerospace, motor, and marine industries. Being one of the toughest metals, titanium was easy to find uses for. 

A blink comparator enables astronomers to look at two different photographic plates taken of the same region of the sky on different nights, using the same telescope and plate exposure. If something "blinks" as the view rapidly switches from one illuminated plate to the other, the object has either changed brightness or moved. This apparatus and technique has been used to detect asteroids, comets, and variable stars. Plates taken a few years apart have been used to detect nearby fast-moving stars or to distinguish between binary stars that orbit a common center of mass, and two stars that happen to be close to the same line of sight, or an optical double. The German physicist Carl Pulfrich (1858-1927) developed the device while working for the Carl Zeiss Optical Workshop. Blink comparators were soon being used by observatories around the world and led to the discovery of hundreds of variable stars. The most important discovery made with a blink comparator was the existence of Pluto, by Clyde W. Tombaugh in March 1930. At the time, "planet X" was believed to be the gravitational perturber of Uranus and Neptune, orbiting near the outer edge of the solar system. More recently, Pluto has been found to be a low-mass object and has been demoted from planetary status. Blink comparators are still used today, although the photographic plates have been replaced by digital images that can be stored on a computer. A new application has been proposed to allow radiologists to more accurately compare new and old X-rays, and CAT and MRI scans.