Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

Stories of research and development of new technologies for environmental, economic, and social sustainability. We draw lessons for the future from tales of successes interspersed with major failures.

Alexander Fleming: a laboratory accident, penicillin and the antibiotic revolution

You learn from your mistakes, and sometimes you even win a Nobel Prize – all it takes is a bit of observation Today, our time machine takes us back to the early decades of the 1900s, a world far removed from the one we know today. The Great War killed...

Author

Luca Longo

Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

Cyril Burt, studies on hereditary intelligence and how to invent...

The encounter between a crackpot theory and Nazi eugenic theories When we speak of scientists, we imagine authoritative researchers working...

Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

The Hindawi scandal: the dark side of open-access scientific publishing

How the Wiley Group, the most prestigious publisher of scientific journals, risked its reputation In recent years, the scientific community...

Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

Dmitry Mendeleev puts them all in line (the building blocks...

What happened on the day of the greatest discovery in chemistry Earth, Water, Air, Fire. Two and a half millennia...

Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

Elena Ceaucescu: the great chemist who didn’t know what sulphuric...

Easy to be the most prestigious scientist in the world if you are the wife of a dictator If you...

Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

The Cardiff giant and the hoax that conquered America

George Hull and the plaster statue he carved and buried in a mine It is 1868, America is undergoing a...

Stories of ideas, discoveries, inventions ... and blunders

Enrico Fermi and the energy of the nucleus

The evolution of atomic power plants, from their origins to the modular reactor revolution When we think ofnuclear energy, our...