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Along time, society's life has changed, and progress is a natural tendency of humanity. There are some great people who changed whole world's lifestyle with their inventions, and just wondering how life would be without their ideas brings strange answers. Nowadays we live at one-click distance from almost everything we need, our lives are part of this informational society, and we are more and more surrounded by gadgets, devices and machines which make our work easier and facilitate entertainment.
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We all have a mobile phone in our pockets but how would we have communicated if Graham Bell wouldn't have thought of this ""apparatus for transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically", which anyway, has changed very much along time. The first transmission (bi-directional) of clear speech was made in 1876, between Bell and Watson, and the words "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you." remained in history as the first words transmitted by telephone. In the beginning the Gray transmitter, based on liquid, was used, but it was not practical for the products designed for commercial purposes, so in time the system changed.

The first telephone call was made in 1876, as I said, from Bell's home in Ontario (Brantford), to his assistant located in Paris, Ontario, at about 10 miles (16 Kms) distance. Bell can be compared in inventions' history to Henry Ford, because he was not the first one to experiment this kind of transmissions, but he managed to design a commercial version for this "device" and he was a pioneer in introducing his invention into a commercial system and somehow we can say that telephone industry was set up by A.G. Bell.



Getting closer to our days, the concept of cellular phones appeared in 1947 and it is strongly linked to car mobile phones' functioning system. The inventor of the first modern portable handset is Martin Cooper, a former manager of Motorola, which made the first call on such a portable phone in 1973. He made the call to Bell Labs head of research, who was in the same time his rival, because they were working on research for the same device. Motorola incorporated this technology into a portable device, which had been designed for car use. In 1977, Bell Labs, the rivals, constructed the prototype for this cellular system, and one year later, they offered the device to 2000 trial customers. In Tokyo, 1979, the first telephone system operated and in 1981 Motorola and American Radio started a telephone test system, in U.S.A., but in Washington and Baltimore area. The first American analog cellular service was made available in 1983 by Ameritech. By 1987, cellular telephone industry reached one million subscribers, and the airways became more and more crowded with radio transmissions.



So, since 1947, when the first concept of mobile phone appeared, and until 1987 when there was already a market created with a substantial number of subscribers, have passed 40 years. This means that inventions take time to integrate into people's life and to really become something usual for them. And since 1987, the standards for transmissions developed continuously and today we have reached the wireless networks level, which offers us the possibility to be connected permanently to a carrier network, and also the phones have been developed so much that they differ a lot from the initial telephone concept. Of course, they still have the same main purpose: voice calls, but plenty of features have been added.

I think that electricity is another important invention which changed a lot humans' lifestyle and made a lot of things easier. Think about not having electricity for a day...no, it's enough not to have electricity and we are wasted. A lot of appliances work based on electricity, and the era of mechanical force has gone. Electricity is the engine both for our work and entertainment. Electricity is one of the basic elements in nature, and currently it is the most widely used form of energy. The electricity is the secondary energy source, converted from other sources, like coal, gas, oil, and other primary sources. Before the point electricity was introduced in common life, 100 years ago, people lit their houses with kerosene lamps, and they did not use refrigerators to conserve foods...they cooled food in iceboxes. The rooms were warmed by burning wood or by using stoves with burning coal. Light bulb's invention brought electricity in people's houses, and since then, electricity has been used in a very large variety of industries, and it is the main engine who runs our lives right now. It is interesting how to think about how life would have been if we didn't have any resources to power our laptops and be connected every second, like we are now.



The first digital computer was invented by Shannon, in 1940, and represented the start point for all the programmable devices which surround us today. The first operational computer was created by Zuse in 1941, and its name was Z3, but only in 1977 the personal computer entered the market with a commercial purpose. It was a entertaining tool, and it also helped financial calculations, but it also boosted creative work efficiency. We use it now for social networking, watching high definition movies, listening to music, finding recipes for our favorite foods, and sometimes, we use it for working. The history in this domain was written by companies and people like: Apple, Intel, IBM, Microsoft, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and many others who had smaller or bigger contributions for this industry's development. Internet and all the industries Internet-related have also changed so much our lifestyle, that I am watching and studying how common gestures and activities like clicking, browsing, blogging, e-commerce have become and their fast evolution is happening in front of our eyes.



There are much more inventions which changed humanity and which I didn't mention here, but we wouldn't like to forget about Flemmings, who discovered penicillin, the invention of micro wave oven, which we should thank Percy LeBaron Spencer for, and many cool inventions!

