Category: Science
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Compulsory Insurance Help to Medical Science
Should we have universal health insurance? The American public in 2016 is divided but leans towards yes, with a Gallup poll in May finding that 56 percent support a federally funded healthcare system for all. Vermont was about to become the first state to implement that policy on a statewide level, but their governor (a […]
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Indian No Longer Called a Vanishing Race
Back in 1916 even a publication as respected as the New York Times had no problem calling the demographic “red men.” Even Disney would do so with the Peter Pan song “What Makes the Red Man Red?” in 1953, and Washington’s NFL team still uses a variant on that name to this day. According to the 1916 article, the […]
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Cause of Seasickness Discovered at Last?
Physicians Dr. Lewis Fisher and Dr. Isaac H. Jones published an article “Vertigo and Seasickness, Their Relation to the Ear” in the New York Medical Journal in 1916, claiming that the condition was related to “a disturbance in the ear.” That is why “Persons in whom the mechanism has been destroyed — deaf-mutes, for instance […]
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Will the Brunette Race Eliminate the Blond?
Hair color was apparently a large enough worry a century ago that some feared an extinction of blonds. That was the worry at the time of Madison Grant, a Trustee of the American Museum of Natural History and Councilor of the American Geographical Society, in his cringeworthy-title-in-retrospect book “The Passing of the Great Race.” Today, […]
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War Has Taught Our Chemists Many Secrets
War has always been one of the most powerful motivators for scientific advancement. As astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil DeGrasse Tyson noted in his 2013 Rice University commencement address, “No one has ever spent big money just to explore. No one has ever done that. I wish they did, but they don’t. We went to the […]
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Will ‘Cold Light’ Soon Be a Scientific Fact?
The problem in 1916: nobody had yet invented a “moving picture projector on which the film may be stopped without danger of ignition.” If you’ve ever pressed pause on a YouTube video without your computer blowing up, you know that this problem was solved. Basically, most of the light through man-made sources a century ago was wasted […]
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Red Cross Organizes Medical Preparedness
The Director General of Military Relief for the American Red Cross discusses the necessity of military medical care. The Red Cross did life-saving work then and continues to do so now, a particularly vital service in such times as the aftermath of the Orlando massacre the other week. I’ve donated blood twice before and I’m scheduled […]
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American Inventor Uses Egypt’s Sun for Power
This article details Frank Shuman’s invention that utilized solar energy to heat water and thus produce steam for energy. He used this to create the world’s first solar thermal power station in Maadi, Egypt, where the steam was enough to pump 23,000 liters of water per minute. Solar power has come a long way. Subsequent […]
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