Dystopias

There are so many novels, stories and movies belonging to this literary genre.
Give a look: http://hem.passagen.se/replikant/dystopia_categorisation.htm

In the second half of the 19th century, apart from Oscar Wilde's picture, there's the story of another portrait: The Oval Portrait written by E.A. Poe in 1850.

What are the similarities and/or the differences that strike your attention?
Replay your comment.

Heinrich Rudolf Hertz and radio waves

Something about Rudolf Hertz....

Luca Libertini

The first machine gun or "Gatling Gun"

Richard Gatling is the american inventor who, in 1861, designed the first machine gun, and he patented it in 1862.

It’s not casual that this weapon was invented at the beginning of the American Civil War: infact it was been used by the Union Army.

This mechanism presented a single firing chamber connecting to multiple barrels, each barrel rotating into place for a single round before rotating out again to cool off.

The system allows higher rates of fire without overheating the barrel.

Alberto Giusti

Cocaine and ether

THE USE OF COCAINE AND ETHER AS ANAESTHETIC

COCAINE
The first discovered local anaesthetic has been cocaine, a natural compound isolated by the coca’s leaf. In a first moment these leaves were used by the people from Peru to work tireless. The cocaine was isolated in 1860 and used like anaesthetic in 1884 by Karl Kohler.


Cocaine's chemical formula

But cocaine is very toxic and cause addiction. So similar molecule was synthesized with collateral and less serious effect such as “procaine” and “lidocaine”. In Australia it is currently prescribed as a local anesthetic for conditions such as mouth and lung ulcers .
Today cocaine is considered an illegal drug. The effects of the substance occur more or less rapidly and consist mainly of:
Effects psychotropic
Distortion and cognitive capabilities receptive, feeling increased perceptions
Accentuation responsiveness physical and mental
Reduction of fatigue
Reduction of sleep and the feeling of hunger
Euphoria
Physiological Effects
Increased heart rate
Increased left ventricular contractility
Increased blood pressure
Iper-production of adrenaline
Increased production of endothelin
Decreased production of nitric oxide
Speeding up the process atherosclerotic, with considerable risk of thrombosis, myocardial infarction and permanent damage to the cardio vascular system.
Hypertension Long-term effects
Depression, anxiety, insomnia, irritability, paranoia and other psychosis
Weight loss
Destruction of the immune system
Nasal septal rupture in the event of repeated borrowing by intranasally
Impotence
Overdose
Agitation, hostility, hallucinations, seizures, hyperthermia, stroke, muscular paralysis and respiratory death.


ETHER

The pharmacist Craword Long was the first to use ether in a operation. In 1842 he used ether to take away a tumour of the neck. The patient remained amazed when he noticed that he didn’t feel pain. The operation costed 2 dollar. It was born modern anaesthesia, a very important chapter in the chemical history.


Craword Long

Vannucchi Francesco

Koch and Cholera Bacillus

Robert Koch was born at Clausthal, in Germany, in 1843 and in 1866 he got a degree in medicine.

In 1883 Koch was send in Egypt as the leader of the German Cholera Commission. There he discovered the vibrio that causes cholera (Vibrio cholerae asiaticae) and brought back pure cultures of it to Germany. He also studied cholera in India.

In 1884 he isolated cholera’s vibrio.

He analysed the infection modalities, established the rules to control the cholera’s epidemics and formed the basis of the methods of control which are still used today.

For his work on cholera a price of 100,000 Marks was awarded to him.

In 1905 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine and died on May of 1910 in Baden Baden.

Andrea Antico

Morse

Something about Morse!

Leonardi Luca

a bit of Maths

Dont' you know anything about Mr Boole? Here you can study in depth his theory.

Lodà Bianca

Edison

Interested in Edison? Just give a look...

Valentina Rizzo

Charles Darwin...

the new Theory of Evolution

and more information about his studies!

Beatrice Zanella

the Hedonistic philosophy in The Picture of Dorian Gray

In Chapter 11 there is a passage in which Dorian's hedonistic philophy is fully stated, both in theory and in practice.

...For the wonderful beauty that had so fascinated Basil Hallward, and many others besides him, seemed never to leave him. Even those who had heard the most evil things against him -- and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs -- could not believe anything to his dishonour when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual.

Often, on returning home from one of those mysterious and prolonged absences that gave rise to such strange conjecture among those who were his friends, or thought that they were so, he himself would creep upstairs to the locked room, open the door with the key that never left him now, and stand, with a mirror, in front of the portrait that Basil Hallward had painted of him, looking now at the evil and aging face on the canvas, and now at the fair young face that laughed back at him from the polished glass. The very sharpness of the contrast used to quicken his sense of pleasure. He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with minute care, and sometimes with a monstrous and terrible delight, the hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead or crawled around the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more horrible, the signs of sin or the signs of age. He would place his white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs.

