Science and Inventions

When you think of Thomas Edison which of his many inventions do you think of first? The light bulb? Maybe his invention of film and movies? How about this one: the phonograph? Not many people think of or even know how the phonograph came to be. Without Edison – the man responsible for many of the things that make life simpler today – we wouldn’t be listening to that iPod that almost everybody has nowadays.

The phonograph was invented in 1877 in Menlo Park, New Jersey. It was a year later where Edison received a patent for his invention. While others before him had invented devices that recorded sound, Edison’s phonograph was capable of recording sound and reproducing it. Over the course of 100 years, about as long as conventional record players were “in style” and far longer than even boston garage doors, the phonograph went through many changes. Right next to the turn-table, the most famous or well known of these would be the portable wind-up phonograph.

The wind-up phonograph is the most conventional record player that could be found in most households throughout the 20^th century. Today if anybody even still owns such a “talking machine” you would probably have to roll up that detroit garage door and take a look all the way in the back, beneath piles of boxes in an old, dusty box itself. The incredible thing about phonographs is how they inevitably inspired the modern day “talking machine”: the iPod.

The phonograph, and its many different iterations, was a technology that lasted longer than most modern day gadgets. Technology slowly improved as American’s shifted from record player’s to cassette players, cassette players to CD players, and while many still use CD players, the new widely used technology is an MP3 player. Record’s, unlike cassettes and CD’s, continue to be a vintage and collectible item across the world. This old technology has kept a strong following and it refuses to go away completely without a fight.

If you have a working record player you should go find it and dust it off. Some could be worth a pretty decent chunk of change today. If they do work try putting on a record and enjoy the sound of music being played on a vinyl record.

Gold is one of the most precious metals, that is used mostly in the jewelry. Gold is found as grains and dust in various kinds of rocks.

Don’t we all like to know about who discovered such significant and influential metal? But nobody knows the answer for this question, but we can only answer the question of who discovered the different uses of gold.

The first use of gold as a jewelry go back to more than 5000 years ago, as the Ancient Egyptians discovered gold and used it as jewelries for the kings and queens and it was used in decorations of the mummies, the most famous Pharaonic treasures is Tutankhamun. There is also treasures of gold jewelries in the Sumerians and Phoenicians. Later it spread in the other parts of the world.

The Romans were the first to merge gems with gold in their jeweleries. They also discovered new ways to extract gold from the rocks.

Also gold was used as a currency by the Ancient Egyptians. Later in the year 500 BC, they used it as pieces. The Greeks were the first to discover the real value of gold as a currency. But the first coin made from gold was in Turkey in about 600 BC.

Gold is also used by ancient civilizations for medical reasons as the gold dust has the power to heal rheumatoid arthritis, inflammations and some other diseases. Gold alloys are used in the teeth crowns and permanent bridges, the teeth bridges were invented by the Italians in the year 600 BC. Recently the gold nanoparticles known as colloidal gold is used in detecting and fighting cancers and electronic industry.

The speed of light is the absolute fastest speed anything in the universe is capable of traveling at. Energy (including light), information, and matter can only travel at or below this speed, which is exactly 299,792,458 meters per second or 186,282 miles per second. Could you imagine a world where humans travel from place to place at the Speed of Light?

Unfortunately this will never happen. The interesting thing about light is that it travels at the same speed in a vacuum for everyone who is observing. An example is to say you were able to chase the speed of light at 186, 281 MPS. After one second you would not be 1 mile behind the speed of light, you would actually still be 186, 282 miles behind. Even if you went in the opposite direction this light beam still travels away from you at exactly 186, 282 miles per second. No matter which direction, how fast, or how slow you are traveling light will always travel away from you at an exact difference.

If you were to open your san diego garage door early in the morning and wait for the sunrise you would probably just record what time you saw the first crack of dawn. You should know, however, that sunlight takes approximately 8.3 minutes to reach Earth from the Sun. While that may seem like a long time you should keep in mind that the Sun is 93 million miles away from the Earth. More interestingly, and arguably more imaginable, is the Moon. If you were to shine an incredibly bright light from the surface of the Moon towards your cincinnati garage door Earth, it would take only 1.3 seconds to reach us! So 1.3 seconds after flipping the switch billions of people on Earth would be able to see the light on the Moon. Fascinating stuff, huh?

