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Richard Grenfell Thomas
Richard Grenfell Thomas (29 March 1901 – 16 May 1974) was an Australian mineralogist and biochemist. He was a senior research scientist in the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), ending his career as chief of the Division of Mineral Chemistry. In 1964 he and Isabel Bear scientifically described the smell of rain, for which he coined the term "petrichor". Early life Thomas was born on 29 March 1901 in Kapunda, South Australia. He was the son of a pastoralist. As a child he became interested in minerals after exploring abandoned copper mines near his home. In later life he recalled one of his earliest experiments as placing pieces of atacamite into a fire to obtain a blue-green flame. In 1919, aged 18, Thomas participated in Herbert Basedow's medical expedition to outback South Australia and adjoining portions of Queensland. His main task was to look after the expedition's horses, while Basedow assessed the health of the local Aboriginal p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kapunda, South Australia
Kapunda is a town on the Light River near the Barossa Valley in South Australia. It was established after a discovery in 1842 of significant copper deposits. The population was 2,917 at the 2016 Australian census. The southern entrance to the town has been dominated since 1988 by the statue of Map Kernow ("the son of Cornwall"), a traditional Cornish miner. The statue was destroyed by a fire in June 2006 but was rebuilt. History Francis Dutton and Charles Bagot, who both ran sheep in the area, discovered copper ore outcrops in 1842. They purchased around the outcrop, beginning mining early in 1844 after good assay results. Mining began with the removal of surface ore and had progressed to underground mining by the end of the year. Copper was mined until 1879. There are also quarries near the town which provide fine marble ranging from dark blue to white. Marble from the Kapunda quarries was used to face Parliament House in Adelaide, and the pedestal of the statue of Ve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mark Oliphant
Sir Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant, (8 October 1901 – 14 July 2000) was an Australian physicist and humanitarian who played an important role in the first experimental demonstration of nuclear fusion and in the development of nuclear weapons. Born and raised in Adelaide, South Australia, Oliphant graduated from the University of Adelaide in 1922. He was awarded an 1851 Exhibition Scholarship in 1927 on the strength of the research he had done on mercury, and went to England, where he studied under Sir Ernest Rutherford at the University of Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory. There, he used a particle accelerator to fire heavy hydrogen nuclei (deuterons) at various targets. He discovered the respective nuclei of helium-3 (helions) and of tritium (tritons). He also discovered that when they reacted with each other, the particles that were released had far more energy than they started with. Energy had been liberated from inside the nucleus, and he realised that this was a r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Melbourne
Melbourne ( , ; Boonwurrung language, Boonwurrung/ or ) is the List of Australian capital cities, capital and List of cities in Australia by population, most populous city of the States and territories of Australia, Australian state of Victoria (state), Victoria, and the second most-populous city in Australia, after Sydney. The city's name generally refers to a metropolitan area also known as Greater Melbourne, comprising an urban agglomeration of Local Government Areas of Victoria#Municipalities of Greater Melbourne, 31 local government areas. The name is also used to specifically refer to the local government area named City of Melbourne, whose area is centred on the Melbourne central business district and some immediate surrounds. The metropolis occupies much of the northern and eastern coastlines of Port Phillip Bay and spreads into the Mornington Peninsula, part of West Gippsland, as well as the hinterlands towards the Yarra Valley, the Dandenong Ranges, and the Macedon R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ian Wark
Sir Ian William Wark (8 May 1899 – 20 April 1985) was an Australian chemist and scientific administrator. He was the recipient of the ANZAAS Medal in 1973. After his death, the Ian Wark Research Institute was established in 1994. This endeavored to support new innovative research methods with other organisations including the CSIRO. The first Director of the Institute was John Ralston , from 1994 to 2015. First published in hardcopy in the Australian Dictionary of Biography The ''Australian Dictionary of Biography'' (ADB or AuDB) is a national co-operative enterprise founded and maintained by the Australian National University (ANU) to produce authoritative biographical articles on eminent people in Australia's ..., Volume 18, (MUP), 2012 (CBE), 8 June 1963, It's an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hedley Marston
Hedley Ralph Marston FRS FAA (26 August 1900 – 25 August 1965) was an Australian biochemist who worked for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). First published in ''Australian Dictionary of Biography'', Volume 15, (MUP), 2000. Originally published in ''Records of the Australian Academy of Science'', vol. 1, no. 2, Canberra, Australia, 1967. Education Marston was born in Bordertown, South Australia and educated at Unley District High School, Adelaide, where he met Mark Oliphant. He attended the University of Adelaide but did not complete a degree due to failing Mathematics. Career Marston was appointed a demonstrator in the university's department of physiology and biochemistry after a chance meeting with Professor Thorburn Robertson in 1922. On 1 March 1928 he joined Robertson's staff in the division of animal nutrition, CSIRO, Adelaide. Marston greatly impressed Robertson, and became the division's acting-chief on Robertson's death in 19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cobalt
Cobalt is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Co and atomic number 27. As with nickel, cobalt is found in the Earth's crust only in a chemically combined form, save for small deposits found in alloys of natural meteoric iron. The free element, produced by reductive smelting, is a hard, lustrous, somewhat brittle, gray metal. Cobalt-based blue pigments (cobalt blue) have been used since antiquity for jewelry and paints, and to impart a distinctive blue tint to glass. The color was long thought to be due to the metal bismuth. Miners had long used the name ''kobold ore'' (German language, German for ''goblin ore'') for some of the blue pigment-producing minerals. They were so named because they were poor in known metals and gave off poisonous arsenic-containing fumes when smelted. In 1735, such ores were found to be reducible to a new metal (the first discovered since ancient times), which was ultimately named for the ''kobold''. Today, some cobalt is produced sp ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Calcareous
