The internet is a truly incredibly thing, but we all hate it when it works too slowly. That’s where optical fibres come in. Made of a high quality extruded glass called silica, they guide light through a process of refraction, and in doing so are able to transmit bandwidths at a remarkably high speed and over remarkably long distances. As such, they are used in telecommunications and computer networking to speed up internet connections, able to do so due to the fact that the total internal refraction of light means very little data is lost. And the best thing about optical fibres is when at Imperial College London they were first demonstrated to be able to ‘bend’ light by Harold Hopkins and Narinder Kapany, dubbed the ‘founding father of fibre optics’.
Climate change is an issue which has grown increasingly prominent over the course of the 20th and early 21st century. Of course, it can’t be claimed to have been ‘discovered’, but someone who did a great deal to expand the subject was Hubert Lamb of the University of East Anglia. He was one of the first to suggest that climate change could affect humans within their lifespan, arguing that climate change should not be treated as a constant for purposes of convenience. He also posited the theory of gradual global cooling and a coming ice age, another first. From his base at the UEA, Lamb predicted the melting of the ice caps, the flooding of cities and serious damage to agriculture. Unsurprisingly, this caught the attention of many and meant that climate change and the issues surrounding it were catapulted to the world stage.
On the 3rd of September 1928 Alexander Fleming returned to his lab after a summer spent holidaying with his family to find a pile of mouldering Petri dishes. One in particular caught his eye; the mould growing within it seemed to have killed the Staphylococcus aureus bacteria that had been in the dish. Fleming realised the mould had potential. It was realised to be a Penicillum mould, capable of killing off many bacteria. It was also found to be non-toxic. However, it was not until the outbreak of the Second World War that penicillin was developed further. Two scientists at the University of Oxford, while looking for promising projects in bacteriology, began looking at the Penicillum mould as a possible solution to the ever growing numbers of deaths due to minor bacterial infections on the battlefields. Following immediate success and the mass development and production, penicillin was hailed as a ‘wonder drug’.
The discovery of embryonic stem cells in a Cambridge lab in 1981 is arguably one of the most important medical breakthroughs of the 20th century. Two English scientists, Martin Evans and Matthew Kauffman of the University of Cambridge managed to derive these stem cells from mouse embryos, and from then on their research has been used in everything from preventing genetic defects in unborn children to treating blood and immune system genetic related diseases such as cancer. They really are incredible things, embryonic stem cells - they can be used to treat ailments in almost any part of the boy. However, their use has caused and will continue to cause much controversy due to the ethical issues raised by the destruction of the human embryo that results from extraction of the cells.
Dolly the sheep
Dolly the Sheep was a bigger world phenomenon than her namesake Dolly Parton, despite the fact that she never left her native Scottish home. She was the world’s first cloned animal. Born of three mothers - one provided the egg, a second the DNA and a third carried the embryo to term - Dolly was to spend the entirety of her life at the Roslin Institute, which is attached to the University of Edinburgh. While not the first animal to be cloned - Cedric the Sheep, who lived at the same institute as Dolly, was an example of a cloned sheep - Dolly was the first animal to be cloned from an adult cell. She was put to sleep in 2003 at the age of six, having contracted a lung disease. Her remains were preserved and are now kept at the National Museum of Scotland. Quite what Dolly Parton thinks of all this is unknown.
At the University of Manchester in 1910, Ernest Rutherford and a team of researchers fired alpha particles at a thin film of gold foil. They expected them to go straight through with their trajectories only slightly, if at all, altered. Instead, some shot off at wild angles and some reflected straight back. It was, as Rutherford put it, like firing a bullet at tissue paper and having it bounce back. He had discovered atomic nuclei. The minute, dense centre of an atom, the nucleus and our knowledge of it has since been instrumental in the development of nuclear fission, whereby they are broken apart in order to create vast amounts of energy. Nuclear fission is what is used in nuclear power plants, and it was due to nuclear fission that the USA was able to develop the nuclear bomb which so devastated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the Second World War.
Ever heard of the double helix? It’s the structure of DNA molecules. And DNA is the molecule that encodes the genetic instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms. It was in 1953 that two Cambridge researchers published a paper describing the double helix structure of DNA, and Cambridge researchers have since put a lot of effort into discovering more about this complicated chemical code. This year, the sixtieth anniversary of that first paper, they published another proving the existence of a four-stranded, ‘quadruple’ helix structure in the human genome. Our knowledge of DNA, so furthered by this patient research, has become vital in everything from archaeology to forensics.
Flickr (Nige Brown)
The first computer
Today’s world abounds with hand-held electronic devices slimmer than a Caramac and more expensive than an Ivy League education, all of which have extraordinary technological capabilities. It all started with the ground-breaking invention of the world’s first working computer in the University of Manchester. Scientists Freddie Williams and Tom Kilburn unveiled ‘Baby’ in 1948. It was the world’s first stored-program computer, actually created as a testbed for the Williams Tube, an early form of computer memory. However, when it was realised the Baby contained all the elements essential to a modern working computer, development was started on the Manchester Mark 1, designed to be a more usable computer. Although nick-named Baby, the size of this first computer was on the large side, taking up the floor space of a medium sized room, or the equivalent of about three billion Macbook Airs lined up side by side.
World's First computer
In 1985, Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex and his US collaborators saw carbon in a new light. They realised it had potential for use on the football pitch, or at least a football pitch of microscopic proportions. That is, they discovered fullerenes, or ‘miniature footballs’ - any carbon molecule that is in the form of a sphere, tube, or other similar shape. Dubbed Buckminsterfullerene, after American architect Buckminster Fuller (who was famous for designing geodesic domes which resemble the structure of fullerenes) they have since been used extensively in tumour research. Similar fullerenes such as carbon nanotubes have proved themselves useful in the development of everything from sports equipment to wind turbines due to their remarkably strong, light structure.
In 1957, a paper was published which said we are all made of stardust. Well, not quite that, but almost. Four scientists of the University of Cambridge, Fred Hoyle, William Fowler and Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, had conducted extensive research into stellar nucleosynthesis, the theory that all elements are created in the oldest chemical factories in the universe - stars. This paper, called ‘Synthesis of the Elements in Stars’, but better known as B2FH because of the initials of its authors, was at odds with the theory common at the time that all the elements were synthesised during the Big Bang. B2FH argued that when a star ages and dies it will enrich the interstellar medium with heavier elements, from which new stars - and, presumably, we - are formed.