Browsing: Science & Technology

A Brief History On January 28, 1986, the U.S. space shuttle Challenger took off right on schedule, only to explode 74 seconds later, killing all seven crew members on board in front of a horrified live television audience. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Challenger, having made 9 previous successful flights and having traveled over 25 million miles in its career prior to the tragedy. The crew, who had planned to study Halley’s Comet as part of their mission, also included a civilian, Mrs. Sharon Christa McAuliffe.  Mrs. McAuliffe, who was from New Hampshire, had won a contest to become…

A Brief history On January 12, 1998, 19 European nations agreed to prohibit the cloning of humans. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find those 19 nations disappointed and dismayed that the two most powerful European countries, Germany and the United Kingdom, refused to sign the agreement! Does this refusal mean we shall soon see human clones?  Not from Germany.  They claimed their national laws were more restrictive than the agreement and they therefore did not need to sign.  It seems they have some national angst as a result the genetic experiments of the Nazi era.  (See the History and Headlines article on…

A Brief History On January 9, 1839, the first practical photographic process (Daguerreotype) was revealed by the French Academy of Sciences. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find many people had been working on the development of practical photography, but Daguerre, a French chemist, was the first to produce a process that was portable, not the size of an entire room, and that resulted in images of reasonable quality. One of the great discoveries by Daguerre was the ability to use paper coated with concoctions containing silver and other chemicals instead of the image being produced on a metal plate.  That…

A Brief History On December 28, 1895, the world of medicine and airport security were forever changed when William Roentgen published his paper describing the production of X-rays. Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find Roentgen, a German physicist, having invented a machine to produce electro-magnetic radiation emitting X-rays. Sometimes called Roentgen Rays in honor of their discoverer, his research and careful documentation led to Roentgen receiving the first Nobel Prize for Physics. Quickly seizing the opportunity his research afforded him, Roentgen developed a way to pass X-rays through an object and onto a target material to create a picture of…

A Brief History Is December 26th the Most Wacked Date in History?  So many disasters occurred we can not even include them all! Digging Deeper Digging deeper, we find our cracked odyssey starting in 1846 in the Sierra Nevada mountains, where the Donner Party, close to death from starvation and freezing, resorts to cannibalism to survive!  At least they apparently waited for their food to die on its own and did not murder each other. In 1862, the U.S. conducted its largest mass hanging ever, when 38 Native Americans are hanged from a single scaffold!  Incredibly, it could have been worse! …