science newsletter: Newsletter for Wednesday 14 November

Newsletter - November 14 - Today in Science History

TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY

NEWSLETTER - NOVEMBER 14

Before you look at today's web page, see if you can answer some of these questions about the events that happened on this day. Some of the names are very familiar. Others will likely stump you. Tickle your curiosity with these questions, then check your answers on today's web page.

On 14 Nov 1925, Zhores Medvedev was born, a dissident Soviet scientist who exposed the nuclear disaster in the Urals of the 1950's. As an ecologist, he wrote on the radiological damage to a 400-sq.-mi. area in the southern Urals to the various members of the ecosystem, including large ungulates, field rodents and fish populations. He believes that the radiological contamination he studied resulted from a non-nuclear explosion of stored leaky barrels of radioactive waste. Water leaching into the waste was heated by the radioactive isotopes, then a steam explosion spread the waste material over a very large area. Today's Science Store pick is Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, by Zhores A. Medvedev, who reveals the damage from a serious nuclear incident you may not otherwise have known about. Available Used from $1.77 (as of time of writing).
Yesterday's pick: Iconoclast: Abraham Flexner and a Life in Learning. For picks from earlier newsletters, see the Today in Science Science Store home page.

Browse the new Science Store pages of Science Titles in Bargain Books.

Quotations for Today

"As a scientist and geneticist I started to feel that science would probably soon reach the point where its interference into the life processes would be counterproductive if a properly designed governing policy was not implemented. A heavily overcrowded planet, ninety-five percent urbanized with nuclear energy as the main source of energy and with all aspects of life highly computerized, is not too pleasant a place for human life. The life of any individual soon will be predictable from birth to death. Medicine, able to cure almost everything, will make the load of accumulated defects too heavy in the next two or three centuries. The artificial prolongation of life, which looked like a very bright idea when I started research in aging about twenty-five years ago, has now lost its attractiveness for me. This is because I now know that the aging process is so multiform and complex that the real technology and chemistry of its prevention by artificial interference must be too complex and expensive. It would be the privilege of a few, not the method for the majority. I also was deeply concerned about the fact that most research is now either directly or indirectly related to military projects and objectives for power." - Zhores A. Medvedev (born 14 Nov 1925)

"No one has ever had an idea in a dress suit." - Sir Frederick G. Banting (born 14 Nov 1891)

"It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mountains, as it must to the first astronomers that the fall of an apple should assist in explaining the motion of the moon." - Sir Charles Lyell, Scottish geologist (born 14 Nov 1797)

QUIZ

Births

Edward H. White II, born 14 Nov 1930, was the first U.S. astronaut to walk in space. With James A. McDivitt he manned the four-day orbital flight of Gemini 4. During the third orbit White emerged from the spacecraft, floated in space for about 20 minutes, and became the first person to propel himself in space with a maneuvering unit.
In which decade did this first U.S. space walk happen?

Sir Frederick Banting, born 14 Nov 1891, assisted Charles Best in extracting a hormone from the pancreas for which he shared the 1929 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
What hormone was extracted from the pancreas, and what disease did it treat?

Sir Charles Lyell, born 14 Nov 1797, was a Scottish geologist who was largely responsible for the general acceptance of the view that all features of the Earth's surface are produced by physical, chemical, and biological processes through long periods of geological time, a concept initially set forth by James Hutton.
By what name is this theory known?

Deaths

John Aitken (1839-1919) was a Scottish physicist and meteorologist who, through a series of experiments and observations in which he used apparatus of his own design, elucidated the crucial role of what are now called Aitken nuclei.
What is the function of Aiken nuclei?

Events

In 1985, the first discovery of a new form of carbon was published in the journal Nature. The American chemists Robert F. Curl, Jr. and Richard E. Smalley, colleagues at Rice met with Sir Harold W. Kroto of the University of Sussex, England. In 11 days of research, they discovered the first spherical cluster of carbon atoms.
What name was given to this form of carbon?

Answers

When you have your answers ready to all the questions above, you'll find all the information to check them, and more, on the November 14 web page of Today in Science History.

Or, try this link first for just the brief answers.

Fast answers for the previous newsletter for November 13: vitamin K; the decade containing the day 7 Apr 1927; Mars; dry-ice (frozen carbon dioxide).

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