There were moments, indeed, at night, when, lying sleepless in his own delicately scented chamber, or in the sordid room of the little ill-famed tavern near the docks which, under an assumed name and in disguise, it was his habit to frequent, he would think of the ruin he had brought upon his soul with a pity that was all the more poignant because it was purely selfish. But moments such as these were rare. That curiosity about life which Lord Henry had first stirred in him, as they sat together in the garden of their friend, seemed to increase with gratification. The more he knew, the more he desired to know. He had mad hungers that grew more ravenous as he fed them.

Yet he was not really reckless, at any rate in his relations to society. Once or twice every month during the winter, and on each Wednesday evening while the season lasted, he would throw open to the world his beautiful house and have the most celebrated musicians of the day to charm his guests with the wonders of their art. His little dinners, in the settling of which Lord Henry always assisted him, were noted as much for the careful selection and placing of those invited, as for the exquisite taste shown in the decoration of the table, with its subtle symphonic arrangements of exotic flowers, and embroidered cloths, and antique plate of gold and silver. Indeed, there were many, especially among the very young men, who saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them he seemed to be of the company of those whom Dante describes as having sought to "make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty." Like Gautier, he was one for whom "the visible world existed."

And, certainly, to him life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious fopperies.

The Preface to The PIcture of Dorian Gray

The Preface to The Picture of Dorian Grey appeared in the 1891 final edition of the novel and was first published as an essay in a literary magazine.

It states that Art must have no moral aim and is to be used to celebrate beauty and the sensorial pleasures.

OSCAR WILDE

PREFACE to THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1891)

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book.
Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass.
The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved.
No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style.
No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything.
Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art.
Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art.
From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type.
All art is at once surface and symbol.
Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.
Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.
Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital.
When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless.

about The Importance of Being Earnest

The play's extraordinary success may be due to the fact that it transforms life's unpleasant realities into higly enjoyable witticism, in a world where MISSING BABIES and FALSE IDENTITIES can be funny and hurt no one.
It is a world without MORAL because nothing really harmful can happen, there are non crimes and so non punishments. All ends happily...and on a wonderful PUN on the importance of being "earnest/Ernest"!

Do you agree?

The story of Aspirin

Aspirin, or acetylsalicylic acid, is a salicylic drug used as an analgesic, antipyretic and as an anti-inflammatory. Low doses of aspirin prevent hearth attacks and blood clot formation in people at high risk for developing blood clots.

Gastrointestinal distress, ulcers and stomach bleeding are the principle side effects of the Aspirin. This medicine has another adverse effect: it increased bleeding in menstruating women.

The medicals discovered that in small dose aspirin had anticoagulant properties.
Aspirin was the first drug known as not steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

History

In the 5th century B.C Hippocrates wrote about an extracted from willow bark that reduce fevers, pains and aches.

The Cherokee and other Native Americans used an infusion of the bark for fever and other medicinal purposes for centuries.

In 1763 the Reverend Edward Stone noted that the bark of the willow was effective in lessening a fever.

In 1828 Henri Leroux, together Raffaele Piria, an Italian chemist, isolated in crystalline form the active extract of the bark.


In 1897 Felix Hoffman, a chemist at Friedrich Bayer & CO, obtained acetylsalicylic acid by a reaction of salicylic acid and acetic anhydride. He was the first who synthesized medically forms of Heroin and Aspirin.


Trademark issue

The name aspirin was invented by Bayer company of Germany. The name Aspirin is composed of A- from acetylated, -SPIR- from the plant genus Spirea and –IN, a common, easily ending for drug names at the time.
After the first world war the Bayer company lost the claim to use the brand “Aspirin” after that the allies invaded and resold its properties. The claim to use the brand Aspirin in United States was brought by Sterling Drug Inc.
In 1921 a sentence of Federal Court of U.S.A ruled Aspirin as a generic name, not as a brand.

andrea biagioni

appendicitis

Here's Reginald Herbert Fitz and appendicitis!

caterina stera

Guglielmo Marconi

That's my work on Marconi!

silvia vecchio

Louis Pasteur

That has always been one of my interests....Pasteur!

andrea vidili


http://picasaweb.google.com/ilaria.salvadori/LouisPasteur/photo#s5153432109240556290

The Lumiere Brothers

Are you interested in cinema?
What do you know about its origins?
Just give a look at these slides.....


beatrice del bianco



http://picasaweb.google.com/ilaria.salvadori/TheLumiereBrothers/photo#s5153426942394898898