The History of the Transistor

Medicine Is Failing Disabled Patients. Meet The Doctors Pushing For Change

“More than sixty-one million Americans have disabilities, and increasing evidence documents that they experience health care disparities.” That’s the conclusion of a series of studies, in which researchers pulled back the curtain on how doctors perceive disabled patients.

A study from last year found that more than half of surveyed physicians do not feel fully confident that they can provide disabled and non-disabled patients the same level of care. And in another paper, some doctors went as far to say that if you have a disability then “I am not the doctor for you.”

So how do we change that? Ira talks with two researchers, who are disabled themselves, about how the medical field needs to better serve the disabled community. He hears from Dr. Lisa Iezzoni, an author on those studies and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who is based at the Health Policy Research Center at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Also joining Science Friday is Dr. Feranmi Okanlami, a physician and assistant professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

To Stop Whale Strikes, Ships Were Asked to Slow Down. It Worked.

The Santa Barbara Channel is like an underwater national park with marine mammals, seabirds, fish and even shipwrecks.

Ocean currents from the north and south meet and mix here to create an ideal feeding grounds for marine life.

“Just the other day I was flying over the channel and we counted over 40 humpback whales in a rather small region feeding on fish,” said Sean Hastings, the Policy Management and Information Officer for the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA.

We met at the Santa Barbara Maritime Museum, close to his office, and sat in the museum’s library which is filled with books that are different shades of blues and greens—the colors you’d expect books about the ocean to be.

Hastings continues his story about a recent flight over the channel spotting all those whales.

To read the rest, visit sciencefriday.com.

75 years ago this month, research scientists working at Bell Labs first created, then unveiled to the world a new device—the point contact transistor. Some call it the greatest invention of the 20th century. That first transistor was a clunky looking thing, with two gold contacts on a plastic wedge pressed against a crystal of germanium. But that early device had a magical property: A voltage in one part of the device could control the flow of electrons in another part of the transistor. It could be a switch, or an amplifier.

That device and the ones that followed and improved on it would become an essential part of modern life. From the first transistor radios to modern computers, hearing aids, and more, transistors are everywhere, in great numbers. An ordinary cell phone today likely has billions of transistors in it. In fact, the transistor has become so ubiquitous that one estimate puts the number of transistors on the planet as about three million per square foot.

The three researchers credited with the invention of the transistor, William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain, went on to share the Nobel Prize in Physics—but they saw limited financial gain from their creation, and had a rocky personal relationship. Michael Riordan, a physicist, science historian, and coauthor of “Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age,” joins Ira to look back on the invention, the scientists who got credit for the device, and where transistor technology has gone since 1947.

Transcripts for each segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com.

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