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4261/ England's first Professor
of Political Economy was Thomas Malthus in 1805, at the then
newly established East India College at Haileybury. In 1798
Malthus had written a much publicised essay called 'Essay
on the Principle of Population' which foretold that struggle
and strife were the ultimate lot of all species of plants
and animals including the human race. Malthus's work was one
of the first to attempt a systematic study of human society.
4262/ The asteroid Ceres (an
'asteroid' being a fragment of a full-sized planet) is some
940 kilometres in diameter.
4263/ The concept of matter as
a collection of small indivisible particles called 'atoms'
probably originated with Democritus in the 5th Century BC,
but it was not generally accepted until the 19th Century.
Even as late as 1900 there were some eminent scientists who
scornfully disputed the existence of these invisible entities:
"Who has ever seen one?" was constantly iterated
by the German physicist Ernst Mach.
4264/ On the 21st July 1820 the
Danish Physicist Hans Christian Oersted published a six-page
paper in Latin announcing the discovery of electro magnetism.
While lecturing to a class of students, he had noticed that
a compass needle is deflected when brought close to a wire
carrying an electric current. This was the first unification
of the basic forces of nature - a prime goal of nineteenth-century
natural philosophy.
4265/ Over 100 Jupiter Sized
planets have been found to date.
4266/ The anti-malarial drug
quinine, was traditionally extracted from the bark of the
Peruvian cinchona tree.
4267/ In 1949 Antonio Egaz Moniz
won a Nobel Prize for pioneering pre-frontal lobotomy - the
severance of the connections of the frontal lobes from the
rest of the brain - in the control of schizophrenia and other
mental disorders.
4268/ In 1888, Heinrich Hertz
discovered electromagnetic waves of much longer wavelength
than light, which were predicted by Maxwell's theory and which
we now call radio waves.
4269/ Enzymes are natural catalysts
that increase the rate of chemical reactions. Perhaps the
most popular example is found in the brewing industry in which
sugars are converted into ethyl alcohol and carbon dioxide
by the action of enzymes secreted by yeast cells.
4270/ Since its introduction
in 1899, aspirin has become the most popular drug of all time.
In the USA alone, some 10,000 to 20,000 tonnes of aspirin
are used annually.
4271/ A kilogram of anything
holds enough energy to boil a hundred billion kettles. Or
destroy a city.
4272/ It takes 11.2 kilometres
per second to escape from the Earth.
4273/ The speed it takes to escape
from the Earth is tiny compared with that of light (300,000
kilometres per second); but it challenges rocket engineers
constrained to use chemical fuel, which converts only a billionth
of its so-called 'rest-mass energy' into effective power.
4274/ The escape velocity from
the Sun's surface is 600 kilometres per second - still only
one fifth of one per cent of the speed of light.
4275/ In 1900 Frederick Hopkins
showed that tryptophan, one of the amino-acid building blocks
of proteins, could not be manufactured in the body and had
to be present in the diet.
4276/ In 1912, Casimir Funk named
the factors that Hopkins had found in his research 'vitamines'
- frokm 'vital amines' - believing they were chemically amines
(the 'e' was dropped when it turned out that not all vitamins
were amines). As each vitamin was identified and isolated,
researchers gave it a new letter, although several vitalins
are in fact groups or complexes of different compounds. Scurvy
is due to a deficiency of Vitamin C (ascorbic acid).
4277/ Earths oldest known rock
material is a zircon grain from Australia, dated at 4.4 billion
years by the uranium-lead method in January 2001.
4278/ Some 100,000 scientific
papers have been published on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
4279/ When a sample of mercury
is cooled to 4.2 degrees above absolute zero (-269 degrees
Celsius), its resistance suddenly drops to nothing. It was
not until 1957 that a full explanation of this 'Superconductivity'
emerged. John Bardeen, Leon Cooper and Robert Schreiffer worked
out how electrons could join together and by a quirk of quantum
mechanics ignore the metal around them.
4280/ Since 1957 the dream has
been to find a material that will superconduct at room temperature.
The closest so far that anyone has got is a ceramic material
that has been found to work at temperatures approaching a
cosy -100 degrees. But no-one yet knows how these high-temperature
superconductors work.
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