If you were the type of kid that would get in trouble all the time, because you blew things up or mixed the wrong chemical elements, and if now you have a child who is like you in your early ages, or if you just have a boring job, which makes you miss a lot the childhood days? You can try some scientist websites which will make your time pass faster, and entertain you in an "academical" manner. You can unleash the mad scientist inside you and you can try having fun with experiments, at home.
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Evil Mad Scientist website has as motto “Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a Time”, and they present weekly a do it yourself project, which are more advanced than those presented on the old website. This means that you will have to go and purchase some things to create the projects they present on the website, but the ideas are pretty cool and they stimulate your creativity. Another similar website, which offers a lot of do it yourself project is Joey Green's Mad Scientist Experiments website; there, Joey Green offers hundreds of unknown uses for well known products, which means a lot of innovation. The science experiment section is a treasure, and if offers hundreds of interesting and entertaining experiments to do at home.

If you want to host a mad scientist party there is a website which offers you all the information you have to know about hosting this kind of parties, beginning with invitations and ending with an evil eye cake. If you and your friends gather at such parties, there is a website where you can send the results of your experiments. The Public Broadcasting Service hosts a popular kids show, Zoom Science, and it associates the website fun with the experiments on the screen, and it also allows you to contribute with your experiments' results.Steve Spangler also performs experiments for a local TV show, and he also uploads them on the website. The website features funny and simple experiments, and be sure that you will find there experiments for the mad scientist inside you.



An interesting new type of websites is "ask a scientist" type, which relies on experts to offer answers to questions submitted by people on the website. These are very useful resources for projects where you will use a lot of technology information, and you want to use it correctly. Teachers have learnt to check if the projects are copied from the Internet, and now they appreciate more and more originality and creativity. Getting an expert's answer in your homework could somehow be construed as cheating, but I see asking an expert a very mature and correct source of getting information. Even if you could read an entire book to find out Einstein's equation's history, it is infinite easier to ask an expert a specific question which will elucidate all the mystery around the topic you are interested in.



This kind of websites might receive daily few hundreds of questions, so don't expect to get an answer in the first five minutes after you post the question on the website. It is very important for the experts to have time to get exact information about the matter you are interested in, because it is obvious that they are not ambulant encyclopaedias and they also need time to give accurate answers.There is a tremendous amount of information available on the web, and most people don't find the information they need because they can't properly use a search engine.  Wikipedia-like projects are great ideas of general knowledge, and they offer a very vast amount of useful information, but there are errors too. It is very important to use the proper keyword when looking up for information on Internet. If all these community knowledge wikis can't help you find the info you need, you can choose an "ask a scientist" website, but make this decision carefully, in order to get the best answers for your questions. It is important to choose a website with well prepared experts, who have studied a lot in interest domain.



The best "ask a scientist"websites are those run by government, special domain agencies or universities. There are a lot of websites associated to publications. There are also science websites which present daily news and progress in technology around the world or in specific areas.

Thinking about passing of time, we can easily observe that life, now, is very different than life 50, 20, and even 10 years ago. Making an analogy, we can ask ourselves which will be future's or present's inventions that will change our lives, like Internet, telephone or car did along time.

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I think that one of the most possible invention to be seen in the closest future are microscopic robots, which could be able to fight infections in our bodies and also clean our homes by unwanted bacterias and viruses. I would like very much to see the development of artificial organs as soon as possible, because this will help a lot people in need of a transplant, but who don't have donors. These artificial organs are much closer than we think that they are, and I hope this will be developed in the closest future.

Food caplets could allow someone to eat a full meal in a few seconds, and the companies in the pharmaceutical industry are working to develop these caplets, containing the optimum number of calories someone needs daily. I think that this will influence not only human activity directly, by transforming the time we spend for eating in an empty period of time, but it would be interesting to see how the retail and the public alimentation sectors will evolve.

Solar power is just a source of electricity now, but it is not quite economical for the production of electricity, because the costs are too high. Scientists are expecting a breakthrough in this field, in the next 10-20 years, and a step in this research domain would help a lot the humanity in it's fight with the dependency on oil.

Phone, from its simple basic, initial concept has been so much changed in time, that we can't except this device to stagnate its evolution. In the future it would be nice to see that your cell phone has an integrated carbon monoxide detector, or a health diagnosis software. Also, there are voices that suggest that phones will become smaller, lighter, simpler.

There is a hope for the blind too, because instead of tapping to find an object, they could use an ultrasounds detector device, built to provide warnings and advice in walking on the right path.

