Tag: history of science
-
How Pregnancy Tests Led to the Decimation of Frog Populations
With readily available pregnancy tests stocked across drugstore shelves, it is hard to imagine a time when determining pregnancy was not so simple a task. Instead of the easy-to-use plastic cartridge we commonly imagine, the earliest reliable pregnancy tests utilised Xenopus laevis, also known as the African clawed frog (Nuwer, 2013). This method for identifying…
-
Chemical Warfare: Naming Elements 101-109
All elements with an atomic number above 100 are called the “transfermium elements.” These synthetic elements are fairly new discoveries, and therefore were named most recently. While there had been 100 prior elements to set naming precedents, this didn’t ensure a smooth process for the nomenclature of the nine following elements (Elding, 1994). The International…
-
The One-Man Environmental Disaster
The story of Thomas Midgley Jr. is a cautionary tale of the power of scientific research, and its consequent potential dangers. As an engineer with over 100 patents by the end of his career, Midgley (Figure 1) could always be expected to be working on the next big breakthrough (National Inventors Hall of Fame, 2003).…
-
Champagne Problems: The Challenge of Effervescence
Whether it is the sweet taste of ripe grapes or the dry flavour of crisp apples, often the first thought that comes to mind when considering champagne are the bubbles, that sparkling signature of facetiousness. What you might not think about is where champagne comes from and its production. What is really in a bottle…
-
Combating the Crippler
In the early 20th century, the world was plunged into a state of frenzy. Poliomyelitis, or polio for short, was a formerly sporadic disease caused by poliovirus that had grown to become a global pandemic. At its height, 22000 people in the US alone were left paralysed each year, their motor neurons destroyed (Trevelyan, Smallman-Raynor and…
-
How One Fossil Changed Who We Think We Are
In 1844, Charles Darwin wrote a letter to his close friend Joseph Hooker in which he confessed that he was becoming more and more doubtful of the predominating immutability of species idea (Burkhardt, 1996). He was not alone. Since the start of the 19th century, intellectuals had been questioning the idea that species were fixed…