University Discoveries

“The Lonely Crowd”

admin — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:54:45 +0000

In the 1950s you did not have to be living in Levittown or in other New York suburbs to hear cocktail party conversation about national character and about conformity and individuality. David Reisman, a Harvard University sociologist, generated a lot of that conversation with the publication of his book (with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny), [...]

Prions

admin — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 18:49:44 +0000

In 1997, Professor of neurology at UCSF, Stanley Prusiner, won the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the prion, a novel infectious pathogen that causes a group of fatal diseases. Prusiner and a team of University of California, San Francisco scientists actually discovered “prions” in 1982. Highly controversial at the time because it challenged received [...]

Sodium Nebula

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:09:14 +0000

In 1989, Boston University Professor Michael Mendillo and his collaborators discovered the largest permanently visible object in the Solar System – the great sodium nebula at Jupiter (50 million miles in diameter). Using the instruments designed and built at Boston University, they then discovered the enormous extent of the Moon’s weak atmosphere. If bright enough [...]

Dark Energy

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:07:19 +0000

Berkeley astronomers Alex Filippenko and Adam Reiss were part of a larger international group that in 1998 discovered that the universe is not only expanding but is expanding at an increasing speed. This work led to the current idea that a mysterious “dark energy” makes up more than two-thirds of the universe.

Antibiotics

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:03:32 +0000

Selman Waksman was born in 1888 into a Jewish family in Czarist Russia when there were few opportunities for Jewish children to pursue higher education. He emigrated with his family in 1910 to the Metuchen, New Jersey. The family lived in New Jersey and Selman enrolled at Rutgers where his interest percolated in studying bacteria [...]

Cori Cycle

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 20:00:19 +0000

Gerty Cori’s father, suffering from diabetes near the end of his life, said to his daughter, “Find me a cure.” In a brilliant collaboration that spanned many decades, Gerty and Carl Cori explored how the human body metabolizes glucose. “Their development of the ‘Cori cycle,’ the biochemical process by which the body reversibly converts glucose [...]

Physostigmine & Hydrocortisone

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:56:36 +0000

Percy Julian, an African American chemist who had two fingers severed when he was punished for learning to read, was born in Alabama in 1899, barred from the public schools, but gained admittance to DePauw University in Indiana. He had to go to the University of Vienna to earn a doctorate. Afterwards, he returned in [...]

Plastics

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:50:50 +0000

In 1900, a University of Michigan chemist, Moses Gomberg achieved what had been believed to be impossible – to isolate an organic free radical (a carbon compound with an unpaired electron).[i] The discovery led to the development of polyethylene, Plexigals® and by other polymers used in the plastics industry – from the production of plastic [...]

Google

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:47:36 +0000

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were graduate students at Stanford University working on their doctoral degrees when they developed the algorithm for the Internet search engine, “Google.” Stanford held the intellectual property rights to the algorithm until the company paid the University handsomely for those rights. Page’s father was a professor of computer science at [...]

The Motion Picture

admin — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:45:06 +0000

In 1922, engineers and scientists at the University of Illinois, Urban- Champaign invented the sound motion picture. The first public demonstration of sound recorded simultaneously with pictures on film took place at the Urbana campus on June 9, 1922. Joseph T. Tykociner’s double-feature motion picture included ringing a bell and reading the Gettysburg Address. The [...]