All Resource articles – Page 81
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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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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ResourceOn 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.
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ResourceOn This Day - May 25 : Pieter Zeeman was born
He studied the influence of magnetism on a source of light, and found that each of the lines in the light spectrum split into several other lines. This effect, known as the “Zeeman Effect”, has important applications such as in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR).
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ResourceOn This Day - Jun 25 : Walther Nernst was born
He was a pioneer in physical chemistry. Nernst is best known for his theories relating to the calculation of chemical affinity, which is the ability of chemicals to form compounds with one another. He won the 1920 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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ResourceOn This Day – Aug 25 : Hans Adolf Krebs was born
He won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering a series of chemical reactions known as the Krebs cycle. This forms part of the process of respiration in living organisms through which energy is generated from food and oxygen (O).
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ResourceOn This Day – Sep 25 : Separation of iron
The method from this English chemist, which used water, ammonia and muriatic acid, was simpler than other popular methods of extracting manganese metal from its ore. Manganese is used in important alloys, and one of its oxides, permanganate, is used in analysis such as redox titrations.
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ResourceOn This Day - Oct 25 : Marjorie Vold was born
She was one of the top female colloid chemists, writing three major science texts and scores of journal articles despite suffering from multiple sclerosis for the last 35 years of her life. She even continued her chemistry calculations from a hospital bed!
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ResourceOn This Day - Nov 25 : Adolph Kolbe died
He discovered a method for the electrolysis of the salts of fatty acids, known as Kolbe electrolysis. He also identified the Kolbe synthesis reaction, which is a method of making salicylic acid – the main component of Aspirin.
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ResourceOn This Day - Dec 25 : William Gregor was born
He discovered the element titanium (Ti), which he originally named manaccanite after the Manaccan valley where he found it. A few years later, it was rediscovered by Martin Klaproth who thought it was a new element and gave it the current name of titanium.
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ResourceOn This Day - Feb 26 : Otto Wallach died
He devised a systematic analysis method to determine the molecular structure of the terpenes found in fragrant essential oils. Up until this point, few terpenes had been isolated in their pure form and structural information was very limited.