Browsing: Health/Medicine

A Brief History On June 3, 1861, in the first organized land battle (barely a battle in reality) of the American Civil War, the Union Army with 3000 men routed an untrained force of 800 Confederate volunteers in what it now West Virginia at Philippi, a small town that today has only about 3000 residents. Touted as a huge victory for the Union, the “battle” would be fairly inconsequential except for the wounding of 2 Confederate soldiers that both required battlefield amputations, one of which fashioned his own homemade artificial leg that proved so successful the wounded soldier founded a…

A Brief History On May 8, 1794, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier, the man generally regarded as the Father of Modern Chemistry, was put to death on the guillotine during the Reign of Terror period of the French Revolution. It seems this man of noble birth who had such an enormous impact on the sciences of chemistry and biology was more than merely a scientist, but also a businessman and an agent of the Ancien Régime, the monarchy of France prior to the Revolution. Digging Deeper Born in Paris in 1743, Antoine was given a fine education (earning a degree in law…

A Brief History On May 7, 2018, while the latest movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Avengers: Infinity War, is breaking box office records, we stop to ask about the main premise of the film, the arch villain Thanos and his plan to reduce life in the Universe by half in order to prevent an overpopulation catastrophe. Our question is, “Has anyone tried this plan in real life?”  In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich published a book titled, The Population Bomb, a dire warning about the catastrophic consequences of overpopulation of people on Earth.  So far, those predictions have not…

A Brief History On April 2, 1911, the Australian Bureau of Statistics conducted their first ever national census. Most countries conduct some sort of periodic census, and we here in the United States do so every 10 years, a critical process that results in how many representatives to Congress each state gets (and electoral votes) and how Federal funds are distributed. In 2018, the Trump Administration announced the 2020 Census questionnaire would include a question asking if the respondent was a citizen or not, a volatile and contentious issue being debated at this time. Digging Deeper That first Australian census…

A Brief History On March 22, 1960, Scientists Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes of Bell Labs in New Jersey patented their invention of the LASER, a device that concentrates and focuses visible light that today we find useful in a myriad of applications. Without the laser, we would not have CD’s and DVD’s, BluRay’s and the like. Digging Deeper The theoretical possibility of creating a laser or laser like device was proposed by Albert Einstein in 1917 and other theoretical scientific work contributing to the development of the laser (and its predecessor, the maser) continued throughout the 20th Century. In…