The Chinese had invented a printing method involving engraved blocks to produce books as early as the 9th century, but the process was arduous and the result often poor. It could quickly produce multiple texts at a high quality standard. The result was nothing less than revolutionary. The process invented by Gutenberg was so technically innovative that it remained relatively unchanged for four centuries. His printing process spread swiftly across Europe, with many presses constructed almost identical to his, and with it came a remarkable surge in learning.
Historians disagree on who should be credited with the invention of the telescope, but the earliest patent on record was petitioned by a Dutch lens maker, Hans Lippershey, in for an optical telescope. Later that century, Isaac Newton successfully built a reflecting telescope and since then a great number of technological advancements have led to today's wide assortment of astronomical instruments ranging from radio to Gamma-ray telescopes.
The best known telescope today is the Hubble Space Telescope which has been orbiting the Earth since It is as equally revered for the data it collects as for the popular images of the Cosmos it captures. The most remarkable of which is perhaps the shot of the Carina Nebula taken in and released on the telescope's 20th anniversary.
The image shows the top of a three-light-year-tall pillar of gas complete with jets of gas being fired off by infant stars. If you consider this a far cry from a 17th century spectacle shop - imagine what astronomy has for us over the next years.
The most influential early vaccination involved a milkmaid, an eight-year-old boy and an English physician named Edward Jenner in the s. When milkmaid Sarah Nelmes, came to see him about the cowpox blisters on her hands he extracted some of the pus and used it to inoculate the son of his gardener.
Once the boy was fully recovered from the ensuing fever, Jenner carried out a series of tests all of which resulted without infection. The results were nothing short of revolutionary. The 20th century saw vaccines for polio, developed by Jonas Salk, along with diphtheria, measles, mumps and rubella. Today, vaccines have become routine in many countries - their impact immeasurable. The invention of gunpowder is attributed to the Chinese and is thought to have been discovered in the search for a magical potion that, ironically, would provide eternal life.
Dating as far back as the 9th century, it spread with the Mongol conquests led by Genghis Khan, quickly falling into the hands of the Arabs, Indians, and eventually Europeans. Ancient weapons employing gunpowder include an array of fearsome devices, from fire-bomb-tossing catapults used by the Mongols, to torpedoes, cannons and hand-held cannons used by the Arabs. Although the technology was quickly put to use for military purposes, it wasn't long before it was repurposed for further usages, from clearing mines to constructing canals in 17th century Europe.
Steam powered engines date as far back as the ancient Greeks, but it wasn't until a series of significant advancements in the 18th and 19th centuries that their influence would reach boiling point. Successive advances made from to by Savery, Newcomen, Leupold, Smeaton, Watt, Trevithick and Evans led to steam engines becoming the dominant source of power at the turn of the 20th century.
Powering pumps, spinning mules, power looms, and transportation on sea and land, steam engines literally generated the Industrial Revolution. Decades of engineering by many scientists went in to designing the internal combustion engine, which took its essentially modern form in the latter half of the 19th century. The engine ushered in the Industrial Age, as well as enabling the invention of a huge variety of machines, including modern cars and aircraft. Pictured are the operating steps of a four-stroke internal combustion engine.
The strokes are as follows: 1 Intake stroke - air and vaporised fuel are drawn in. Though several inventors did pioneering work on electronic voice transmission many of whom later filed intellectual property lawsuits when telephone use exploded , Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone in His patent drawing is pictured above. He drew his inspiration from teaching the deaf and also visits to his hearing-impaired mom, according to PBS.
He called the first telephone an "electrical speech machine," according to PBS. The invention quickly took off, and revolutionized global business and communication. When Bell died on Aug. When all you have is natural light, productivity is limited to daylight hours. Light bulbs changed the world by allowing us to be active at night. According to historians, two dozen people were instrumental in inventing incandescent lamps throughout the s; Thomas Edison is credited as the primary inventor because he created a completely functional lighting system, including a generator and wiring as well as a carbon-filament bulb like the one above, in As well as initiating the introduction of electricity in homes throughout the Western world, this invention also had a rather unexpected consequence of changing people's sleep patterns.
Instead of going to bed at nightfall having nothing else to do and sleeping in segments throughout the night separated by periods of wakefulness, we now stay up except for the 7 to 8 hours allotted for sleep, and, ideally, we sleep all in one go.
It's one of the most famous discovery stories in history. In , the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-filled Petri dish in his laboratory with its lid accidentally ajar. The sample had become contaminated with a mold, and everywhere the mold was, the bacteria was dead.
That antibiotic mold turned out to be the fungus Penicillium, and over the next two decades, chemists purified it and developed the drug Penicillin, which fights a huge number of bacterial infections in humans without harming the humans themselves. Penicillin was being mass produced and advertised by This poster attached to a curbside mailbox advised World War II servicemen to take the drug to rid themselves of venereal disease. About 1 in 10 people have an allergic reaction to the antibiotic , according to study published in in the journal Clinical Reviews in Allergy and Immunology; even so most of those people go on to be able to tolerate the drug, researchers said.
Like millions of people, [neuroscientist Karim] Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, , attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections… As clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.
Charles Darwin started life as a creationist and only gradually came to realize the significance of the variation he observed in his travels aboard the Beagle.
For the past years, since On the Origin of Species was published, people have been arguing over evolution. Cultures throughout history and around the world have engaged in ritual human sacrifice. What to take? A couple of coins for the ferryman? Some flowers, maybe, or mementos of your loved ones? Concubines were sacrificed in China to be eternal companions; certain Indian sects required human sacrifices.
The Aztecs slaughtered tens of thousands of people to inaugurate the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan; after sacred Mayan ballgames , the losing team was sometimes sacrificed. Ritual sacrifice is described in the Bible, Greek mythology and the Norse sagas, and the Romans accused many of the people they conquered of engaging in ritual sacrifice, but the evidence was thin.
A recent accumulation of archaeological findings from around the world shows that it was surprisingly common for people to ritually kill—and sometimes eat—other people.
The consequences are already apparent: glaciers are melting faster than ever, flowers are blooming earlier just ask Henry David Thoreau , and plants and animals are moving to more extreme latitudes and altitudes to keep cool. Even more disturbing is the fact that carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. Everything you probably think of when you think of the universe—planets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dust—makes up just 4 percent of whatever is out there.
Scientists have some ideas about what dark matter might be—exotic and still hypothetical particles—but they have hardly a clue about dark energy. The effort to solve it has mobilized a generation of astronomers in a rethinking of physics and cosmology to rival and perhaps surpass the revolution Galileo inaugurated on an autumn evening in Padua.
But astronomers do know that, thanks to these dark parts, the universe is expanding. And not only expanding, but expanding faster and faster.
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