Category: Discoveries

The first Briton in space was Yorkshire-born Dr. Helen Sharman (1963-) in 1991, who spent eight days in the Russian space station, Mir, in orbit above the Earth. The second Briton, Major Tim N. Peake (1972-) from Sussex spent 186 days in the International Space Station from December 2015 to June 2016. He had previously been in the British Army Air Corps and was a helicopter pilot before training at the European Space Agency.

He was able to set up or contribute to more than 250 experiments during his 3,000 orbits of the Earth. Most of these are long-term. Some, like his rocket seeds experiment, are aimed at getting schoolchildren interested and involved. Major Peake has been a leading figure in new school projects designed for the STEM subjects ~ science, technology, engineering and mathematics ~ in the hope that they will inspire British youngsters to take up careers in space technology in the future.

(Top image: NASA Johnson at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC 2.0)

The British Antarctic Survey (BAS), who operate in research stations in the British Antarctic Territory, published their discovery of the ‘hole’ in the ozone layer in 1985. They had been taking measurements since 1957 on the same piece of equipment and were therefore confident in the readings which showed a drop in the Dobson Units (DU) from 300 to 220 ~ this constituted the ‘hole’.

Following their discovery with its global implications, the countries of the world have apparently united to reduce the amount of harmful gases emitted and the situation is improving little by little. Provided this continues, the ozone layer should have recovered in fifty years’ time.

(Image of BAS plane: Rob Hodgkins at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 2.0)

The Loch Ness Monster, or ‘Nessie’ as she is affectionately known, has long been a draw for tourists to the Inverness area of the Scottish Highlands. This is in spite of the only evidence for her existence being a few blurry long-distance photographs which have apparently been shown to be fakes.

Loch Ness is the UK’s largest lake by volume, being 23 miles long, a mile wide and 755 feet deep. Its sides and bottom are smooth, making it the perfect shape for the phenomenon of tidal bores and seiches, like an enormous lava wave motion machine. Some scientists say that the wind sets off the back-and-forth movement of the water, others that it is a tidal effect from the adjacent North Sea which lifts the British Isles up and down all the time.

Modern wave tanks can be used to demonstrate how these wave motions create shapes which might appear to be huge sea creatures. However, the mystery surrounding the shy, solitary creature remains and scientists continue to come up with new methods of investigation. For instance, in 1987 they methodically swept the loch with sonar and in 2018 there was a search of all DNA in the Loch. Nessie eludes them all.

(Top image of Loch Ness: David Dixon at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-NC 2.0)

The 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine recognised three men whose efforts brought about the production of the world’s first antibiotic, namely penicillin. This was first used during World War 2 and it saved the lives of thousands of wounded soldiers by attacking the cell structure of bacteria.

The first of the three men was Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), who was born in Ayrshire. In his research work at St Mary’s Hospital in London, he had accidentally left some petri dishes out during a short absence in 1928 and returned to find a mould around which there were no bacteria.

Although he continued to work on his discovery and published a paper about it, there was not much interest until émigrés Sir Howard Walter Florey (1898-1968) and Sir Ernst Boris Chain (1906-79), working together at Oxford University, found that it could be used to combat disease. This was in the early 1940s and since then, many other antibiotics have been developed to meet high demand. However, bacteria can adapt and there are now public information campaigns warning of over-use.

(Top image of portrait of Sir Alexander Fleming: jenikirbyhistory.getarchive.net / Public domain)

In late December 1980 there occurred the world’s best-documented UFO incident in Rendlesham Forest in Suffolk. This was the site of the twin bases of RAF Woodbridge and RAF Bentwaters. Although British police attended the UFO landing site afterwards, we are reliant on the statements of US Air Force (USAF) personnel who were stationed there. The most senior of these was Lt Col Charles Halt:

As well as strange lights, there was an actual craft which had landed in the forest. This craft was triangular, made of something akin to black glass, with strange hieroglyphics on the side. One of the USAF men touched it and after a short while it rose slowly and disappeared. Some saw a craft on a subsequent night sending down pencil beams of light. Some of these seemed to be directed towards the nuclear weapons that were apparently being stored there.

These craft were tracked on radar and there were scorch marks and broken branches at the landing site. Nevertheless, there are those who dismiss the incident as a hoax. Nick Pope, who worked for the UK Ministry of Defence UFO section in the 1990s, gives his conclusions here.

(Image: Tim Marchant at geograph.org.uk / CC BY-SA 2.0)

Dolly the sheep became famous for being the first publicly known mammal to be cloned. This caused much controversy, as it was seen as a precedent to cloning humans. Dolly was born on 5th July 1996 at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh and was euthanised on 14th February 2003 after contracting lung cancer. She had also suffered from arthritis.

Sir John Gurdon (1933-), who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2012, carried out the first investigations into removing the nuclei from adult somatic cells and transplanting them into embryonic cells. He experimented on frogs, but the research team headed by Professors Keith Campbell (1954-2012) and Sir Ian Wilmut (1944-, pictured above with Dolly) decided to go one further and use sheep.

The team implanted their modified embryo into a surrogate mother sheep of a breed that has black faces. Dolly had the white face of her donor mother’s breed, proving the success of the nucleus transplant. Dolly spent her life at the Institute and had six lambs, by normal means. Her preserved body is on display at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh.

(Top image: courtesy of the Roslin Institute, University of Edinburgh / CC0)

British archaeologist, Howard Carter (1874-1939), born in London, discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings in 1922. With financial support from Lord Carnarvon, Carter had been meticulously searching for five years. He had excavated only workers’ huts up to that point, but this led to the eventual unearthing of sixteen steps leading downwards…

Lord Carnarvon and his daughter hurried from England to be at the opening. They found that robbers had been there twice, many centuries before. Nevertheless, there were still masses of items, which took several months to catalogue. Carter described the scene as resembling “a gigantic game of spillikins”. The next door to be opened was to the actual burial chamber and it was there that they found Tutankhamun’s untouched mummy.

(Top image of replica mask: Bluesnap at pixabay.com)

The ‘crop circle‘ phenomenon began in the 1970s on the farmlands of south-west England, particularly in Wiltshire. It continues to this day. A great number of them are created by pranksters using ropes and boards to flatten the crops of wheat, barley or oil-seed rape. The stalks are snapped at the base, making this activity a costly and stressful one for the farmers.

However, there are some crop circles ~ or crop formations ~ that are equally stressful but more of a mystery, since there is evidence of extreme heat or electro-magnetic vibrations having been applied, causing chemical changes in the stalks. They do not snap at the base, but stretch and bend.

Most of the designs are mathematical and some investigators have said that they are expressing messages to mankind, either from the planet Earth itself or from the extra-terrestrials that are said to be visiting it.

(Image: Frank Da Silva at Flickr.com / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) closed its telephone hotline for the reporting of UFO sightings in 2009. This was perhaps partly because they were finding it difficult to cope with the increasing numbers of mobile phone videos being submitted for analysis.

Today, UFO sightings (UAP is the modern acronym: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) can be reported to organisations such as BUFORA ~ the British UFO Research Association. Of course, many people simply post their videos on social media and/or contact their local newspaper.

The MoD has released thousands of UFO sighting records in recent years. Most of these indicate that they were mistaken for man-made objects or weather phenomena. However, around 5% could not be explained away…

(Top image: Stefan-Xp at Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0)