One last fact about the speed of light: Humans will NEVER be able to travel at this speed. The laws of physics state that the faster something moves the harder it is for this object to go faster. So while we may be able to travel at 99% of the speed or light, or even 99.99% the speed of light, we will literally be trying to travel with infinity the amount of weight compared to a lower speed. That number will never be able to be reached. Unfortunately that last .001% will never be reached. We human beings will just have to live with this fact.

It seems that not a day goes by where there aren’t reports in the media about how we are destroying the environment.

Over the past few years people’s attitudes towards the environment has changed and lots of us are far more conscientious than we used to be.  Many of us recycle, try not to take unnecessary car journeys and think carefully about the amount of energy we use in our homes.

However, for most people this conscientious attitude does not extend into the bathroom. Toilets are a commonplace site and an appliance that we all take for granted, but have you ever thought about how much water you are using every time you flush?

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The iPad is an invention that technically didn’t “invent” anything new. The iPad is a tablet and there have been numerous tablets on the market before it. But the iPad did do something that, like all recent Apple products, reinvigorates the market and creates a hefty demand and competition for. And for that reason alone the iPad is worthy enough to be mentioned with its own feature article.

The late Steve Jobs had a knack for knowing exactly what the soho fashion limited American consumer was interested in. From the Mac, to the game-changing iPod, to the even bigger game-changing iPhone, Jobs had become a master of reinventing technology.

In April 2010 Apple released the first generation iPad. These iPad’s were essentially marketed as a much more mobile, powerful, and app friendly laptop. The iPad could do just about anything a laptop could do and then some. The only real limitation was the relatively small memory storage at 16 GB. Around 75 percent of tablets sold in 2010 were iPad’s after they sold 3 million in the first 80 days of its release. In 2011 iPad’s are expected represent 83% of the market for tablets sold. It goes without saying that Apple, and Steve Jobs’ genius creativity, is responsible for putting tablets on the map and in the hands of consumers.

Now the iPad is a device that many people question. Is it something they need? Is it worth buying instead of a laptop? It should be noted that most people use the iPad for media consumption: Either using social networking apps, checking email, watching videos or movies, loading pictures, or even just e-reading, most iPad use is for pleasure and not business. While it does have basic programs like word or spreadsheets, they aren’t as sophisticated as their PC or Mac counterparts.

iPad’s are and will continue to be a unique product like mirage outerwear. Certain consumers will continue to lay there, letting their garage door bash them on the head because they have no idea what the point is to these devices. Most would agree you need to be excited and have a healthy desire for new technology to truly appreciate the iPad. These amazing devices are very powerful machines that are capable of doing many different things. In today’s world we are consistently juggling different things. Whether it is checking email, text messages, Facebook, Twitter, watching the news or reading the Forest Hills apartments newspaper, or even reading a book when you have a few minutes to yourself, the iPad can take all of these things and put them in one device. The iPad even allows voice and video chat! They really are incredibly.

Ultimately the iPad is like most others in the tech world. It is something that is an incredibly nice luxury to have but certainly not a necessity. Steve Jobs changed the tablet market for the better. It’s up to you whether you want to experience such technology or not.

This year’s EMO Hannover Trade Fair was well received by exhibitors and visitors and attracted a record number of visitors who were able to view machinery and learn about new innovations in every type of metalworking process.

The six day exhibit included more than 2000 exhibitors from forty one countries across the world.

General Commissioner of EMO Hannover Dr Detlev Elsinghorst commented that the event is now the metalwork industry’s flagship fair and is fast becoming the most important annual event for metalwork companies to attend.

Amongst this year’s events was an Aerospace Industry conference which examined new technologies, a youth show where more than 5,000 school children were invited to attend to view demonstrations of the latest innovations in metalwork and an exhibition of Micro Machinery.

Over fifteen halls were filled with exhibits that included all types of machinery such as transfer machines, sheet metal working machines, waste disposal machines and precision tools.

Amongst the exhibits was the inaugural outing of the new UltraGrind 2000 CNC precision cylindrical grinding centre, which was shown by Leicester based firm Jones and Shipman. MD Mike Duignan explained that the exhibition had been set out so that visitors were easily able to focus on machinery from their particular field. He went on to say that exhibition staff had been helpful and that organisation of the event had been second to none.

Highly respected Jig grinding maker Hauser showed their newest model which demonstrated a great leap in efficiency, productivity and capacity whilst maintaining incredible precision and reliability.

