Happy 25th Birthday! Things Turning 25 Along with High Touch High Tech

Happy 25th Birthday!

Things Turning 25 Along with High Touch High Tech

1994 was an amazing year in world news, technological and scientific advancements. High Touch High Tech began franchising, Nelson Mandela won the presidency of South Africa, and Amazon and Yahoo were both created, and floppy disks were a thing of everyday life! Take the nostalgic trip down memory lane with us as we reminisce 1994.

Amazon and Yahoo

In 1994, the world wide web has just been created. Yahoo and Amazon were both created and grew to the internet giants they are today. Imagine the days before being able to chat with strangers thousands of miles away at any given time! Imagine being unable to order your entire grocery list from your couch through Amazon prime! These websites revolutionized our relationship with the internet, both getting their start alongside High Touch High Tech.

Creation of the Element 110, Darmstadtium

Darmstadtium, element 110 was first synthesized in 1994! There were several failed attempts to create element 110, and was first successfully made that year. While chemists Yuri Ganessian and Vladimir Utyonkov created the very first Darmstadtium particles through cold fusion, credit for the first successful synthesizing goes to Sigurd Hofmann, Peter Armbruster and Gottfried Münzenberg of Darmstadt, Germany where the element earned its name. The German scientists created the element by bombarding lead with nickel, and their evidence was deeming more credible and confirmed by other scientists throughout the world. Darmstadtium is a highly radioactive metal, and few atoms have ever been created!

PlayStation

The very first PlayStation was released by Sony in 1994. While PlayStation wasn’t the sole gaming console on the market, then competing with the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn, the PlayStation was game changing. With a CD format and sleek design, the PlayStation became the first gaming console to sell 100 million units worldwide! While many trends and gaming consoles have come and gone, PlayStation has remained a key player for 25 years.

Living fossil Wollemi Pine found

Before 1994, the Wollemi Pine (Wollemia nobilis) was believed to be extinct, only having been seen in fossils. The plant is from a line of evolutionary plants, dating back to the dinosaurs, long believed to have been extinct. In 1994, the plant was discovered in the remote, rainforest gorge of Australia. Currently, there are about 80 mature plants and 300 seedlings. The Wollemi pine produces various types of foliage depending on the age of the leaf, and the leaf’s position on the tree. Newer foliage is apple-green in color and frond-like. As the plant develops, the foliage becomes a blue-green color, giving it a Jurassic appearance with dual leaf rows on its branches. The mature trees have a bubbling chocolate appearance, as spongy nodules develop on its bark.

Nelson Mandela Elected President of South Africa

Until 1994, the Apartheid government of South Africa only allowed black voters elect Bantustan or homeland candidates. The Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act had stripped black citizens of South Africa of their citizenship, making them citizens of their segregated homelands, or Bantu, in the apartheid state. In 1994 these homelands ceased to exist and were incorporated into the general South African elections, making this election the first multiracial election in South African history. On May 10^th of 1994, Nelson Mandela, at the age of 77, was inaugurated as South Africa’s first place president. He tirelessly worked as president to address the issues caused by the apartheid, poverty, inequality, lack of social services and infrastructure, and building a strong economy. Nelson Mandela’s presidency reconciled and strengthened the nation of South Africa, becoming a beacon of progress throughout the world.

Western Hemisphere Declared Free of Polio

Poliomyelitis, more commonly known as polio, was a disease which left survivors permanently disabled. Each few years polio epidemics would plague cities and towns, leaving a trail of death and paralysis behind it. Most famous of all polio survivors being President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, being paralyzed waist down by the disease at age 39. FDR founded the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis in 1938, which would lead to the development of vaccinations for polio. In 1908, polio was identified as a virus by Dr. Karl Landsteiner after filtering preparations of spinal fluid of persons killed by polio. Later in 1910, Dr. Simon Flexner identified “germicidal substances” in the blood of monkeys that survived the polio virus, identifying the antibodies to polio which are the necessary agents in developing a vaccination.

Two separate teams of researchers developed early forms of the polio vaccination in 1935, both vaccinations ending in allergic reactions, illnesses, paralysis, and some deaths. For another 25 years, there were unfortunate trials and errors of an effective polio vaccination, but in the year 1960 Albert Sabin’s poliovirus vaccination for Type 1 poliovirus was licensed and formally recommended by the U.S. Surgeon general. Three years after this licensure, a vaccination for poliovirus types 1, 2 and 3 were combined creating one vaccination of the disease. In the year 1994, polio was completely eradicated in the Western Hemisphere. While there are still cases of polio globally, there has been more than a 99% reduction of polio cases worldwide, proven the Poliomyelitis vaccination a simple and effective.

The Transition in Technology from 1994

So many of our everyday life depends on the internet; work, entertainment, communication, information, monetary transactions, networking, marketing, and education. In 1994, the World Wide Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee, and became the Internet we know and depend on today.

In 1994 there was no Google, no Hulu and Netflix, no smartphones, no YouTube, no social media, and no flat-screen TVs. Let’s look back at our very humble internet and technology beginnings.

The First Website

Windows Operating System

Yahoo

Program Installation, installed via floppy disk

GameBoy Games

Before Netflix and streaming sites, you had to go to a Blockbuster or video store to watch a movie

VHS Movies, the DVD was invented in 1995

No one had an email, or much access to the internet, so faxing was the go-to for messages

Cell phones, whose battery was the size of the phone. Free of a camera, touch screen, and texting.

CD Players, because there were no iPods, Pandora, or Spotify.

