The year is 1943 and World War 2 is raging throughout Europe. The war is eating up the best consumer goods. Newly invented nylon is gone from stockings and winds up in parachutes. The Japanese invasion of rubber-producing countries in the Far East has cut off the supply of natural rubber to the United States. [...]

It was the most notorious scientific experiment in recent memory - in 1989, the two men who claimed to have discovered the energy of the future were condemned as imposters and exiled by their peers. Can it possibly make sense to reopen the cold fusion investigation? A surprising number of researchers already have.
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Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928. Of course he wasn’t actually looking for it at the time- he was researching the ‘flu. He noticed that one of his petri dishes had become contaminated with mould. Other scientists may have recoiled in horror at this result of shoddy work practice, but not Alexander. He chose to [...]

In 1970, Spencer Silver was working at the 3M research labs trying to develop a strong adhesive. What he actually came up with, was weaker than what had already been developed. It stuck, but then it easily unstuck.
That seemed like a pretty useless invention, until 4 years later when a colleague was singing in the [...]

Back in 1908 Jacques Brandenberger, a Swiss chemist working for a French textile firm, was trying to make his fortune with a stain proof tablecloth. He got the stain proof part right by coating the cloth with a thin layer of viscose, but the fortune never came. Apparently people liked stains on their tablecloths. Fortunately [...]