A very interesting invention, for which I am very anxious too see it working, would be some sort of device which could work on the 'plug and play' principle, and it could transfer information directly into our brains. I think that now, people are using so little of the huge capacity of the brain, and this device would minimize people's efforts for processing and memorizing information.

We are dreaming about a lot of these cool inventions for the future, and making a small trip into the past and remembering how older computers took 400 square feet large rooms to function properly, and seeing how they changed over time, we can be more are more sure about the desires we have about our future life.

A symbol is something that represents another "something", by association or by resemblance. The symbol can be a material object, a written sign,a sound, usually used to represent something which is invisible in some situations. Language is a system of symbols, and we use it to communicate. Words are symbols and the letters from the word "table" represent in the same time a sound and an object.

Symbols are used in many fields of society's activity and for example, the symbols used in mathematics can represent numbers or operations. Some common mathematical symbols are used very often by billions of people every day. Plus for addition, minus for substraction, we write "pi" instead of the number 3.14159, a transcendental number, and many other symbols.

Political symbolism represents standpoints, and can be a banner, an acronym, a picture, a motto or a flag. I think it is obvious that these political symbols often evoke strong emotions and that they have a strong link to the national feeling, patriotism, or like in Nazi case, a link to a hatred and anger feeling.

Colours are also important in symbolism, and their sense depends on the location and the type of civilization you are in. For example, the combination of red, white and blue is the symbol for American things, green is the color for environmentally friendly elements, black represents sadness and mourning, but, I repeat, they all depend on the place you are.

Along time, symbolism lost some spiritual aspects from the original heritage, and now symbols are very easily used in many non-ocult activities, like marketing for example. In marketing symbols are directly linked to branding, and for a company it is very important to imprint it's name/symbol/logo in people's mind.

Symbols have been very well integrated into the online life of people, and many symbols are part of someone's lifestream. The short definition of lifestream is "a chronological aggregated view of your life activities both online and offline". A lot of people use symbols as avatars for their accounts, on various social network communities, they print them on their clothes, they use symbols to represent an inner aspect of their personality.



I think symbolism is very important because it offers us a simple alternative to express some complicated aspects in one's life, or in one field. And how the simple relation Einstein wrote about relativity means a lot more than 5 characters, we should think that all symbols we see around us mean much more than that. Each symbol has a story and a meaning.

Science experiments are funny and entertaining for childreen and not only. Even adults, which have chemistry or life sciences as a passion like to do from time to time an experiment, to have fun and enlarge their knowledge about something specific. Some people have a special room for these experiments, a minilab, and they even wear Dexter model glasses when they make experiments.

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Science is indeed complicated, but this is what makes it exciting, next to the challenges it offers us. For many people is very cool to see at a much smaller scale how are the things around them created, like: soap or electricity, and some others are interested in the vapor-compression cycle.

I thought about something one day: how is the DNA extracted from every alive being on this Earth? and is it possible to make this process in a simpler an more rudimentary way, so we can have fun at home, looking at a DNA molecule.



For this experiment, you need a DNA source, like spinach, broccoli, anything alive. For this experiment we'll take as an example spinach.It's better to use vegetables, because it's science is not that painful when you use them, comparing to the moments you kill the bugs in the garden and try to extract DNA from them.

The first step is to put in a blender 100 mg of spinach, 1/8 teaspoon table salt, which is less than 1 ml and a cup of cold water, no more than 200 ml. After you blend on high speed for 15 seconds, pour the created soup through a strainer in another container, and add 2 tablespoons of liquid detergent. Swirl to mix, and then let it sit for no more than 10 minutes. Then, put the mixture created into test tubes, each 1/3 full. Next step is to add some enzymes in each test tube, and to stir gently, trying not to break up the DNA. You can use meat tenderizer, and if you don't find, you can use pineapple juice or contact lens cleaning solution.

Now you should add rubbing alcohol (70-95% ethyl alcohol or isopropyl) and you should pour until you have the same amount of alcohol as the spinach mixture. Taking into account that alcohol has lower density than the water, it will float on top, and where the water and alcohol layers meet, there you will find some white stringy things. That is DNA molecule. It usually stays dissolved in water, but because you added salt in the beginning, it will be precipitated. You can use a small stick to collect it and if you want to keep it for a longer time, you should transfer it into a container filled with alcohol.



Now that you have found out the technique, you should try with other DNA sources, or with other compounds. You can change the detergent, or the alcohol, but you can make the experiment as explained here too. Many science experiments are cool and they bring scientific knowledge into your house!