Posts Tagged ‘original’
X-ray machine from 1896 compared to modern version
Modern image on the right
Scientists have dusted off X-ray equipment dating from shortly after the discovery of the rays in 1895, in order to put it through its paces.
Researchers from the same Dutch town where the system was originally built used it to produce striking images that belie its simplicity and age…
The original system was developed by high school director H J Hoffmans and local hospital director Lambertus Theodorus van Kleef from Maastricht in the Netherlands…Following a publication by X-ray discoverer Wilhelm Roentgen just weeks before, the pair built their device from parts found at the high school and used it for anatomical imaging experiments.
The machine ended up in a warehouse in Maastricht and was unearthed last year for a history programme on television.
Fortunately, no one in Europe ever throws anything away.
Then Gerrit Kemerink of Maastricht University Medical Center decided to put the equipment to the test against a modern system…
Given that a high radiation dose might be required to carry out the tests, the team obtained a hand from a cadaver as their imaging subject – rather than the “young lady’s hand” listed in Hoffmans and van Kleef’s notes…
Using a photographic plate and the same imaging conditions Hoffmans and van Kleef used, a dose 1,500 times higher was required…
“Our experience with this machine, which had a buzzing interruptor, crackling lightning within a spark gap, and a greenish light flashing in a tube, which spread the smell of ozone and which revealed internal structures in the human body was, even today, little less than magical,” they wrote.
Sounds like most early pop movies about science and sci-fi.
Honeybees survive for millennia in Sahara oasis
Deep in the Sahara desert are honeybees that have remained isolated from all other bees for at least 5,000 years.
The bees arrived at Kufra in Libya when the Sahara was still a green savannah, and have survived ever since around an oasis in the desert, over 1,000km from their nearest neighbouring bees…
Around 10,000 years ago, the Sahara was a green savannah, a habitat well suited to honeybees (Apis mellifera).
Today, the Sahara is inhospitable to honeybees, which can’t survive in the large sand deserts that lack any vegetation. However, honeybees do survive in many oases that litter the desert. Most are maintained by local beekeepers that keep the insects for honey production and to pollinate oasis plants. But some wild populations of bees survive.
One such group lives at the desert oasis at Kufra in southeast Libya, while another lives at an oasis at Brak to the west of the country…
Though honeybees living at Kufra have colonies of a similar density to bees elsewhere, certain genetic traits appeared in the Kufra bees at much high frequencies, with some being unique.
That shows that the Kufra bees have remained isolated from all others for at least 5,000 years and perhaps up to 10,000 years, since the moment they were cut off by the creation of the Sahara desert…
The Kufra bees could also be a source of new genetic traits that could be useful to beekeepers elsewhere, the researchers suggest.
Just like the sensible botanists who maintain heritage species of fruits and vegetables for the same purpose.
If we do little or nothing – climate change odds much worse than thought
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission
The most comprehensive modeling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get in this century shows that without rapid and massive action, the problem will be about twice as severe as previously estimated six years ago—and could be even worse than that.
The study uses the MIT Integrated Global Systems Model, a detailed computer simulation of global economic activity and climate processes that has been developed and refined by the Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change since the early 1990s. The new research involved 400 runs of the model with each run using slight variations in input parameters, selected so that each run has about an equal probability of being correct based on present observations and knowledge. Other research groups have estimated the probabilities of various outcomes, based on variations in the physical response of the climate system itself. But the MIT model is the only one that interactively includes detailed treatment of possible changes in human activities as well—such as the degree of economic growth, with its associated energy use, in different countries.
Study co-author Ronald Prinn, the co-director of the Joint Program and director of MIT’s Center for Global Change Science, says that, regarding global warming, it is important “to base our opinions and policies on the peer-reviewed science.” And in the peer-reviewed literature, the MIT model, unlike any other, looks in great detail at the effects of economic activity coupled with the effects of atmospheric, oceanic, and biological systems. “In that sense, our work is unique,” he says.
Puerto Rican ID theft ring sold document sets of ID to illegal immigrants
As many as 12,000 Puerto Rican schoolchildren, teachers and school administrators are believed to be victims of an identity-theft ring that sold stolen personal documents to illegal immigrants in the mainland United States, according to the FBI.
A federal grand jury this week indicted eight people on charges of identity theft, aggravated identity theft and Social Security fraud.
“In search warrants, we found over 5,000 different types of identification documents — originals and copies, Social Security cards and birth certificates,” FBI spokesman Harry Rodriguez said.
“They were selling them as a set; an original birth certificate and Social Security card sold for $150 or more. Copies sold for $40 or more,” he said.
Authorities believe the suspects broke into about 50 public schools and stole personal files belonging to students, teachers and school administrators. In Puerto Rico, students must provide an original or a copy of their birth certificate to be registered in a school.
Should get them some sort of award for enterprise in entrepreneurship, eh?
The original Microsoft ‘family’
In 1978, when Microsoft was three years old and based in Albuquerque, New Mexico, there were only a dozen people working for the company – compared with the current number of almost 90 000 employees worldwide.
Thirty years on from the taking of the original photograph, the Microsoft staff who worked at Albuquerque were reunited to recreate the photograph.
Wonder what their net worth is, nowadays?