Calcareous () is an adjective meaning "mostly or partly composed of calcium carbonate", in other words, containing lime (mineral), lime or being chalky. The term is used in a wide variety of Science, scientific disciplines. In zoology ''Calcareous'' is used as an adjectival term applied to anatomical structures which are made primarily of calcium carbonate, in animals such as gastropods, i.e., snails, specifically in relation to such structures as the operculum (gastropod), operculum, the clausilium, and the love dart. The term also applies to the calcium carbonate Test (biology), tests of, often, more-or-less microscopic Foraminifera. Not all tests are calcareous; diatoms and radiolaria have siliceous tests. The molluscs are calcareous organisms, as are the Calcarea, calcareous sponges (Calcarea), that have spicules which are made of calcium carbonate. Additionally, reef-building corals, or Scleractinia, are calcareous organisms that form their rigid skeletal structure th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kangaroo Island
Kangaroo Island (, ) is Australia's third-largest island, after Tasmania and Melville Island, Northern Territory, Melville Island. It lies in the state of South Australia, southwest of Adelaide. Its closest point to the mainland is Snapper Point in Backstairs Passage, which is from the Fleurieu Peninsula. The native population of Aboriginal Australians that once occupied the island (sometimes referred to as the Kartan people) disappeared from the archaeological record sometime after the land became an island following the sea level rise, rising sea levels associated with the Last Glacial Period around 10,000 years ago. It was subsequently settled intermittently by sealers and whalers in the early 19th century, and from 1836 on a permanent basis during the British colonisation of South Australia. Since then the island's economy has been principally agricultural, with a Jasus edwardsii, southern rock lobster fishery and with tourism growing in importance. The largest town, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radium Hill
Radium Hill is a former minesite in South Australia which operated from 1906 until 1961. It was Australia's first uranium mine, years before the country's next major mines at Rum Jungle in the Northern Territory (opened in 1950), and the Mary Kathleen mine in Queensland (1958). The associated settlement which once housed up to 1,100 people is now a ghost town, largely abandoned and demolished. The former townsite and cemetery were provisionally listed on the South Australian Heritage Register on 24 August 2016. During its main period of production between 1954 and 1961 the mine produced nearly 1 million tonnes of davidite-bearing ore to produce about 860 tons of U3O8. History The site was first pegged for mining in 1906 after prospector Arthur John Smith inadvertently discovered a radioactive material at a location approximately East South East of Olary. Smith mistook the dark coloured ore he found for tin oxide or wolfram (tungsten). His samples were sent to the Univers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Scandium
Scandium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol Sc and atomic number 21. It is a silvery-white metallic d-block, d-block element. Historically, it has been classified as a rare-earth element, together with yttrium and the lanthanides. It was discovered in 1879 by spectral analysis of the minerals euxenite and gadolinite from Scandinavia. Scandium is present in most of the deposits of rare-earth and uranium compounds, but it is extracted from these ores in only a few mines worldwide. Because of the low availability and difficulties in the preparation of metallic scandium, which was first done in 1937, applications for scandium were not developed until the 1970s, when the positive effects of scandium on aluminium alloys were discovered. Its use in such alloys remains its only major application. The global trade of scandium oxide is 15–20 tonnes per year. The properties of scandium compounds are intermediate between those of aluminium and yttrium. A diagonal rela ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Vanadium
Vanadium is a chemical element; it has Symbol (chemistry), symbol V and atomic number 23. It is a hard, silvery-grey, malleable transition metal. The elemental metal is rarely found in nature, but once isolated artificially, the formation of an oxide layer (passivation (chemistry), passivation) somewhat stabilizes the free metal against further oxidation. Spain, Spanish-Mexico, Mexican scientist Andrés Manuel del Río discovered compounds of vanadium in 1801 by analyzing a new lead-bearing mineral he called "brown lead". Though he initially presumed its qualities were due to the presence of a new element, he was later erroneously convinced by French chemist Hippolyte Victor Collet-Descotils that the element was just chromium. Then in 1830, Nils Gabriel Sefström generated chlorides of vanadium, thus proving there was a new element, and named it "vanadium" after the Scandinavian goddess of beauty and fertility, Vanadís (Freyja). The name was based on the wide range of colors fo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Radium
Radium is a chemical element; it has chemical symbol, symbol Ra and atomic number 88. It is the sixth element in alkaline earth metal, group 2 of the periodic table, also known as the alkaline earth metals. Pure radium is silvery-white, but it readily reacts with nitrogen (rather than oxygen) upon exposure to air, forming a black surface layer of radium nitride (Ra3N2). All isotopes of radium are radioactive, the most stable isotope being radium-226 with a half-life of 1,600 years. When radium decays, it emits ionizing radiation as a by-product, which can excite fluorescent chemicals and cause radioluminescence. For this property, it was widely used in Self-luminous paint, self-luminous paints following its discovery. Of the Radionuclide, radioactive elements that occur in quantity, radium is considered particularly Toxicity, toxic, and it is Carcinogen, carcinogenic due to the radioactivity of both it and its immediate decay product radon as well as its tendency to B ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
