All Resource articles – Page 79

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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 – Sep 26 : Biosphere 2

For two years, the eight participants lived in this huge glass and steel structure in the Arizona desert completely closed off from the rest of the world. It also contained 4,000 species of plants, animals and microbes.
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On This Day - Mar 20 : Volta revealed the battery

He wrote to the president of the Royal Society detailing his invention, which was initially called the ‘electric pile’. The battery consisted of alternating copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn) discs, connected by pieces of leather or card soaked in salt water.
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On This Day - Apr 20 : Franz Achard died

Achard invented the industrial process to produce sugar from beets. Sugar used to be a luxury item only the wealthy could afford, but Achard’s mass-production process meant that many more people could afford to have a sugar in their homes.
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On This Day - May 20 : Erika Cremer was born

She conceived the technique of gas chromatography, which separates gaseous compounds within a mixture. Cremer’s notes on the new technique were almost completely lost during air raids in WW2, which meant that her work was only published 30 years later.
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On This Day - Jun 20 : Mary Good was born

She is currently an industrial inorganic chemist, but spent many years working for the US government as an advisor in science and technology. She was the 1987-1988 president of the American Chemical Society.
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On This Day – Jul 20 : James Woodhouse professor

The American Chemist founded the Chemical Society of Philadelphia and authored numerous works on chemistry, including the first book of directed chemical experiments.
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On This Day – Aug 20 : Plutonium iodate isolated

American nuclear chemists Burris Cunningham and Louis Werner isolated a microgram of plutonium(IV) iodate, the first visible quantity to the human eye. Today, plutonium is widely used in the production of nuclear energy.
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On This Day – Sep 20 : James Dewar was born

His work blurred the line between chemistry and physics. Dewar’s achievements include designing an insulating double-walled flask with a vacuum between two silvered layers of steel or glass – the technology that led to the modern domestic Thermos flask.
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On This Day - Oct 20 : James Chadwick was born

By bombarding the element beryllium (Be) with alpha particles, he discovered a neutral particle in the atom’s nucleus - the neutron. Chadwick subsequently led the UK’s research team investigating the atomic bomb in World War II.
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On This Day - Dec 20 : Jaroslav Heyrovskȳ was born

He was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of polarography, an analytical tool that uses a dropping mercury (Hg) electrode to investigate the effects of varying currents and potentials of a compound.
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On This Day - Mar 21 : Plutonium was named

Plutonium (Pu) took its name from the dwarf planet Pluto. First discovered by Glenn Seaborg and colleagues as a product of nuclear fission, traces of plutonium were later found in a rock formation by Darleane Hoffmann.
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On This Day - Apr 21: Paul Karrer was born

Karrer was awarded half the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1937 for his research into plant pigments, namely yellow carotenoids, flavins, and vitamins A, B2 and E.
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On This Day - May 21 : Bengt Samuelsson was born

He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1982 with Sune Bergström and John Vane for their work on how prostaglandins are formed and metabolised. Prostaglandins are hormone-like substances that participate in a wide range of bodily functions.