All Resource articles – Page 76

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On This Day - Apr 19 : Glen Seaborg was born

Seaborg was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1951 with Edwin McMillan for the discovery of many transuranium elements. The element seaborgium (Sg) is named in his honour.
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On This Day - Jun 19 : Ernst Chain was born

Chain and his partner Howard Florey extracted and isolated the antibiotic penicillin from Penicillium mould nine years after its accidental discovery by Alexander Fleming. Chain, Florey and Fleming shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 for their work.
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On This Day – Jul 19 : Pelletier died

He was one of the pioneers of the study of plant alkaloid chemistry. Alkaloids are organic compounds that induce various effects in medicine, including painkillers and respiratory stimulants. Pelletier and his colleagues first isolated the pigment chlorophyll in 1817.
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On This Day – Sep 19 : Chemical structure defined

Chemical structure refers to the way atoms are arranged within molecules. Butlerov realised that chemical compounds are not a random cluster of atoms and functional groups, but structures with definite order.
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On This Day - Oct 19 : Samuel Guthrie died

He discovered chloroform (trichloromethane) by distilling chloride of lime (a mixture of calcium hydroxide, chloride and hypochlorite) with alcohol in a copper barrel. He found that this had properties that made it a mild anaesthetic, which he used in amputations.
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On This Day - Nov 19 : James Sumner was born

He shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1946 with John Howard Northrop and Wendell tanley for the discovery that enzymes can be crystallized. This allowed him to show that enzymes are in fact proteins.
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On This Day - Dec 19 : Thomas Andrews was born

He received the Royal Medal from the Royal Society in 1844 for his Philosophical Transactions paper on “the thermal changes accompanying basic substitutions” that had been published earlier in the same year.
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On This Day - Mar 18 : Superconductivity session

Dubbed ‘The Woodstock of physics’, the event held by the American Physics Society at The New York City Hilton lasted over 7 hours and brought together thousands of physicists, showcasing the recent breakthroughs in superconductivity.
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On This Day - Apr 18 : Paul de Boisbaudran born

His most significant work was in spectroscopy and its application to the rare earth metals. He analysed the spectra of 35 elements using a Bunsen burner or electric spark to induce luminescence and consequently discovered the lanthanides samarium (Sm), dysprosium (Dy) and europium (Eu).
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On This Day - May 18 : Dow Chemical Company

Dow Chemical Company is one of the world’s largest chemical manufacturers. It was founded by Canadian-born chemist Herbert Dow, who invented a new method of extracting bromine (Br) from brine that was trapped underground.
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On This Day - Jun 18 : Jerome Karle was born

Karle was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Herbert Hauptman for direct methods of analysing crystal structures using X-ray scattering. These achievements have been developed into practical instruments, which are used to determine the structure of natural products.
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On This Day – Jul 18 : Robert Hooke was born

Hooke realised that the force exerted on a spring is proportional to its extension, now known as Hooke’s Law. He also wrote a book on microscopes, made Robert Boyle an air pump so that he could study gases and coined the biological term ‘cell’.
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On This Day – Aug 18 : The solar spectrum

Helium is named after the Greek god of the sun, Helios. It was first detected as an unknown yellow spectral line signature in sunlight during a solar eclipse by the French astronomer Jules Janssen.
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On This Day - Oct 18 : Schoenbein was born

He accidentally discovered the powerful explosive nitrocellulose when he spilled sulfuric and nitric acids, and soaked them up with a cotton apron. When the apron dried, it burst into flame - he had created the highly flammable compound nitrocellulose.
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On This Day - Nov 18 : George Wald was born

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1967 for his research into the chemistry of vision. He identified visual pigments and their precursors, and also discovered the primary molecular reaction to light in the eye.
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On This Day - Dec 18 : J J Thomson was born

He was named Cavendish Professor at just 28 years of age, and won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1906 for discovering the electron, and his work on electrical conductivity in gases.
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On This Day - Mar 17 : Carl Jacob Löwig was born

He discovered bromine (Br) while adding chlorine (Cl) and ether to spring water and found a red coloured substance. While Löwig investigated this substance, Antoine Balard published his independent discovery of bromine.
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On This Day - Apr 17 : Chemical naming established

This book presented a logical system for naming chemical substances. Proposed names were based on the origin or function of each element, and led to an international consensus for naming chemicals.
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On This Day - May 17 : Joseph Lockyer was born

While observing a spectrum of the sun during a solar eclipse in 1868, Lockyer noticed a prominent yellow line, which he identified as an unknown solar element. He named this helium (He) after the Greek word for sun.
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On This Day - Jun 17 : Donald James Cram died

He shared the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Jean-Marie Lehn and Charles Pedersen for their work on host-guest chemistry, where two or more molecules or ions bond in unique ways due to their structure. This has allowed the synthesis of molecules that mimic the action of enzymes.