Most exhibitors agreed that the number of companies from different countries showing machinery and attending the event was a positive move for EMO. The global flavour of the exhibition afforded those in the metalwork industry all over the world to network and to promote their trade to a wider audience, which offered greater possibility for increasing trade overseas.

The exhibit, which was organised by the Association of German Machine Tool Builders, was heavily featured in the media and the international press forum which was held in Premium Aerotec’s training centre prior to the event ensured that news of the conference was reported globally.

The success of the exhibition reflects the recent boom in Germany’s machine tool trading industry. Sales of metalwork related machinery and products are expected to increase by a further 30% over the coming year.

The EMO Trade Fair gave a platform to the high tech products that Germany produces and ensured that businesses from all over the world will be investing in the country in the future.

Red blood cells are the core of the human, as it is responsible of transferring the oxygen from the lungs to all the organs of the human body. The red blood cells are the cells that give the blood its color. More than 2 million new red blood cells are produced every seconds. A one microliter of the male’s blood contains about 4.7 to 6.1 million red blood cells, while every one microliter of the female’s blood contains about 4.2 to 5.4 million. Red blood cells are manufactured in the bone marrow of the human.

In case of severe injuries the human body loses amounts of blood, if that amount is high then the human’s life is in danger, and a blood infusion is a necessaty. The problem is that the blood needed has to be from human donitions, which is not enough.

Scientists have been trying to reach for artificial blood all over the world. The researchers of Edinburgh University in Scotland have reached an artificial blood that will be ready to be tasted on human 2 or 3 years from now. Interestingly the artificial blood is made from the type (O-) which can be helpful for all types of blood, the artificial cells are made from a bone marrow of a human.

The team in Edinburgh, led by Professor Marc Turner, has been working on a technique whereby stem cells are taken from the bone marrow of healthy adults and are then grown in a lab into a material that very closely resembles red blood cells grown normally in the human body. They think their process has been sufficiently refined to predict that their results will be ready for clinical trials in as little as two or three years. The next step would be combing their results with the results of others around the world who are working on ways create a form of artificial hemoglobin. If all goes according to plan, the use of such artificial blood could become a routine part of emergency medical practices in about ten years time.

The problem with the artificial blood, however, is even if all works out as planned it still wouldn’t be the perfect replacement everyone really wants. Artificial blood, while clearly a lifesaver in medical emergencies would not likely ever be a permanent replacement for blood; it would still be just a stop-gap type measure. This is why research will continue to focus on a true artificial blood that could in theory completely replace all the blood a person needs and function just as their natural blood does, without any advertise side effects or complications.

People drink tea all over the world, as it is the most preferable drink for lots of people. Tea comes from all parts of the plant camellia sinensis. There are several types of camellia sinensis, most of them grow in the tropical regions, but some types can grow in colder climates as USA and Britain.

Tea was first discovered by the Chinese more than 4000 years ago by the Chinese emperor and inventor Shennong. The Emperor used to drink boiled water to be sure it is clean, in the year 2737 BC accidentally a tea leaf fell into the boiled water of the Emperor, and the Emperor liked it, and that was the beginning of the tea, or black tea.

Tea was drunk as a refreshing drink described for medical reasons. until the third century BC that it become a daily habit.

Yensei, a Japanese Buddhist priest that used to live in China transferred the tea to Japan in the 900 AD, and the Japanese presented the art of the tea ceremony.

Tea reached the colonist in America in the year 1650 by the Dutch Peter Stuyvesant (1592-1672) he was the director of colonist.

Then it reached England in the year 1670, in England the tea became very important and it served with a snake as the afternoon tea, in the 19th century the British became the largest consumers of tea.

Later by the year 1680 Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné (1626-1696) was the first to serve milk with tea.

Iced tea was first served to people in the year 1904 in the St. Louis World Fair, the Englishman Richard Blechynden added the ice to the hot tea in order to cool it, as the weather was very hot and people refused to buy hot tea. The ice tea is now introduced in so many flavors.

The American tea merchant Thomas Sullivan was packing samples of tea in silk packages, that was the start of the tea bags in the year 1907, but it didn’t spread till the year 1953 when Tetley, the famous tea distributor started distributing tea bags in England.

