Ronaldo

Ronaldo Luiz Nazário de Lima (b. September 22, 1976), simply known as Ronaldo, is a Brazilian footballer who is widely considered to be one of the best strikers of all time.

Ronaldo celebratingIn 1993, aged 16, Ronaldo had already scored 59 goals in 57 matches for Brazil's under 17 squad. By 1994 he had joined the squad of the national team, but didn't get to play a single minute on the pitch of the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the USA.

In 1996–1997, Ronaldo played arguably his best season, scoring numerous spectacular goals for FC Barcelona. One of them, a solo goal against Compostela, is considered one of the most amazing goals in football.

Chosen the World's best player in 1996 and 1997, he had a disappointing performance during the 1998 World Cup, scoring only 4 goals, and losing the final to host team France after suffering a mysterious fit in the night before. The fit's circumstances still remain unclear and a source of speculation.

He then moved to a club he considered more promising and more respected: Inter Milan. Fans all over the world jumped the bandwagon and supported the world's most glamorous footballer, receiving praise from the Italians all over. Ronaldo's fame grew as he was contantly in the action for the Italian juggernauts.

In April 1999, Ronaldo married Milene Domingues. The marriage lasted 4 years and ended in a divorce.

A year later, he severely injured his right knee and was out of the game for several months. During his first comeback in 2000, he managed to play a few minutes during a league game against Lazio before injuring his knee for a second time.

After 2 operations and 20 months of rehabilitation, Ronaldo managed a comeback during the 2002 FIFA World Cup. He claimed the Golden Boot by scoring 8 goals during the tournament (and tied with Pelé for a Brazilian record 12 total World Cup goals), leading Brazil to win an unprecedented fifth World Championship. In 2002, he was awarded the title of the World's best soccer player for the third time, and transferred from Inter Milan to Real Madrid after frequent disputes with current Inter Milan coach Hector Cuper.

On June 2, 2004, Ronaldo scored an unusual hat-trick for Brazil against archrivals Argentina in a CONMEBOL qualifier for the 2006 World Cup. He scored all of Brazil's goals in a 3-1 win via penalty kicks.

As of 2004, Ronaldo is still playing football, and is still considered one of the world's best strikers.

Full name: Ronaldo Luíz Nazário de Lima
DOB: September 22, 1976
Birthplace: Bento Ribeiro, Brazil
Nationality: Brazilian
Other nationality: Spanish
EU passport: Yes
Height: 183 cm
Weight: 82 kg

Club: Real Madrid CF
Position: Forward [C]
Number: 9
Contract Expires: June 2009
Previous Clubs: Sao Cristovao > Cruzeiro > (€6m) PSV > (€19m) Barcelona > (€30.5m) Internazionale > (€45m) Real Madrid

International debut: March 1994, v Argentina
Caps: 91
Goals: 58
World Cups: USA 1994, France 1998, Japan-Korea 2002, Germany 2006
Palmares:
FIFA World Cup (94, 02)
Copa America (97, 99)
Confederations Cup (97)

South American Supercup (93)
Intercontinental Cup (02)
UEFA Cup Winners Cup (97)
UEFA Cup (98)

Brazilian Cup (93)
Dutch Cup (96)
Spanish Supercup (96, 03)
Spanish Liga Primera (03)

Dutch League Top Scorer (96)
FIFA World Player of the Year (96, 97, 02)
World Soccer Player of the Year (96, 97, 02)
U-21 European Footballer of the Year (97, 98)
Spanish Liga Primera Top Scorer (97, 04)
European Footballer of the Year (97, 02)
FIFA World Cup MVP (98, 02)
Italian Serie A Footballer of the Year (98)
Copa America Top Scorer (99)
FIFA World Cup Top Scorer (02)
Intercontinental Cup MVP (02)


