Madam Marie Curie honoured

Poland will hold observances next year to mark 100 years since the Polish-born scientist Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her discovery of radioactive elements polonium and radium.

Poland’s lawmakers adopted a resolution Friday naming 2011 the year of the researcher, who was born Maria Sklodowska in Warsaw in 1867.

The lawmakers said she was one of the “most outstanding scientists of our times.”

In 1891 she left Warsaw which was under Russian rule at the time to study in Paris, where later she and her husband Pierre Curie researched radioactive elements. In 1903 they jointly received a Nobel Prize in physics and in 1911 she won a Nobel in chemistry for her discovery of polonium and radium, work that laid the grounds for X-ray tests.

The "Sandwich Gamble".

The Sandwich takes its name from the notorious British gambler John Montagu, Earl of Sandwich. In 1762, at the Beef Steak Club in Covent Garden, London, Montagu spent twentyfour hours gambling without a break. He asked for meat and slices of bread to be brought to him so that he could eat without interuptting his game. The conveniant result appealed to to Londons fashionable society and teh word Sandwich stuck.

Hiccups.

Hiccups

If you've frequently got a case of the hiccups, try slowing down when you eat and drink, suggests Dr. Plasker. Doing either too quickly causes your stomach to swell; this irritates your diaphragm, which contracts and causes hiccups. You may also get hiccups in emotional situations or if your body experiences a sudden temperature change. In both of these cases, the hiccups are a result of a glitch in your nerve pathways, which is why a sudden scare - which might shake up and reset your nerves - can sometimes end an episode.

Nobel Prize. 1988

Sir James W. Black

Gertrude B. Elion

George H. Hitchings

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1988 was awarded jointly to Sir James W. Black, Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment".

Why do we yawn

If your body is low on oxygen, your mouth opens wide and tries to suck more in. Yawning is a way to regulate the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in your blood. Unfortunately, yawns are nearly impossible to stifle.

Fascinating facts

Common things used by us..Innovations.

• Rubber bands were fitst made by Perry and Co. of London in 1845.
• Charles Gould invented the stapler in 1868 for use in bookbinding.
• A vaccum flask was demonstrated in 1892 by the Scottish physicist James Dewar. His mother in law remained sceptical of a flask made for his son in 1902 and knitted a wollen cosy for it to make sure that its contrnts remained warm.
• Vaccum flasks were first marketed in1902 by the German Reinhold who held a competition to name the invention. The winning entry was Thermos, the Greek word for'hot'.
• In 1900 the Norwegian Johann Vaaler patented the paperclip.
• The aerosol can was invented by another Norwegian, Eric Rotheim, but the idea was not developed commercially until 1941. when Lyle Goodhue and William Sullivan took a patent in the USA. They saw the spray can as an ideal container for insectisides.

J. Michael Bishop

Harold E. Varmus

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1989 was awarded jointly to J. Michael Bishop and Harold E. Varmus "for their discovery of the cellular origin of retroviral oncogenes"

The Story of the Escalator

Jesse Reno, Charles Seeberger
An escalator is a conveyor type transport device that moves people. It is a moving staircase with steps that move up or down using a conveyor belt and tracks keeping each step horizontal for the passenger. However, the escalator began as an amusement and not as a practical transport. The first patent relating to an escalator-like machine was granted in 1859 to a Massachusetts man for a steam driven unit. On March 15 1892, Jesse Reno patented his moving stairs or inclined elevator as he called it. In 1895, Jesse Reno created a new novelty ride at Coney Island from his patented design, a moving stairway that elevated passengers on a conveyor belt at a 25 degree angle. Escalator = Scala Elevator The escalator as we know it was later re-designed by Charles Seeberger in 1897, who created the name 'escalator' from the word 'scala', which is Latin for steps and the word 'elevator', which had already been invented. Charles Seeberger, together with the Otis Elevator Company produced the first commercial escalator in 1899 at the Otis factory in Yonkers, N.Y. The Seeberger-Otis wooden escalator won first prize at the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle in France. Jesse Reno's Coney Island ride success briefly made Jesse Reno into "the" escalator designer and he founded the Reno Electric Stairways and Conveyors company in 1902. Charles Seeberger sold his patent rights for the escalator to the Otis Elevator Company in 1910, who also bought Jesse Reno's escalator patent in 1911. Otis then came to dominate escalator production, and combined and improved the various designs of escalators. According to Otis, "In the 1920s, Otis engineers, led by David Lindquist, combined and improved the Jesse Reno and Charles Seeberger escalator designs, and created the cleated, level steps of the modern escalator in use today. Over the years, Otis dominated the escalator business, but lost the product's trademark. The word escalator lost its proprietary status and its capital "e" in 1950 when the U.S. Patent Office ruled that the word "escalator" had become just a common descriptive term for moving stairways."

Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1992

Edmond H. Fischer

Edwin G. Krebs

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1992 was awarded jointly to Edmond H. Fischer and Edwin G. Krebs "for their discoveries concerning reversible protein phosphorylation as a biological regulatory mechanism"