All RSC Education articles in Non-EiC content – Page 109

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On This Day - Oct 29 : Cloud seeding

Cloud seeding disperses substances such as dry ice (solid carbon dioxide) into the air to serve as nucleation particles around which water molecules condense. It is used to increase rain or snowfall, or in this case it was used to extinguish a forest fire.
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On This Day - Nov 29 : Iodine was discovered

The discovery was made during the process of producing potassium nitrate for gunpowder and was made public in a meeting of the Imperial Institute of France. Its name is derived from the Greek ‘iodes’ meaning violet.
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On This Day - Mar 28 : Nuclear plant meltdown

Overheating in the reactor caused serious damage to fuel rods and created a pressure rise in the system. Valves were opened to lower this pressure but they failed to close again and released radioactive material into the environment.
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On This Day - May 28 : Alfred Nier was born

Nier pioneered the development of mass spectrometry. He used the technique to make some major scientific establishments, answering questions such as how old is the earth and what is the composition of the atmosphere around Mars.
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On This Day - Jun 28 : Richard Erlenmeyer was born

He synthesised the amino acid tyrosine but is perhaps better known for inventing the conical flask, which is widely used in chemistry and microbiology labs around the world.
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On This Day – Jul 28 : Earl Tupper was born

While working at the DuPont chemical company he began to scrounge waste polythene, and then purified and moulded it into cups, bowls and plates. Tupper later founded the Tupperware Plastics Company, and sold it 20 years later for $16 million USD.
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On This Day – Aug 28 : Worcester sauce made

Lea and Perrins sauce is still manufactured at the Midlands Road factory in Worcester, where production first began. In 1916 Perrins used some of the profits to found the Dyson Perrins organic chemistry laboratory at Oxford University.
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On This Day – Sep 28 : Metre was defined

One metre was defined as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of an alloy of platinum (Pt) with 10% iridium (Ir), measured at the melting point of ice. The original international prototype of the metre is still kept at the BIPM, Bureau International des Poids et Mesures, in Sèvres, France.
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On This Day - Oct 28 : Christopher Ingold was born

He was one of the leading figures in British chemistry and his aim was to understand the mechanism of organic reactions. He also contributed to the Cahn-Ingold-Prelog system, which is used to name the stereoisomers of a molecule.
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On This Day - Nov 28 : Royal Society was founded

The Royal Society is a learned society, and the oldest scientific academy. The mission of the Royal Society is “to recognise, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.”
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On This Day - Dec 28 : Dewar gave lecture on air

Air, gaseous and liquid were a series of six well-illustrated lectures given by the Scottish physical chemist. For example, some of the air in the room was liquefied in the presence of the audience and it remained so for some time, when enclosed in a vacuum jacket.
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On This Day - Mar 27 : Paul Lauterbur died

He was awarded half of the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2003 for the development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI scans use nuclear magnetic resonance to see inside the body and have revolutionised medical diagnosis.
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On This Day - Apr 27 : Philip Abelson was born

He proposed the gas diffusion process to separate uranium-235 and uranium-238 needed to develop the atomic bomb. He also co-discovered the element neptunium (Np) with Edwin McMillan.
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On This Day - May 27 : John Bailar was born

He discovered that isomers, compounds with the same chemical composition but different structural formulas, could exist in inorganic compounds. Bailar became recognised as the “father of American coordination chemistry”.
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On This Day - Jun 27 : First nuclear power plant

The plant was located in the city of Obninsk, about 110 km southwest of Moscow in the USSR. It generated around five megawatts of electrical power using nuclear fission.
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On This Day – Jul 27 : John Dalton died

He was a pioneering researcher of modern atomic theory and colour blindness. Dalton discovered that pressures of saturated vapours of all liquids have the same value at boiling point and founded ‘Dalton’s law of partial pressures’.
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On This Day – Aug 27 : Carl Bosch was born

His work transformed agriculture and industry. He co-developed the Haber-Bosch process, a method of fixing nitrogen using high pressure chemistry. Today this consumes more than 1% of the energy on Earth and is responsible for feeding around 30% of its population.
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On This Day – Sep 27 : Ciamician, solar energy

He predicted that humans would one day be able to directly convert sunlight into energy, stored in a ‘fuel’ as an alternative to fossil fuels. Today, photovoltaic solar panels can produce electricity, but scientists are also working towards other methods of harnessing the sun’s power, such as solar fuels that mimic photosynthesis.
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On This Day - Nov 27 : Lars Onsager was born

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968 for his work on a general theory of irreversible chemical processes. This is known as Onsager’s reciprocal relations, which can be described as a universal natural law, and holds great scope and importance in physics and chemistry.
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On This Day - Dec 27 : Louis Pasteur was born

He discovered the role of bacteria in fermentation, proved the germ theory of disease and invented the process of pasteurisation. Pasteur is considered the founder of microbiology.