Browsing: Science & Technology

A Brief History On March 17, 2020, the United States of America and Ireland both have cancelled virtually all St. Patrick’s Day festivities, absolutely destroying one of the jolliest holidays in either country.  For this disappointment, we have to thank the coronavirus, or more correctly COVID-19, the mysterious flu like illness believed to have originated in Wuhan, China only a few months earlier. Digging Deeper While the world has experienced many pandemics throughout history, the last several decades have been marred by only a few breakouts of illness that garnered a lot of attention, including the AIDS/HIV pandemic, the Swine…

A Brief History On March 12, 2020, people all over the globe are wondering about the true origins and the true implications of the “coronavirus” that (as we are told) originated in Wuhan, China.  Drastic measures being taken, including shutting down schools and colleges, draconian quarantines of cruise ships, cancellation public presidential campaign events, ending spectators at school athletic contests and the use of the National Guard to enforce a quarantine of New Rochelle, New York are all the types of measures we would expect in some sort of apocalyptic scenario, such as the Black Plague or the fictional “Captain…

A Brief History On March 9, 2020, we take a look at some of today’s technology that is not celebrated the way some previous inventions have been.  Virtually everyone knows that Edison invented the light bulb and Bell invented the telephone, but we ask, who knows the inventor of the touch screen?  Who invented the computer chip?  Who came up with GPS?  Today we take a few selected modern devices and tell you a little about how they came about.  What would you add to this list?  (Note: Not being scientists ourselves, some of the technology in this article is…

A Brief History On March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777 jet airliner flying from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing, China, disappeared from radar screens and has not been seen or heard from since, despite incredibly large and extensive search efforts.  A total of 227 passengers and 12 crew members vanished from the face of the Earth and grieving relatives want to know why. Digging Deeper While it is true that airplanes have “disappeared” often enough over the course of aviation history, with some highly noted cases such as that of Amelia Earhart (1937) and of course the infamous “Bermuda…

A Brief History On March 5, 1872, George Westinghouse patented the air brake, a system for use with railroad trains.  Prior to his invention, the brakes on trains had to be operated by a brakeman individually turning a large brake wheel on each car.  With the Westinghouse system, the engineer could have all the cars in his train brake at the same time, allowing for safer train travel and longer trains.  Air brakes also revolutionized the trucking industry, as prior to their adoption the use of trucks in mountainous terrain was rather dangerous.  Like many other unsung inventions, air brakes…