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Artificial cooling is not a particularly new technology. The practice of using ice-storehouses and iceboxes to preserve food dates back to the early 19th century. Harvesting ice in areas like New England for shipment to places like the American south and the Caribbean...

In 1908, looking to test Mendel’s theories on heredity, Thomas Hunt Morgan began studying Drosophila melanogaster (also known as the fruit fly or vinegar fly) in his “Fly Room” at Columbia University. Dr. Morgan and his students studied flies, looking for mutations,...

According to the opinion of the British Royal Society, virtually every medical achievement in the 20th century was accomplished through research requiring the use of animals. Using animals for scientific research dates back over 4,000 years to ancient Greece. In the...

Sunlight is a powerful force. The sun emits radiation across most of the electromagnetic spectrum, including significant amounts of UV radiation. Although some of the sun’s radiation is absorbed by the Earth’s atmosphere, quite a bit of it reaches the earth’s...

Protein crystallography is a technique that uses x-ray beams to visualize the structures of proteins at the atomic level. A crystal of the protein to be studied is blasted with x-rays, and the crystal structure scatters the rays into a diffraction pattern recorded on...

For several centuries, dating back to about 1750 B.C., fingerprints have been recognized as a method of identifying people. It was originally used primarily to establish ownership or identity, since a fingerprint is effectively a forge-proof signature. However, since...