50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since The Wheel

The 50 Greatest Breakthroughs Since The Wheel -- The Atlantic

Why did it take so long to invent the wheelbarrow? Have we hit peak innovation? What our list reveals about imagination, optimism, and the nature of progress.

Some questions you ask because you want the right answer. Others are valuable because no answer is right; the payoff comes from the range of attempts. Seven years ago, The Atlantic surveyed a group of eminent historians to create a ranked list of the 100 people who had done the most to shape the character of modern America. The panelists agreed easily on the top few names—Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, in that order—but then began diverging in intriguing ways that reflected not simply their own values but also the varied avenues toward influence in our country. Lewis and Clark, or Henry Ford? Thomas Edison, or Martin Luther King? The result was of course not scientific. But the exercise of asking, comparing, and choosing helped us understand more about what these historical figures had done and about the areas in which American society had proved most and least open to the changes wrought by talented, determined men and women.

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CSN Editor: The list starts here. My beef with this list is that alphabetization is on it .... but 'numbers' did not make it.

An App On The History Of Math

1,000 Years Of Maths... Via An App: IBM Creates A (Very Long) iPad Timeline History Of Geeks' Favourite Subject -- Daily Mail

To celebrate the history of maths and its impact on the world, IBM has released Minds of Modern Mathematics - an iPad app that re-imagines a classic 50-foot infographic on the history of maths.

It was created by husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames and displayed at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City.

The app is designed as an ‘interactive vintage-meets-digital experience for students, teachers, and tech fans that illustrates how mathematics has advanced art, science, music and architecture’.

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My Comment: The history of science has always a fascination for me .... having an app for it .... divine.

The Core Of Truth Behind Sir Isaac Newton's Apple

Sir Isaac Newton was said to have discovered gravity while
sitting in his mother's garden in Lincolnshire. PA.

From The Independent:

The manuscript that gave rise to one of science's best-known anecdotes is now online.

It is one of the most famous anecdotes in the history of science. The young Isaac Newton is sitting in his garden when an apple falls on his head and, in a stroke of brilliant insight, he suddenly comes up with his theory of gravity. The story is almost certainly embellished, both by Newton and the generations of storytellers who came after him. But from today anyone with access to the internet can see for themselves the first-hand account of how a falling apple inspired the understanding of gravitational force.

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The Royal Society Puts Historic Papers Online

From BBC News:

One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.

The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.

Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.

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The Origin Of Computing

Holly Lindem (photoillustration); Gene Burkhardt (styling)

From Scientific American:

The information age began with the realization that machines could emulate the power of minds

In the standard story, the computer’s evolution has been brisk and short. It starts with the giant machines warehoused in World War II–era laboratories. Microchips shrink them onto desktops, Moore’s Law predicts how powerful they will become, and Microsoft capitalizes on the software. Eventually small, inexpensive devices appear that can trade stocks and beam video around the world. That is one way to approach the history of computing—the history of solid-state electronics in the past 60 years.

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In Galileo’s Footsteps

Galileo

From Newsweek:

For the first time in hundreds of years, the most powerful telescopes may soon come from Europe.
Galileo has been getting a lot of press lately, and no wonder. Four centuries ago this year, the Italian genius pointed his small, primitive telescope at the night sky and saw wonders nobody had imagined. His discoveries transformed our view of the heavens, but also infected astronomers with a permanent desire to peer just a bit deeper in the universe and find a few more cosmic secrets. Which is why, less than 20 years after they put the finishing touches on a generation of telescopes so big they would have made the Renaissance stargazer swoon, the astronomers are at it again. Three teams are racing to build telescopes four times wider and with up to 16 times the light gathering power than what exists now, and to have them trained on the stars by 2018.

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Idea Of Infinity Stretched Back To Third Century B.C.

From Live Science:

CHICAGO - The first mathematical use of the concept of actual infinity has been pushed back some 2,000 years via a new analysis of a tattered page of parchment on which a medieval monk in Constantinople copied the third century B.C. work of the Greek mathematician Archimedes.

Infinity is one of the most fundamental questions in mathematics and still remains an unsolved riddle. For instance, if you add or subtract a number from infinity, the remaining value is still infinity, some Indian philosophers said. Mathematicians today refer to actual infinity as an uncountable set of numbers such as the number of points existing on a line at the same time, while a potential infinity is an endless sequence that unfolds consecutively over time.

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Researchers Unlock Secrets Of 1918 Flu Pandemic

Policemen in Seattle wearing masks made by the Red Cross, during the influenza epidemic in a National Archives photo dated December 1918. (National Archives/Handout/Reuters)

From Yahoo News/Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Researchers have found out what made the 1918 flu pandemic so deadly -- a group of three genes that lets the virus invade the lungs and cause pneumonia.

They mixed samples of the 1918 influenza strain with modern seasonal flu viruses to find the three genes and said their study might help in the development of new flu drugs.

The discovery, published in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could also point to mutations that might turn ordinary flu into a dangerous pandemic strain.

Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin and colleagues at the Universities of Kobe and Tokyo in Japan used ferrets, which develop flu in ways very similar to humans.

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Darwin's Beagle To Sail Again

Vessel of knowledge: The original HMS Beagle on which Charles Darwin sailed. A replica is being built to research the effects of plankton on the world's oceans

From The Daily Mail:

It was the ship that carried Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands nearly 180 years ago, enabling him to make his breakthrough on the theory of evolution.

Now another HMS Beagle will depart on a new voyage of scientific discovery - this time with the help of sat-nav, engines and guidance from space.

The Beagle Trust plans to build a £5 million replica of the 19th-century vessel and use it to research the effects of plankton on the world's oceans.

