Edward Goodrich Acheson was an American chemist and inventor. He was born in 1856 at Washington, Pennsylvania, and died in 1931. From 1880 to 1881 he did research on electric lamps as an assistant to Thomas Edison. After 1884 he worked independently to develop the electric furnace for the conversion of carbon into diamonds, without success. In 1891 he invented carborundum (silicon carbide) and artificially prepared graphite. Research Edward Acheson
Jenny McCarthy (Jennifer McCarthy) is an American Actress, writer, film producer and glamour model. She was born in 1972 at Chicago, Illinois. Best known for her nude modelling in Playboy magazine as a busty blonde, she is actually a brunette and at the time had silicon breast implants which she later had removed, she reached a wider audience starring in the 2003 film 'Scary Movie 3'. Educated as a nurse, she abandoned her studies to become a model, without much success until she appeared as the Playboy Playmate of the month in October 1993 and Playmate of the Year 1994 in which year she also landed her first television role in a bit part in the television series 'Silk Stalkings'. In 1996 she appeared in an episode of 'Baywatch' before her break came in 2000 with a major role in the film 'Scream 3'. Research Jenny McCarthy
Pamela Denise Anderson is a Canadian actress and former glamour model. She was born in 1967 at Ladysmith, British Columbia. Pamela Anderson's career started after being displayed on a large screen during a British Columbia Lionsfootball game as a result of which she was signed by Labatt's beer for an advertising campaign, which in turn led to her being approached by Playboy magazine (by 2007 she had appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine a record eleven times, first in October 1989 and lastly in 2004). Moving to Los Angeles in 1990 she became internationally famous for playing Casey Jean Parker (CJ) in 111 episodes of the television series 'Baywatch' between 1992 and 1997. In 1996 she starred in the film 'Barb Wire'.
Even before the theft and internet distribution of a pornographic film featuring Pamela Anderson and her husband Tommy Lee in 1996 Pamela Anderson had become an iconic pin-up for teenage boys around the world, and was famous for her blond hair (artificial, her natural hair colour is brown) and already large breasts which were famously enlarged even further by silicon implants which were later removed in 1999. In 2006 she was ranked 24th in FHM magazines 100 sexiest women of the world table. Research Pamela Anderson More pictures of Pamela Anderson
The Acheson process is an industrial process for the manufacture of graphite by heating coke mixed with clay. The reaction involves the production of silicon carbide, which loses silicon at 4150°C to leave graphite. The process was patented in 1896 by the American inventor Edward Acheson. Research Acheson Process
Animal Chemistry is the department of organicchemistry which investigates the composition of the fluids and the solids of animals, and the chemical action that takes place in animal bodies. There are four elements, sometimes distinctively named organic elements, which are invariably found in living bodies, that is carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. To these may be added, as frequent constituents of the human body, sulphur, phosphorus, lime, sodium, potassium, chlorine, and iron.
The four organic elements are found in all the fluids and solids of the body. Sulphur occurs in blood and in many of the secretions. Phosphorus is also common, being found in nerves, in the teeth, and in fluids. Chlorine occurs almost universally throughout the body; lime is found in bone, in the teeth, and in the secretions; iron occurs in the blood, in urine, and in bile; and sodium, like chlorine, is of almost universal occurrence. Potassium occurs in muscles, in nerves, and in the blood-corpuscles. Minute quantities of copper, silicon, manganese, lead, and lithium are also found in the human body.
The compounds formed in the human organism are divisible into the organic and inorganic. The most frequent of the latter is water, of which two-thirds (by weight) of the body are composed. The organic compounds may, like the foods from which they are formed, be divided into the nitrogenous and non-nitrogenous. Of the former the chief are albumen (found in blood, lymph, and chyle), casein (found in milk), myosin (in muscle), gelatin (obtained from bone), and others. The non-nitrogeneous compounds are represented by organic acids, such as formic, acetic, butyric, stearic, etc by animal starches, sugars; and by fats and oils, as stearin and olein. Research Animal Chemistry
A computer is a programmable, usually electronic, device. The modern computer is generally accepted to have been invented during the 19th century by the mathematician Charles Babbage.
Computers are of two distinct types: analog and digital. Analog computers operate by manipulating electrical potentials, voltage in simple terms. Digital computers operate on fixed values, usually the binary code of one and zero. Modern computers are generally digital, and certainly all personal computers are digital.
Early digital computers used electrical relays as their two-state (binary) devices - two-state, they were either 'on' or 'off'. These early digital computers were first made during the 1940's, were large and were used for military purposes and in a few research laboratories. They were unreliable due to the unreliability of the physical contacts of the relays, and were very low speed - compared to modern computers. During the 1950's valves or vacuum tubes replaced relays in digital computers, and by the 1960's they in turn were replaced by transistors - enabling a computer with the power of one which filled a room in the 1950's to be built which would fit in a shoe box. Transistors were in turn replaced by the integrated circuit or 'silicon chip', allowing computers to be made even smaller and smaller.
