All RSC Education articles in Non-EiC content – Page 11

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On This Day - Mar 10 : Charles Hatchett died

He first discovered an element that he named columbium but was later rediscovered by German chemist Heinrich Rose and was named niobium (Nb).
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On This Day - May 10 : Caesium was discovered

Caesium (Cs) was discovered in spring waters by Robert Bunsen and Gustav Kirchoff. Although they were the first to identify the new element, Carl Setterberg was the first to isolate the metal itself.
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On This Day - Jun 10 : André-Marie Ampère died

He was the founder of the study of electrodynamics. He described how two wires carrying current either repel or attract one another depending on whether the current flows in the same or opposite direction. The SI unit of current is named in his honour.
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On This Day – Jul 10 : Onnes made liquid helium

Helium has the lowest boiling point of the elements at -269 °C, or 4 Kelvin on the absolute temperature scale. It must be cooled down to between 1 and 4 K to exist as a liquid. For this work, Onnes won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913.
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On This Day – Sep 10 : DNA fingerprinting

He identified that every individual has a unique genetic code, so people could be identified by their genetic fingerprints. The technique has since helped to solve crime investigations and allowed the identification of family members in paternity cases.
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On This Day - Oct 10 : First demo of cyclotron

The cyclotron is one of the earliest types of particle accelerators, similar to those used by the European Organization for Nuclear Research, also known as CERN. It uses electric and magnetic fields to accelerate charged particles.
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On This Day - Dec 10 : Alfred Nobel died

Nobel spent his life devoted to the study of explosives and their safe manufacture. He amassed a great amount of wealth during his career and left the majority in trust to fund the awards now known as Nobel Prizes.
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On This Day - Apr 11 : Percy Julian was born

He was a pioneer in pharmacological chemical synthesis. He held over 130 chemical patents including the industrial scale synthesis of the human steroids progesterone and testosterone, and the plant sterols stigmasterol and sitosterol.
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On This Day - May 11 : Koji Nakanishi was born

He pioneered the use of spectroscopic and chemical methods to determine the structure of complex natural products. To date, he has determined the structures of over 200 biologically active animal and plant products including ginkgolides, new nucleic acids and antibiotics.
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On This Day – Jul 11 : Samuel Goudsmit was born

He introduced the concept of electron spin along with George Eugene Uhlenbeck in 1925. This phenomenon explains many aspects of atomic behaviour that cannot be explained by classical physics.
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On This Day – Aug 11 : Solar eclipse visible

This was the first visible total eclipse from the UK since 29th June 1927. Scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory used the eclipse as an opportunity to carry out experiments on radio waves and investigate the composition of the Earth’s ionosphere.
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On This Day – Sep 11 : Rudolf Schoenheimer died

He developed the technique of “tagging” molecules with radioactive isotopes. This made it possible to trace the pathways of organic molecules in animals and plants, and revolutionized metabolic studies.
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On This Day - Nov 11 : Discovery of cosmic rays

Cosmic rays are particles that bombard the Earth from outside its atmosphere. They were investigated as early as 1911 by Victor Francis Hess, a Nobel laureate in physics, however the name ‘cosmic rays’ was only coined in 1925.
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On This Day - Dec 11 : Explosion at Buncefield

Although the accident did not cause any fatalities, the immense scale of the explosion made it Europe’s biggest fire in peacetime.
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On This Day - Mar 12 : William Perkin was born

Credited with founding the organic chemical industry, Perkin discovered mauveine dye by accident when working with coal tar. Realising the commercial potential of this new purple dye, Perkin patented his synthetic process when he was just 18.
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On This Day - Jun 12 : Fritz Lipmann was born

Lipmann was awarded half the 1953 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of coenzyme A and its role in nutrition. Coenzyme A is a molecule required in the synthesis and oxidation of fatty acids.
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On This Day – Jul 12 : Discovery of xenon

The British chemists used a powerful machine that cooled and liquefied air to obtain krypton (Kr). They then repeatedly distilled the krypton until an even denser substance separated out, which they named xenon (Xe).
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On This Day – Aug 12 : Phenol used in surgery

The British surgeon was a pioneer of antiseptic surgery and pushed the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Using sterile instruments and cleaning wounds were of great success and vastly reduced the number of people dying from post-operation infections from 50% to 15%.
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On This Day – Sep 12 : Irène Joliot-Curie born

Like her parents, she was also a scientist. She and her husband Frédéric bombarded stable atoms with alpha particles to transmute them into different radioactive elements. They created nitrogen (N) from boron (B), phosphorus (P) from aluminium (Al), and silicon (Si) from magnesium (Mg).
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On This Day - Oct 12 : Iron lung respirator

An iron lung is a cylindrical container, encasing a person’s entire body apart from the head. It regulates air pressure to help a person breathe, and was first used to save the life of a young girl with polio.