My Science School

Edward Jenner was an English surgeon, who discovered a vaccination for smallpox. It is in fact, the world's first vaccine. Edward Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire on 1749. It was a time when on the one side, there were 'surgeons who simply acquired their medical knowledge through apprenticeship and on the other there were academically-trained doctors. Jenner became one of the former types. At the age of 14, he was apprenticed by a local surgeon, where he gained most of the experience needed to become a surgeon himself. On completing his apprenticeship at the age of 21, he went to London and became the house pupil of Dr. John Hunter, at St. George's Hospital. After studying in London from 1770 to 1773, he returned to Berkeley and spent the rest of his career as a doctor in his native town.

Jenner was a lover of Nature from a very young age and he had other interests apart from medicine. Besides practising medicine and spreading medical knowledge, he played the violin, wrote poetry, observed birds and collected fossils.

Famous experiment Smallpox was widespread across Europe at the time and one of the main causes of high death rate. After observing that cowpox infection seemed to protect humans against smallpox, Jenner carried out his now famous experiment on eight-year-old Phipps in May 1796. Jenner inoculated the boy with cowpox pustule from a blister on the hand of an English milkmaid. The boy developed mild symptoms of cowpox, but was not severely affected. On July 1, 1796, Jenner inoculated the boy again, this time with smallpox matter. But the boy did not develop smallpox. Jenner experimented on several other children, including his own 11-month-old son. Jenner subsequently proved that having been inoculated with cowpox Phipps was immune to smallpox. In 1798, Jenner, published a book titled An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae. Jenner coined the word vaccine from the Latin ‘vacca’ for cow.

Unfavourable responselenner’s method of vaccination against smallpox was not received favourably. He was even ridiculed. But with subsequent research by others in the field, Jennars method grew in popularity. The death rate from smallpox plunged due to vaccination. Cowpox served as a natural vaccine until the modern smallpox vaccine emerged in the 19th century. Jenner received worldwide recognition and many honours. He did follow his other passion of fossil collection and horticulture. About 150 years after Jenner's death in 1823, smallpox was totally eradicated.

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Scientists have stumbled across a decades-old recording of an Australian musk duck which was able to reproduce sounds and speech, according to an AFP report. It could imitate the noise of a door slamming and someone muttering the phrase. "You bloody fool". Searching through archives, biologist Carel ten Cate found an eerie 1987 recording of "Ripper", a musk duck hand-raised at the

Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, near Canberra. "You bloody fool," the duck says, over and over, dropping the "1", which is apparently hard for ducks to pronounce. Males of the species emit a musky odour which is what gives them their name.

The recordings had been kept in a sound archive and referenced occasionally until Ten Cate rediscovered them in the course of his research on vocal learning in birds. Ten Cate said Ripper had a bit more in his repertoire – he could also make a noise like the sound of a door closing and its latch clicking.

Some species of animals, and notably birds such as parrots and songbirds, are capable of mimicking human speech. But the phenomenon is rare – if somewhat more common in animals raised by humans. “To find a species quite outside these groups…in a duck, that’s quite extraordinary. So it’s an independent evolutionary occurrence of the ability for vocal learning – that’s very special,” Ten Cate said.

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Grace Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral, who created a computer programming technology that paved the way for modern data processing. A mathematical genius, she helped device UNIVAC 1, the first commercial electronic computer, and naval applications for COBOL

Grace Murray Hopper was born in 1906 in New York. Hopper went to Yale University to earn her Masters. Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar College in 1931 and received her Ph.D from Yale in 1934.

In 1943, Hopper quit teaching and joined the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service). She was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant. She served on the Mark I programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Mark I was the first large-scale automatic calculator and a precursor to electronic computers.

In 1946, Hopper wrote a manual of operations for the automatic sequence-controlled calculator, which described how to operate Mark I. It was the first extensive guidance of how to program a computer. Hopper continued her programming work with the Mark II and Mark III computers.

She is credited with coining the word "bug" to describe an unusual computer failure.

In 1949, Hopper joined the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation (later the Sperry Corporation), where she worked on the UNIVAC I. In 1952, Hopper created the first compiler for modern computers, a program that translates instructions written by a programmer into codes that can be read by a computer. Hopper went on to develop the FLOW-MATIC computer programming language in 1957 and shortly after, pioneered the Common Business Oriented Language (COBOL). Hopper retired from the U.S. Navy Reserve in 1986 and was then hired as a senior consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, a position she retained until her death in 1992, at age 86. She received many awards for her contribution to computer programming and technology, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1991).

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