December Science Fun Facts

General

In 1911, at Stockholm, Sweden, Marie Curie became the first person to be awarded a second Nobel prize. She had isolated radium by electrolyzing molten radium chloride. At the negative electrode the radium formed an amalgam with mercury. Heating the amalgam in a silica tube filled with nitrogen at low pressure boiled away the mercury, leaving pure white deposits of radium. This second prize was for her individual achievements in Chemistry, whereas her first prize (1903) was a collaborative effort with her husband, Pierre, and Henri Becquerel in Physics for her contributions in the discovery of radium and polonium

Biology

In 1967, the first synthesis of biologically active DNA in a test tube was announced at a press conference by Arthur Kornberg who had worked with Mehran Goulian at Stanford and Robert L. Sinsheimer of MIT. Kornberg chose to replicate the relatively simple DNA chain of the Phi X174 virus, which infects bacteria (a bacteriophage). It has a single strand of DNA only about 5500 nucleotide building blocks long, and with about 11 genes, it was easier to purify without breaking it up. Having isolated the Phi X174 DNA, they used the DNA from E. coli, a common bacterium in the human intestine that could copy a DNA template from any organism. The viral DNA template thus copied was found to be able to infect bacteria - it was error-free, active DNA.

Earth Science

In 1995, the Galileo spacecraft arrived at Jupiter and entered orbit after 6 years years of travel including a flyby of Venus and two asteroids, Gaspra and Ida. The orbiter had also carried an atmospheric probe with scientific instruments, which it had released from the main spacecraft in Jul 1995, five months before reaching Jupiter Galileo then spent a further 8 years examining Jupiter and its moons Io and Europa. In 1994, the Galileo orbiter was present to watch the fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash into Jupiter. Its mission was concluded 21 Sep 2003 by sending the orbiter into Jupiter's atmosphere at a speed of nearly 50 km/sec, destroying it to avoid any chance of it contaminating local moons with bacteria from Earth.

Physics

In 1900, German physicist Max Planck made public his ideas on quantum physics at a meeting of the German Physics Society, revolutionizing scientists' understanding of physics. Planck demonstrated that in certain situations energy exhibits characteristics of physical matter, something unthinkable at the time. He suggested the explanation energy exists in discrete packets, which he called "quanta."

Chemistry

In 1933, Rutherford suggested the names diplogen for the newly discovered heavy hydrogen isotope and diplon for its nucleus. He presented these ideas in the Discussion on Heavy Hydrogen at the Royal Society. For ordinary hydrogen, the lightest of the atoms, having a nuclues of a sole proton, he coined a related name: haplogen. (Greek: haploos, single; diploos, double.) In 1931, Harold Urey had discovered small quantities of atoms of heavy hydrogen wherever ordinary hydrogen occurred. The mass of its nucleus was double that of ordinary hydrogen. This hydrogen-2 is now called deuterium, as named by Urey (Greek: deuteros, second). Its nucleus, named a deuteron, has a neutron in addition to a proton.