Tag Archives: inventors

Anthropology, Biochemistry, Engineering, History, Medicine, Science

10 History-making Hispanic Researchers

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Photo of Luis Alvarez with balloons.
When not doing Nobel prize-winning research, Luis Alvarez built President Eisenhower an indoor golf-training machine, analyzed the Zapruder film and tried to locate an Egyptian pyramid’s treasure chamber using cosmic rays. Photo courtesy Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory

Far too many scientists who made major contributions to knowledge and human health go unremarked, forgotten save for the occasional postage stamp or Google doodle. So when I was offered the chance to write about a few of the many outstanding scientists who came from Spanish-speaking lands, cultures and ancestors, I was understandably excited…and a little nervous. On the one hand, combining such a varied assemblage of people under one term – especially the political term Hispanic – wasn’t ideal. On the other hand, it gave me the chance to explore, and raise awareness of, a remarkably diverse array of persons, backgrounds and accomplishments. I hope you’ll find their stories as inspiring as I did.

10 Hispanic Scientists You Should Know

Astronomy, Biochemistry, Culture, Electromagnetism, Health, History, Mathematics, Medicine, Neuroscience, Philosophy, Physics, Psychology, Science, Top 10, Weird

There was Madness to Their Method: The Western World Before the Scientific Method

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Cartoon of Mary Toft's doctors.
“My money’s on a lop-eared doe, or perhaps a Britannia Petite.”

One of the many things I enjoy about teaching my university class, Science, Feuds, Scandals and Hoaxes, is the opportunity to explore some of the most outrageous ideas ever to gain traction in the public mind. It’s easy to make fun today, but some of these ideas were grounded in reasoning that, though flawed, eventually gave rise to the right answer. Then again, there’s really no defending those doctors who thought that woman was giving birth to rabbit parts.

10 Things We Thought Were True Before the Scientific Method

Chemistry, Consumer, Engineering, Gadgets, Green, How To, Materials, Science, Technology

Throwable Fire Extinguishers: You Had Me at “Fire Grenade”

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Disco ball and ceiling.
Products not recommended for disco infernos.

Fire is frightening and dangerous – that’s why they call it fire. So it’s a little strange that we have laws requiring us to stock canister extinguishers but not regulations requiring that we learn how, if or when to operate them. If you’re like most people, you probably don’t even know what kind of fire your extinguisher is rated for, and you likely have no idea when you last serviced or inspected the device, if ever.

Recently, a few companies have begun marketing new kinds of extinguishers, updated versions of fire grenades intended to make fighting fires as worry-free as possible. Lightweight and easy to use, they rely on the most basic of human skills: throwing. Which raises the question:

How do throwable fire extinguishers work?

Computing, Consumer, Engineering, Materials, Technology

Rethinking the Black Box: Is it Time for Cloud Storage?

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Photo of two black boxes
Black boxes are neither black nor particularly boxy. Photo by Mrsocial99mfine.

The 2014 loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 revived a perennial argument among airline safety wonks: In the age of satellites, big data and cloud storage, why do we lock away essential flight data on a box that can go down with the plane? It wasn’t simply a question of losing the device, as nearly happened with the Air France Flight 447 crash five years earlier; it was the risk that, when we finally found it, the data we needed to understand the calamity might already have been erased.

Does the black box need a 21st-century update? And, if so, is cloud storage practical, affordable, reliable and secure enough to supplement or replace the status quo? In other words…

Should black box data be stored in the cloud?

Astronomy, Computing, Consumer, Electromagnetism, Engineering, Health, Imaging, Internet, Physics, Science, Space, Technology

Laser Communications Gets a Zap(pa) from Moon Unit

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Photo by ESO Photo Ambassador Yuri Beletsky. Unrelated to the NASA experiment but cool nonetheless.

Lasers rank among the most vital and widespread technologies in the industrialized world, but for years they were considered a solution looking for a problem. One possible application lay in communications: Lasers, being of higher frequency and energy than radio, held the potential to communicate more information per second.

Fast-forward to October 2013, when NASA pulled off one of the most impressive proofs-of-concept in history. That month, a spacecraft orbiting the moon sent data 239,000 miles to Earth via a pulsed laser beam at a download rate of 622 megabits per second (by comparison, high-speed consumer data plans are usually measured in the tens of megabits). Everyone from cryptographers to high-speed Wall Street traders sat up and took notice. Sound cool? Read on as I explain…

How Laser Communication Works