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shipperx
1 There went our best chance: In the ninth century, a team of Chinese alchemists trying to synthesize an "elixir of immortality" from saltpeter, sulfur, realgar, and dried honey instead invented gunpowder.
2 German scientist Hennig Brand stored 50 buckets of urine in his cellar for months in 1675, hoping that it would turn into gold. Instead, it yielded a waxy, glowing goo that spontaneously burst into flame—phosphorus. Soldiers supplied the raw material in vast, sloshing quantities until the 1750s, when Swedish chemist Carl Scheele developed an industrial method of producing phosphorus. He also discovered eight other elements and compounds, including chlorine, ammonia, and prussic acid. Scheele was found dead in his lab at age 43, perhaps owing to his propensity for tasting his own toxic chemicals.
3 Kevlar, superglue, cellophane, Post-it notes, photographs, and the phonograph: They all emerged from laboratory blunders.
4 The Flash, created in 1940 for All-American Publications, was the first comic book hero to develop superpowers after a lab accident, attaining "super speed" after inhaling "hard water" vapors. Other beneficiaries of the Freak Lab Mishap include Plastic Man (struck by a falling drum full of acid), the Hulk (irradiated by an experimental bomb), and of course, Spider-Man (bitten by a radioactive spider).
5 The lab-accident rate in schools and colleges is 100 to 1,000 times greater than at firms like Dow or DuPont.
6 In 1938 DuPont chemist Roy Plunkett opened a dud canister of tetrafluoroethylene gas and discovered an amazing, nearly friction-free white powder. He named it Teflon. In 2005 the Environmental Protection Agency identified a Teflon ingredient, perfluorooctanoic acid, as a "likely carcinogen." It is now in the bloodstream of 95 percent of Americans.
7 After a 1992 drug trial in the Welsh mining town of Merthyr Tydfil, male subjects reported that sildenafil citrate hadn't done much for their angina, but it did have an unusual side effect on another part of their anatomy. Today the drug is sold as Viagra.
8 In 1943 Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman inadvertently absorbed a small quantity of lysergic acid through his fingertips and experienced "dizziness . . . visual distortions . . . [a] desire to laugh." The age of LSD had begun. ... Hoffman turned 100 this past January.
9 In 1965 astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson scrubbed their Bell Labs radio antenna to rid it of pigeon droppings, which they suspected were causing the instrument's annoying steady hiss. That noise turned out to be the microwave echo of the Big Bang.
10 The world has scores of superpowerful particle accelerators. Last year, a fireball created at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Upton, New York, had the characteristics of a black hole. Physicists are reasonably sure that no such black holes could escape and consume Earth.
Reasonably.
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no subject
Date: 2006-11-01 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-02 01:32 am (UTC)I kept wondering whether this was a paricularly good idea...
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Date: 2006-11-01 10:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-02 01:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-01 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-02 01:36 am (UTC)Someone makes a discovery.
First, other scientists tell them that they're wrong.
Second, they admit that the discovery is correct, but say it's not important.
Third, when they decide it's important, they credit someone else with the discovery.
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Date: 2006-11-01 04:11 pm (UTC)Okie, sorry, the dork in me shows up sometimes. :p
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Date: 2006-11-02 01:37 am (UTC)They really should have left out "reasonably."
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Date: 2006-11-02 01:08 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-11-02 02:03 am (UTC)A Short History of Nearly Everything (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/076790818X/ref=pd_rvi_gw_2/102-7274220-8070541)
It manages to be both funny and incredibly informative.
Sample:
Einstein couldn't bear the notion that God could create a universe in which some things were forever unknowable. Moreover, the idea of action at a distance -- that one particle could instantaneously influence another trillions of miles away-- was a stark violation of the special theory of relativity which expressly decreed that nothing could outrace the speed of light. Yet here were physicists insisting that, somehow, at the subatomic level, information could. (No one, incidentally, has ever explained how particles achieve this feat. Scientists have dealt with this problem, according to physicist Yakir Aharnov, "by not thinking about it.")
and
the history of any part of the Earth, like the life of a soldier, consists of long periods of boredom and short periods of terror.
and
"Charles Darwin thought Buckland a buffoon -- that was the wood he used -- but Lyell appeared to find him inspiring {...}Lyell was extremely shortsighted and went through most of his life with a pained squint, which gave him a troubled air. His other slight peculiarity was the habit, when distracted by thought, of taking up improbable positions on furniture -- laying across two chairs at once or "resting his head on the seat of a chair while standing up (to quote a friend of Darwin.) Often when lost in thought, he would slink so low in a chair that his buttocks would all but touch the floor...