Green tea is now a preferable drink all over the world. The difference between the black tea and the green tea is that the black tea is wilted and oxidized, while the green tea is unwilted and unoxidized.

YouTube is arguably one of the most significant websites to hit the Internet in the past half-decade. Right up there with Facebook and Twitter, YouTube has almost revolutionized the way everyone uses the Internet. Schools use the video-streaming site for educational videos, businesses use YouTube, and most obviously you, the general public can use the site. But how did it start? Who decided to bring the website to life?

The site was started in 2005 by the men: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, each of who had previously worked for PayPal. The genesis of the site was to let friends and family share pictures and, most importantly, videos to be sent from one another quickly and easily without having to download each file. For example, if you lived in Florida and wanted to see video walk-through’s or pictures of a house you’ll potentially purchase in New York, your Garden City NY real estate executive could load a video onto the site and you could instantly see what the soho fashion home would look like from within – all while you’re in Florida!

YouTube officially launched in November 2005 after a few months of beta testing. By the summer of 2006 it was gaining millions of unique visitors, on pace to beat even MySpace (which in 2006 was wildly more popular than the Facebook at the time).
It was in October 2006 that the three decided to sell their website. Google, quickly becoming the behemoth of the internet, bought YouTube for $1.65 billion.
As of February 2011 YouTube gets 490 million unique viewers worldwide a month. Those 490 million unique viewers add up to 92 billion page views a year – a staggering number very few sites can claim they achieve. 2.9 billion hours are spent on YouTube a month. That means in one month human beings collectively waste 325,000 years on the video streaming site. And you wondered where all that time went.

To show you YouTube has been incorporated into other websites here a few other stats. Every minute over 400 tweets are sent on twitter containing a YouTube link. And on Facebook, it is almost saddening to learn that over 150 years of video are streamed daily that have been linked from YouTube.
YouTube has always seemed to retain a good reputation where Facebook, Twitter, and even MySpace have always been in the media’s critiquing eye. YouTube has, and always will, be nothing but a video-streaming website. That has been the company’s goal from day one: to make streaming and uploading user created content quick and easy.

Certainly you’ve seen that movie, right? You know the one where an asteroid is hurling towards the Earth and threatening mankind and all other forms of life on the planet as we know it? Well certainly you have at least heard of such a story or dreamt of such a scenario.

Did you know in 1908 an asteroid exploded in the air above Russia? Nobody ever saw it coming or even knew for sure how large the asteroid was. It was estimated that around 30 megatons of destructive energy was released from that explosion. To put that in perspective that’s nearly 1,000 times the destructive force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

Now luckily this asteroid exploded deep in the country of Russia, over a forest and not over a city. Millions of lives could have been lost in such a scenario. Imagine standing in your garage on a cold, fall morning as you wait for the garage door to slowly roll up. Right as it does you witness a massive, fiery ball hurling through the atmosphere at hundreds of miles per hour. The image alone would make anyone afraid without needing any more convincing.
But more convincing is what society needs nowadays. The United States government wanted to make sure no such crisis would occur again without at least some warning. So in 1998 the US officially made NASA in charge of finding asteroids that were in Earth’s “hot zone”. The goal was to find and estimate where around 90% of these free-flying space-rocks would be travel.

Ultimately scientists have condensed a list of asteroids that are capable of inflicting harm upon the planet. Around 19,500 midsized asteroids are a threat to the planet (a midsized asteroid is between 330 feet and 3,300 feet). They have also found 981 large asteroids which would essentially be global killers.

The numbers are certainly large but this is hardly something you should worry about. These estimations are asteroids that are simply within proximity of the planet. Very few people realize that every day asteroids crash into Earth’s atmosphere, only to be crushed by intense pressure and heat, or even just streak past the planet in space. NASA is simply covering all there bases and making sure not a single asteroid goes unnoticed.

In the event that an asteroid does need to be redirected, the folks over at NASA are constantly working on plans and contingency plans in case such an event takes place. They do believe that it is possible to slightly alter an asteroids path so that it misses the planet. They would do this by either shooting a rocket at the asteroid, that would “steer” the rock until it is out of the collision course with Earth, or they will be able to cause an explosion that would knock it out of its current trajectory like a garage door malfunction gone bad.

Today in 2011 we don’t need to worry about such a spontaneous massive explosion like the Russian’s experienced in 1908. With the technology that we have available today scientists will be able to see asteroids coming many months in advance.