All RSC Education articles in Non-EiC content – Page 16

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On This Day - Nov 22 : Louis Néel was born

2012-09-27T13:12:00Z

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1970 for his work on the magnetic properties of solids. Néel provided an explanation of the weak magnetism of certain rocks, which then made it possible to study the history of the Earth’s magnetic field.
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On This Day - Dec 22 : Liquid oxygen was made

The experiment was notified to the Academy of Sciences in Paris in a telegram from Pictet in Geneva: “Oxygen liquefied to-day under 320 atmospheres and 140 degrees of cold by combined use of sulfurous and carbonic acid”.
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On This Day - Apr 23 : Max Planck was born

Max Planck was the founder of quantum theory. He came up with the equation E = hν, which related the frequency of light emitted by a body to its energy.
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On This Day - May 23 : John Bardeen was born

He co-invented the transistor, a device that can switch and modulate electrical current. Transistors have transformed the world of electronics, and have allowed us to build smaller and lighter computers.
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On This Day - Jun 23 : Etienne-Louis Malus born

He discovered that light waves could be polarised (made to vibrate in a single plane) by reflecting them off a non-metallic surface. This phenomenon is responsible for the ‘glare’ seen when light shines on glass or water.
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On This Day – Sep 23 : Richard Zsigmondy died

He was awarded the 1925 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research into colloids, which are substances microscopically dispersed throughout another substance. Examples include foams (gas dispersed through liquid), aerosols (liquid through gas) and emulsions (liquid through liquid).
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On This Day - Dec 23 : Axel Cronstedt was born

He discovered the element nickel (Ni) in 1751, describing the metal as “kupfernickel” – the Devil’s copper (Cu). He is one of the founders of modern mineralogy and developed a procedure involving the use of blowpipes for analysing the composition of minerals.
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On This Day - Feb 24 : Nylon commercially produced

Nylon was first used in toothbrush bristles for the Miracle Tuft Toothbrush. Before this, the world relied on toothbrush bristles made from the neck hairs of wild pigs from Siberia, Poland and China.
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On This Day - Apr 24 : Roger Kornberg was born

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2006 for his “studies of the molecular basis of eukaryotic transcription” – the process where genetic information is copied from DNA to RNA.
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On This Day - May 24 : Daniel Fahrenheit was born

He invented the alcohol thermometer (1709) and mercury thermometer (1714). He also developed the Fahrenheit temperature scale by reference to three fixed points of temperature, where a mixture of ice, water and ammonium chloride was taken as 0 °F.
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On This Day - Jun 24 : Johannes Wislicenus born

He is best known for his work on stereochemistry. He coined the term ‘geometric isomerism’ in the early 1870s when he discovered two substances that had an identical chemical structure but different physical properties.
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On This Day – Jul 24 : Sir James Chadwick died

He received the Nobel Prize in Physics 1935 for his discovery of the neutron, a subatomic particle with zero electrical charge. Neutrons are found in the nucleus of all elements (except hydrogen) along with protons, which carry a positive charge.
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On This Day – Aug 24 : Ray McIntire was born

He invented foam polystyrene, or Styrofoam. McIntire had been trying to develop a flexible electrical insulator for coating wires. Polystyrene, although a good insulator, was too brittle. He thought he could soften it by adding isobutylene under pressure, but instead made the light foamy substance.
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On This Day – Sep 24 : Georges Claude born

He was the first person to apply an electrical discharge to a sealed tube of neon (Ne) gas and make a neon lamp (the forerunner to modern fluorescent lighting). He is also known for being the first person to demonstrate generating energy by a concept called “ocean thermal energy conversion”.
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On This Day - Oct 24 : Henrik Dam found vitamin K

When Dam fed chickens a diet low in cholesterol, he found that their blood did not clot. However, he discovered that it wasn’t just cholesterol but also a vitamin that they were lacking. He called this Vitamin K, after the German word for coagulation, “koagulation”.
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On This Day - Nov 24 : Simon van der Meer was born

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1984 for his contributions to the European Organization for Nuclear Research or CERN project, which led to the discovery of the W and Z subatomic particles – two fundamental constituents of matter.
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On This Day - Dec 24 : Medical use of radioisotope

American physician and phyicist John Lawrence used phosphorus-32 (32P) to treat a 28 year old woman with chronic leukaemia at Berkeley, California. He became the father of nuclear medicine.
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On This Day - Feb 25 : Ida Noddack was born

Noddack co-discovered rhenium (Re) while working with her future husband Walter Noddack. They named the element after the river Rhine. Rhenium is one of the rarest metals on earth and is used in filaments and for catalysts in the chemicals industry.
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On This Day - Mar 25 : HIV has no latent period

These papers showed that HIV-positive patients who had not developed AIDS still showed high levels of the HIV virus in their lymphatic system, implying that the virus actively replicates even when no symptoms are detected.
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On This Day - Apr 25 : Wolfgang Pauli was born

He is most famous for the Pauli “exclusion principle”, which states that in an atom no two electrons can occupy the same quantum state simultaneously. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1945 for his work.