Technology is constantly developing, and we’ve come a long way since 1994. As new inventions are developed, technology takes an increasing large role in our lives. We at High Touch High Tech believe in developing the next generation of inventors, granting us to the innovations of our future.

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Sources Cited:

Barker, E. “25 Moments That Defined 1994.” NME, Jan. 2014. Retrieved from: https://www.nme.com/photos/25-moments-that-defined-1994-1422189

Sony Interactive Entertainment. “PlayStation, Through the Years.” PlayStation, Sep. 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/explore/ps4/playstation-through-the-years/

Robertson, M. “Darmstadtium.” Royal Society of Chemistry, 2017. Retrieved from: http://www.rsc.org/periodic-table/element/110/darmstadtium

The Global Trees Campaign. “Threatened Trees, Wollemi Pine.” Fauna and Flora International, 2017. Retrieved from: https://globaltrees.org/threatened-trees/trees/wollemi-pine/

South African History Online. “The Nelson Mandela Presidency – 1994 to 1999.” South African History Online Towards a People’s History, August 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/nelson-mandela-presidency-1994-1999

History of Vaccines. “The History of Vaccines, All Timelines Overview.” The College of Physicians of Philadelphia Birthplace of American Medicine, 2019. Retrieved from: https://www.historyofvaccines.org/timeline#EVT_100340

Bort, J. “No Google. No Netflix. No iPhone. This is What Tech Was Like in 1994.” Business Insider, August 2014. Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-in-1994-the-year-the-web-was-born-2014-8

Today we honor Lucy Wills, the woman who created prenatal vitamins.

Lucy Wills, born in Birmingham, England in 1888, she studied botany and geology and received a certificate in 1911. In 1915 she enrolled in The London School of Medicine for Women and legally became a medical practitioner in 1920, earning her bachelor degrees in medicine and science.

In 1928, she did research about pregnant women and anemia and realized that the Bombay women had a correlation between their dietary habits and likelihood of their becoming anemic during pregnancy. Ultimately, her studies suggested that a vitamin deficiency was to blame.

Her discovery was the first step toward creation of folic acid. For many years it was the Wills Factor until folic acid was named in 1941 when it was isolated from spinach.

Now the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now recommends that women take 400 micrograms of folic acid are taken every day.

May 10, 1888 – April 16, 1964

Happy Birthday Lucy Wills and Thank You for all that you did for women and their babies!

Source: https://www.cnet

.com/news/google-doodle-honors-lucy-wills-pioneering-prenatal-care-researcher/

Pic Source: https://www.google.com/

Google Doodle

Honoring The Two-Time Nobel Prize Winner Marie Curie On Her 144th Birthday!

To honor one of the most enduringly inspiring scientists ever to grace a lab, France and Poland declared 2011 to be the Year of Marie Curie.

Now, Google joins the welcome pageant of prominent tributes.

The California company’s search-engine home page on Nov. 7 celebrates the 144th anniversary of Madame Curie’s birth with a pastel-colored “Google Doodle” so evocative of her era.

Curie is the latest science figure to join Google’s pantheon of “Doodled” researchers, including Thomas Edison and “father of genetics” Gregor Mendel and “Vitamin C” scientist Albert Szent-Györgyi.

The laurels accorded Curie are numerous and still accumulating a century after she won her second Nobel Prize — the first of only two people ever to win the prize in multiple fields (the other being Linus Pauling). She was also the first woman ever to win the Nobel, and the first researcher to win in multiple sciences (physics and chemistry). But the breadth and depth and influence of her career — as well as the triumphs and tragedies of her life — paint a much fuller picture of the groundbreaking figure who in a 2009 New Scientist poll was voted “the most inspirational woman in science.”

Born in Warsaw in 1867 as Maria Sklodowska, Curie left her native Poland after she was deemed too poor to marry her would-be fiance, future esteemed mathematician Kazimierz Zorawski. So with her sister’s help, she relocated to France in the 1890s, studying at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) and meeting her scientific “soulmate,” Pierre Curie. As they both studied the science of magnetism, they discovered, too, their own personal magnetic attraction.

Together, Marie and Pierre Curie did pioneering work in radioactivity (a term she coined), working with uranium, isolating radioactive isotopes and discovering the elements radium and polonium — the latter named for her native land.

The Curies shared in the 1903 Nobel for physics, bringing them fame as side by side, they grew their professional and personal lives. They had two daughters before Pierre’s untimely death when he was struck by a horse-drawn vehicle on a rainy street in 1906.

Rendered “wretched” and lonely by the tragedy, Marie Curie poured herself into her work, becoming the first woman to become a Sorbonne professor. In 1911, Curie received her second Nobel, this time for chemistry.

Several years later, during World War I, Curie helped set up mobile field hospitals that featured primitive X-ray equipment to help detect shrapnel in soldiers. She worked in the field with her teenage daughter Irene, who — with her husband, Frederic Joliot-Curie — would later win the 1935 chemistry Nobel for her work on artificial radioactivity.

Exposed to so many radioactive materials throughout her career, Marie Curie died of aplastic anemia in 1934.

In addition to her many honors, she founded the Curie Institutes in France and Poland; co-founded the Warsaw Radium Institute; and headed the Pasteur Institute.

Curie’s accomplishments in the lab led to her being interred (with her husband) at the Pantheon, Paris — the first woman so honored based on her work.

Curie helped forever change not only how science thought about radioactivity, but also how the world perceived women in science.

Happy birthday, Madame Curie.
Watch the Live Google Doodle Here