It will be guided to algae blooms across the globe with the help of Nasa astronauts aboard the International Space Station.

The charity has finalised its plans and is currently raising funds for its project, scheduled to begin construction within months.

'We are making a lot of progress, and I'm confident we will begin building next year, then set sail in 2010,' said project director Peter McGrath.

The original HMS Beagle took scientist and naturalist Darwin around the world between 1831 and 1836.

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Researchers Play Tune Recorded Before Edison

The audio historian David Giovannoni with a recently discovered phonautogram that is among the earliest sound recordings. (Image from The New York Times)

From The New York Times:

For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words “Mary had a little lamb” on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades.

The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

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Space Expectations

THE MIND OF WERNHER VON BRAUN: In the October 18, 1952, issue of Collier's, von Braun sketched out the 190-foot- (58-meter-) tall "orbit-to-orbit space ship," which he designed to transport people from a space station to lunar orbit.

From Scientific American:

German rocket physicist and astronautics engineer Wernher von Braun played a crucial role in developing the rocket technology, including the Saturn 5 , that put U.S. astronauts on the surface of the moon in 1969. Just 17 years earlier, when spaceflight was little more than a dream, von Braun worked for the U.S. Army building ballistic missiles. It was during this time that the future and first director of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., would share his vision of manned space exploration. A series of articles published in Collier's magazine in the early 1950s revealed many ideas that later became reality (including space stations, lunar missions and satellites) and some that never got off the ground (a rocket operated by three rhesus monkeys).

Von Braun's sketches for the magazine's illustrations are up for bid by U.K. auctioneers Bonhams Wednesday. The auction house, which expected the lot of 35 drawings and letters to fetch up to $25,000, was pleasantly surprised with the winning bid came in at $132,000.

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Earliest Known Human TB Found In 9,000 Year-old Skeletons

The Skeletons submerged at the Alit-Yam site.
(Credit: Image courtesy of University College London)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Oct. 15, 2008) — The discovery of the earliest known cases of human tuberculosis (TB) in bones found submerged off the coast of Israel shows that the disease is 3000 years older than previously thought. Direct examination of this ancient DNA confirms the latest theory that bovine TB evolved later than human TB.

The new research, led by scientists from UCL (University College London) and Tel-Aviv University and published today in PLoS One, sheds light on how the TB bacterium has evolved over the millennia and increases our understanding of how it may change in the future.

The bones, thought to be of a mother and baby, were excavated from Alit-Yam, a 9000 year-old Pre-Pottery Neolithic village, which has been submerged off the coast of Haifa, Israel for thousands of years. Professor Israel Hershkovitz, from Tel-Aviv University's Department of Anatomy, noticed the characteristic bone lesions that are signs of TB in skeletons from the settlement, one of the earliest with evidence of domesticated cattle.

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Tesla's Impact On Everyday Life

Host Bre Pettis and his Tesla coil on the set of his show "History Hacker."

History Reveals: Tesla Totally Awesome! -- MSNBC

Circuit-bending YouTube star Bre Pettis doesn’t want you to know that before making his History Channel pilot, he hadn’t seen “The Prestige.”

It’s not that he purposely failed to catch Chris Nolan’s 2006 adaptation of the steam punk novel about rival magicians starring Batman (Christian Bale) and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman).

It seems Pettis never got around to it. And by the time he started putting together “History Hacker,” premiering tonight at 8 p.m. and midnight, it was too late.

Not too late to ever see “ The Prestige,” mind you. But “History Hacker’s” premise is to focus each episode on the life and innovations of one inventor, and the pilot is about Nikola Tesla.

Pettis didn’t want to infect his flow by watching David Bowie’s critically-acclaimed portrayal of “The Father of Physics,” a pivotal — albeit fictionalized — character in the film.

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Skeleton May Be Early TB Victim By LiveScience Staff

A close-up of a skeleton dating to A.D. 302 that archaeologists say bears evidence of TB. Credit: Sarah Mitchell/University of York

From Live Science:

The skeleton of a man discovered in a shallow grave on what is now a college campus in England could belong to one of Britain’s earliest victims of tuberculosis.

Radiocarbon dating suggests the man died in the fourth century, around A.D. 302, when Romans ruled the region. He was interred in a shallow scoop in a flexed position, on his right side.

The man, aged 26 to 35 years old, suffered from iron deficiency anemia during childhood and at 5-foot, 4-inches, was shorter than average for Roman males.

The first known case of TB in Britain is from the Iron Age (300 B.C.), but cases in the Roman period are fairly rare, and largely confined to the southern half of England. TB is most frequent from the 12th century A.D. in England when people were living in urban environments. So the skeleton may provide crucial evidence for the origin and development of the disease in this country.

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The Microchip's 50th Birthday Party

The first integrated circuit invented by Jack Kilby. Kilby won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2000 for his work.

Happy 50th Birthday: Microchip Celebrates Five
Decade Milestone -- Daily Mail

When Jack Kilby demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in Texas in 1958, he could have had no idea how his invention would change the world.

Now 50 years later, microchips are integral to modern-day life in devices as wide-ranging as computers to credit cards, cameras to cookers.

Kilby's design used a strip of germanium, rather than silicon, with one transister and other components glued on to a glass slide.

In July, the electrical engineer had not been allowed to go on holiday because he had only recently joined the company Texas Instruments. Kilby used the time to create his ground-breaking design, which tackled the problem of connecting large numbers of electronic components in circuits in a cost-effective way.

Jim Tully, vice president at the technology analyst Gartner said the microchip slashed the cost in producing electronics, which allowed the technology to spread rapidly through all areas of society.

'Integrated circuits are so woven into our lives that it would be hard to imagine a world without them,' Tully said.

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