All RSC Education articles in Non-EiC content – Page 18

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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.
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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 - Feb 29 : Bohr issued bowl of balls

Danish physicist Niels Henrik David Bohr made fundamental contributions to the understanding of atomic structure and quantum mechanics, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922.
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On This Day - Mar 29 : New electron microscope

This electron microscope enabled atoms to be seen for first time. Advances in imaging have allowed materials to be probed with astonishing resolution using transmission electron microscopy (TEM).
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On This Day - Jun 29 : Peter Waage was born

Waage discovered the Law of Mass Action with Cato Guldberg. This law relates the rate of a chemical reaction to the concentration of the reactants, and has become the basis for determining reaction rate constants.
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On This Day – Aug 29 : Meitnerium synthesised

Meitnerium was first synthesised in Darmstadt, Germany. It is believed to be the heaviest element in group 9 of the periodic table, but it is incredibly unstable and very little is known about its chemical properties.
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On This Day – Sep 29 : CERN was established

The organisation runs the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. In September 2011 CERN scientists reported that some particles appeared to be travelling faster than light, although it’s now thought that the experiment was flawed.
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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 30 : The first anaesthetic used

American surgeon Crawford Long encouraged his patient to inhale ether during a medical procedure to remove a neck tumour. This marked the beginning of the use of anaesthesia during surgeries.