In 1980 Sir Clive Sinclair revolutionised computing with the invention of the ZX80 domestic micro computer, and a year later marketed the ZX81, the first computer to be built with just four siliconchips. Shortly afterwards the personal computer or PC emerged aimed at the business market. Research Computer
Core was an old-fashioned type of computer memory, made from doughnut-shaped
cores about 0.01 inch in diameter. These could be magnetized to store information, each holding one binary digit. Core memories were superseded in the 1970s by memories that use integrated circuits, often called siliconchips.
There are many theories as to how the solar system formed. And it is generally accepted that any theory of the formation of the solar system must explain at least the following two observations: First, the planets, with the exception of Pluto, orbit in almost the same plane (the 'ecliptic'). Second, the inner four planets are small and rocky, while the outer four planets are large and gaseous. One theory that does a reasonably good job of explaining these observations is the disk model.
The Sun is thought to have formed by the collapse of a large interstellar gas cloud. The original cloud was probably thousands of times larger than the present solar system. Initially the cloud had a very slow rotation rate (it's essentially impossible for one of these clouds to have a rotation rate of exactly zero). As it collapsed, it began rotating faster. The collapse process is not 100% efficient, though, so some of the material did not fall into the proto-Sun. This rotating gas that was left behind settled into a disk. In addition to gas, interstellar clouds can also contain dust. Therefore, the rotating disk consisted of dust grains and gas. In the process of settling into a disk-and even after the disk had formed-the dust grains began to collide and stick together. Initially quite small, this process of colliding dust grains sticking together (known as ' accretion') began to build up larger dust grains. The accretion process continued with large dust grains accreting to form small pebbles, small pebbles accreting to form large pebbles, pebbles forming rocks, rocks forming boulders, etc. Initially this process is quite random: Two dust grains collide only if their paths happen to cross. However, as particles became larger, they exert a larger gravitational force and attract smaller particles to them. Hence, once started, the accretion process can actually speed up.
The collapse process itself can generate considerable heat. Furthermore, as the Sun's mass grew, it eventually reached the point at which fusion reactions in its core could be sustained. The result was that there was a heat source in the middle of the disk: the inner parts of the disk were warmer than the outer parts. In the inner part of the disk, only those materials which can remain solid at high temperatures could form the planets. That is, the dust grains were composed of materials such as silicon, iron, nickel, and the like; as these materials accrete they form rocks. Farther from the early Sun, where the disk was cooler, there were not only dust grains but also snowflakes (primarily ice flakes of water, methane, and ammonia). In the outer parts of the disk, not only could dust grains accrete to form rocks, but these snowflakes could accrete to form snowballs. Water, methane, and ammonia are relatively abundant substances, particularly compared to substances formed from silicon, iron, etc.
In the inner part of the solar system, where only rocks could remain solid, we therefore expect small planets, whereas in the outer solar system, where both rocks and ices could remain solid, we therefore expect large planets. (Not only did the gaseous planets form from more abundant substances, they also had more raw material from which to form). It is currently thought that the giant planets, particularly Jupiter and Saturn, formed from a run-away accretion process. They started accreting slowly and probably initially were quite rocky. However, once their mass reached about 10 to 15 times that of Earth, their gravitational force was so strong that they could attract not only other rocks and snowballs around them, but also some of the gas in the disk that had not frozen into an ice. As they attracted more material, their gravitational force increased, thereby attracting even more material and increasing their gravitational force even more. The result was run-away accretion and large planets. One of the problems with this theory for the formation of Jupiter, though, is that it seems to take longer than the disk may have existed. The conventional scenario predicts that Jupiter might have taken several million years to form.
Other theories indicate that a giantplanet might also form from small, unstable clumps in the disk. Rather than being 'bottom-up'. One of the results of finding planets around other stars is the realization that this model does not require the planets to always have been in the same orbits as they have today. Interactions between the planets, particularly the giant planets, and the disk of material could have resulted from migration. The giant planets may have moved inward or outward from their current locations during their formation. If planets can migrate during or shortly after their formation, it makes it easier to explain the presence of Uranus and Neptune. A straightforward application of the above model encounters a slightly embarrassing problem: The time to form Uranus and Neptune is longer than the age of the solar system. If, however, these planets formed at a closer distance, then migrated outward, it may be easier to understand why Uranus and Neptune are at their current distances from the Sun. Research Formation of The Solar System
A junction detector is a sensitive detector of ionizing radiation in which the output is a current pulse proportional to the energy falling in or near the depletion region of a reverse-biased semiconductor junction. The first types were made by evaporating a thin layer of gold on to a polished wafer of n-type germanium; however, gold-silicon devices can be operated at room temperature and these have superseded the germanium type, which have to be operated at the temperature of liquid nitrogen to reduce noise. When the gold-silicon junction is reverse-biased a depletion region, devoid of charge carriers, forms in the silicon. Incoming ionizing radiation falling in this depletion region creates pairs of electrons and holes, which both have to be collected in order to give an output pulse proportional to the energy of the detected particle.
Junction detectors are used in medicine and biology as well as in space systems. Research Junction Detector
Abbreviations
Research Edward Acheson
