January Science History Tidbits

General Science History
In 1957, the Wham-O Company developed the first frisbee; a representative of the company got the idea for the product when he saw some truck drivers from the Frisbee Pie Co. of Connecticut showing Yale students how to throw pie pans in the air.

Biology History
In 1998, scientists announced the identification for the first time of a key brain chemical related to nicotine addiction, in the journal Nature. The researchers worked at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and the research arm of Glaxo-Wellcome in Geneva. The addictive nature of nicotine is related to release of dopamine, a neurotransmitter chemical in the brain. The scientists had found the first of 11 subunits, or molecules, of the nicotine receptor in the brain of mice. Mutant mice lacking the b2 subunit in their brains did not react to nicotine. Humans have the same so-called b2 subunit. This is a step toward to designing a drug to block the receptor, and produce new smoking-cessation drugs.

Earth Science History
In 1610, Galileo dated his first letter describing telescopic observations in which he saw the moon's cratered surface using his twenty-powered spyglass. He wrote, "... it is seen that the Moon is most evidently not at all of an even, smooth, and regular surface, as a great many people believe of it and of the other heavenly bodies, but on the contrary it is rough and unequal. In short it is shown to be such that sane reasoning cannot conclude otherwise than that it is full of prominences and cavities similar, but much larger, to the mountains and valleys spread over the Earth's surface." Galileo went on to describe the phenomena in considerable detail, rehearsing, as it were, the observations and conclusions he was to publish more elaborately a few months later in Sidereus Nuncius.

Physics History
In 1930, the element Fr (francium) was discovered, the last naturally occurring element to be found. It is the heaviest alkali metal atom, with atomic number 87. Marguerite Perey joined (Oct 1929) the Institut du Radium in Paris in Oct 1929 as a technician for Marie Curie. Perey worked for years on actinium, which was anticpated to produce the new element by alpha decay. Finally, she was able to make the first entry about francium in her lab notebook on 7 Jan 1939, recording its half-life as about 20 minutes. A note in the Comptes Rendus was presented at the Académie des Sciences by Jean Perrin (9 Jan 1939). In his periodic table, Mendeleev anticipated its discovery, and provisionally named it eka-cesium. Perey gave it the name "francium." She first used the symbol Fa, but changed it to Fr.

Chemistry History
In 1941, the commercial production of magnesium first began in the U.S. at Freeport, Texas. Magnesium, the lightest of all structural elements, was extracted from seawater through an electrolytic process. Herbert H. Dow first extracted the metal from brine in Midland, Michigan, in 1916. Dow's Freeport magnesium plant played a key role during WW II when the lightweight metal became a critical alloy for airplanes. U.S. military aircraft production escalated, and as much as 2,000 pounds of magnesium was needed per plane. Today, magnesium alloys are die cast into a variety of automotive components. On 20 Nov 1998, Dow Chemical Co. announced it would shut down production at Freeport due to crippling damage during severe Gulf Coast storms.

Quote
Only the curious will learn and only the resolute overcome the obstacles to learning. The quest quotient has always excited me more than the intelligence quotient.
- Eugene S. Wilson