All Resource articles – Page 84

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On This Day - Jan 26 : Nuclear fission reported

The discovery was made by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann and was interpreted by Lise Meitner and Otto Frish. Danish physicist Niels Bohr then reported the discovery of nuclear fission at the Washington conference. Related resources: Chemistry will play a central role to the future of UK nuclear The ...
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On This Day - Jan 24 : Morris Travers was born

He worked with Scottish chemist William Ramsay to discover the noble gases krypton (Kr), xenon (Xe) and neon (Ne). He also played a pivotal role in setting up the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
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On This Day - Feb 23 : Chemical Society first meet

In 1980, the Chemical Society merged with the Royal Institute of Chemistry, Faraday Society and the Society for Analytical Chemistry to become what is now known as the Royal Society of Chemistry.
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On This Day - Jan 22 : Alan J Heeger was born

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2000 along with Alan MacDiarmid and Hideki Shirakawa for “their discovery and development of conductive polymers”. They found that modified plastics could conduct electricity, which has many commercial uses such as LEDs and mobile telephone display screens.
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On This Day - Jan 21 : Magnesium produced

Magnesium (Mg) was first extracted from seawater through an electrolytic process. Is the lightest of all structural elements – one-third less dense than aluminium – and is used in flares, pyrotechnics, incendiary bombs, aeroplane and missile construction.
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On This Day - Feb 21 : Henrik Dam was born

He received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1943 along with Edward Doisy for their discovery of vitamin K. Vitamin K is part of a group of fat-soluble vitamins that are needed for blood coagulation and in metabolic pathways.
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On This Day - Jan 20 : de Chancourtois was born

He was the first person to organise elements by atomic weights, by plotting a graph of the elements around a cylinder with a circumference of 16 units corresponding to the weight of oxygen (O). Elements that appeared above and below each other shared similar periodic properties.
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On This Day - Feb 19 : Svante Arrhenius was born

He is one of the founders of physical chemistry and perhaps most famous for proposing the Arrhenius equation, which describes the rate of a chemical reaction.
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On This Day - Jan 17 : Friedrich Kohlrausch died

His research focussed on the thermal, electrical and magnetic properties of electrolytes. He is recognised as one of the most important experimental physicists, with his early work contributing to the absolute system of electrical and magnetic measuring units.
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On This Day - Feb 17 : Beilstein was born

He published a still-popular standard reference work on organic chemistry, called the “Handbuch der organischen Chemie”. It contained approximately 2,200 pages on 15,000 organic compounds.
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On This Day - Jan 16 : Andres Ekeberg was born

He discovered tantalum (Ta), which is named after the character Tantalus from Greek mythology. It is a rare transition metal that is highly resistant to corrosion.
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On This Day - Feb 16 : Man-made diamonds produced

The small diamonds were produced in Stockholm by the ASEA, one of Sweden’s major electrical manufacturing companies. The ASEA had employed a team of five scientists and engineers to work on the top-secret diamond-making project QUINTUS.
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On This Day - Jan 15 : Water composition announced

He revealed that water was a compound of hydrogen (H) and oxygen (O), which was known at the time as “dephlogistonated air”. He later discovered the composition of air and made the first calculations of the Earth’s mass.
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On This Day - Feb 15 : von Euler-Chelpin was born

He shared the 1929 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Arthur Harden for their investigations on the fermentation of sugar and on fermentative enzymes.
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On This Day - Jan 14 : Paul Vieille died

He invented modern nitrocellulose-based smokeless gunpowder in 1884. The smokeless powder was three times more powerful than black powder for the same weight and left virtually no residues of combustion.
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On This Day - Feb 14 : Silly putty was first made

The first Silly Putty was made by mixing silicone oil with boric acid. This formula has remained essentially unchanged for 50 years, and more than 4,500 tons have been sold since 1950.
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On This Day - Jan 13 : Ford patented plastic car

The Soybean car, or “Hemp body car”, was the first car to have a body entirely made of plastic. It was 30% lighter than a regular metal car and the panels were said to be only a quarter of an inch (6 mm) thick.
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On This Day - Feb 13 : Julius Thomsen died

He predicted the existence of the noble gases before they were discovered. He was also interested in thermochemistry, measuring the heat produced from around 3,500 chemical reactions.
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On This Day - Jan 12 : Antonio de Ulloa was born

He is credited with the discovery of platinum (Pt) after publishing in 1748 accounts of his time in South America. Platinum had actually been used by pre-columbian civilisations, making Ulloa’s work of a‘re-discovery’.
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On This Day - Feb 12 : Wentorf made borazon

Borazon, a material hard enough to scratch diamonds, is created by heating equal quantities of boron and nitrogen at temperatures greater than 1,800 °C. It is used to manufacture high-precision steel and to sharpen high-speed steel tools.