100 Amazing Inventions
71. Why is it said that the invention of the ATM is a milestone in
history?
ATM:
The ATM is one of the
most popular among modern day inventions.
ATM, also known as the Automated Teller Machine, is an
electronic telecommunications device that enables the customers of a
financial institution like that of a bank, to perform financial
transactions, particularly cash withdrawal, without the need for a human
cashier, clerk or bank teller.
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Money from a ATM |
Authentication is provided by the customer entering a
personal identification number of PIN.
It is believed that there were many such devices in
many of the countries in the last century, especially one in Japan,
but little is known about the Japanese device. Luther George Simjian
has been credited popularly with developing a 'prior art
device'.
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ATM Machines |
The idea of a PIN stored on the card was developed by
a British engineer named James Goodfellow in 1965. It is widely
accepted that the first cash machine was put into use by Barclays
Bank in its Enfield Town branch in London, United Kingdom, on 27th
June 1967.
Today, the ATMs are so popular that even remote
areas are serviced by these machines. Do you know that there are
two in Antarctica?
72. What is the Large Hardon Collider?
LARGE HARDON COLLIDER:
The Large Hadron
Collider, built by CERN, is basically an atom smasher. It straddles the
borders of France and Switzerland, and is the largest, most complex
experimental facility ever built.
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Large Hardon Collider |
The Large Hadron Collider or LHC is designed to reveal the
secrets of the Universe, by recreating the conditions that existed
immediately after the Big Bang. It is the world's largest and most
powerful particle collider, and the largest single machine in the world.
It houses 9300 magnets, and fires protons and lead ions around a 27
kilometer circular tunnel.
LHC's aim is to allow physicists to test the predictions
of different theories of particle physics, high-energy physics and in
particular, to understand better the conditions that gave birth to the
Universe millions of years ago.
73. Who invented the world's thinnest glass?
THINNEST GALSS:
In 2012,
researchers at Cornell University and Germany's University of Ulm accidentally
discovered the world's thinnest glass.
They were trying to create graphene, one of the thinnest and
strongest materials in the world. Sheets of graphene are just carbon atom
thick, with those atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice.
Using an electron microscope, the researchers inspected
some 'muck' on the graphene. To their surprise, they discovered that it
was essentially a 2D sheet of common glass, made up of silicon and oxygen
atoms. They had created the world's thinnest glass that was just two atoms
thick!
The researchers observations were first described in
January 2012 in the journal Nano Letters. Though it was an accidental
discovery, the researchers say such deliberately created 2D glass could
find its way into nanotechnology, and could even one day be used in
transistors.
74. Why is the Oculus Rift a breakthrough in virtual reality?
OCULUS RIFT:
Everyone talks about
virtual reality, but do you know what it actually is? Virtual reality is an
artificial environment that is created with software, and presented to the
user in such a way that the user feels he is in a real world.
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Oculus Rift |
To enter this world, you need special goggles. The Oculus
Rift is an amazing set of virtual reality goggles. You can use them with
your gaming desktop or laptop. You just pull a helmet over your head, and
suddenly, you're inside a virtual world that seems completely
lifelike.
You can run around, fight, race, fly and play games in a
way that no one has ever done before. The Oculus Rift has a pair of
screens that displays two images side by side, one for each eye. A set
of lenses is placed on top of the panels, focusing and reshaping the
picture for each eye, and creating a stereoscopic 3D image.
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Oculus Rift |
The goggles have embedded sensors that monitor the
wearer's head motions, and adjust the image accordingly. The Oculus
Rift was developed by a virtual reality enthusiast named Palmer
Luckey.
75. Why is the Higgs Boson a scientific breakthrough?
HIGGS BOSON:
We know that all matter is made up of atoms, and
inside atoms are electrons, protons and neutrons.
They, in turn, are made up of quarks and other
subatomic particles. Scientists have long puzzled over how these
minute building blocks of the universe acquire mass.
Without mass, particles wouldn't hold together and there would be no matter.
Peter Higgs suggested that elementary particles sweep up their masses from an
invisible energy field - now known as the Higgs field - permeating space, and
the existence of a new particle, the Higgs Boson.
Many Higgs Bosons clumped together make up the
Higgs field, and it is this field that causes particles to
have mass.
Fifty years later, the world's largest
particle smasher, the LHC, buried underground near the
border of France and Switzerland proved that this tiniest of
all particles actually exists! It is known both as Higgs
Boson and the God Particle.