1976
Born September 22 in Bento Ribeiro, a poor neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro.
1993
A teenage prodigy with Cruziero, Ronaldo scored 58 goals in 60 games before moving on to Europe.
May: Wins Brazilian cup with Cruzeiro, his first professional title.
1994
March: Makes National team debut against Argentina.
June: Member of the Brazilian team that win World Cup, altough he sat on the bench for all matches.
July: Signs with PSV for 6m euros fee.
1996
May: Wins Dutch Cup with PSV.
June: Signs for Spanish giants Barcelona.
August: Member of the Brazilian team that won the Bronze Medal at the Atlanta Olympic Games.
December: Wins his first FIFA World Player of the year award.
1997
May: Converts the decisive penalty which clinched the UEFA Cup Winners' Cup for the Catalan club; Barcelona fails to win the Spanish League title as Ronaldo ends as the league top scorer.
June: Wins Copa America with Brazil, ends tournament as second best top scorer with 5 goals.
July: Joins FC Internazionale for a world record 30.5m euros fee.
December: First player to retain his title as FIFA World Player of the Year; First South American to win the prestigious European Footballer of the Year award.
1998
May: Scores 1 goals as Internazionale defeats Lazio 3-0 in the UEFA Cup final.
July: Helps Brazil to reach the final at the World Cup finals, but a mysterious and terrific display against France saw the Brazilians defeated 3-0.
1999
April: Marries Milene Domingues, the marriage lasted four years and ended in divorce.
July: Wins second Copa America, ends competition as top scorer with 5 goals.
October: Scores Inter's fifth goal in a 6-0 win over Lecce but later limped off with a knee injury which required surgery and kept him sidelined for six months.
2000
April: Returns to action in the Italian Cup final, but ruptured a knee ligament just six minutes into a appearance as a second-half substitute. Causing him to miss the entire 2000/1 season.
2001
September: Makes his return to official action against Romanian side Brasov in the UEFA Cup first round.
November: Makes his first Italian League appearance for almost two years, but limps out of his Serie A comeback with a thigh injury after just 14 minutes against Lecce at the San Siro.
2002
June: Inspires Brazil to win their 5th World Cup trophy, finish the competition as top scorer with 8 goals, 2 of them in the final.
July: Signs for Real Madrid.
December: Named Intercontinental Club Cup's MVP as Real Madrid defeats Olimpia in Yokohama; Wins third FIFA World Player of the year award; Wins second European Footballer of the Year award.
2003
May: Ends first season at Madrid, scoring 21 times in 30 domestic matches as they won the Primera Division title.
2004
May: Madrid fails to retain title as Ronaldo ends as the league top scorer.
2005
February: Marries Daniella Cicarelli, their relationship lasted only 3 months.
November: Given Spanish citizenship.
2006
May: Turns down a $120 million, 10-year offer to play for the New York Red Bulls in Major League Soccer.

Alexander Fleming

     Sir Alexander Fleming (August 6, 1881 - March 11, 1955) is famous as the discoverer of the antibiotic substance lysozyme and for isolating the antibiotic substance penicillin from the fungus Penicillium notatum.

     Fleming was born in Ayrshire, Scotland. He later attended St Mary's Hospital medical school in London until World War I broke out. He participated in a battlefield hospital with many of his colleagues in the fronts of France. Being exposed to the horrid medical infections by the dying soldiers, he returned to St. Mary's after the war with renewed energy in searching for an improved antiseptic.

     Both of Fleming's discoveries happened entirely by accident during the 1920s. The first, lysozyme, was discovered after mucus from his nose dropped into a bacterium laced Petri dish (he sneezed). A few days later, it was noted that bacteria where the mucus had fallen had been destroyed.

     Fleming's labs were usually in disarray, which led to be to his advantage. In September 1928, he was sorting through the many idle experiments strewn about his lab. He inspected each specimen before discarding it and noticed an interesting fungal colony had grown as a contaminant on one of the agar plates streaked with the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus. Fleming inspected the Petri dish further and found that the bacterial colonies around the fungus were transparent because their cells were lysing. Lysis is the breakdown of cells, and in this case, potentially harmful bacteria. The importance was immediately recognized, however the discovery was still underestimated, initially used to clean his glassware. Fleming issued a publication about penicillin in the British Journal of Experimental Pathology in 1929.

     Fleming worked with the mould for some time, but refining and growing it was a difficult process better suited to chemists. In part by believing its effect may only hold valid with small infections and further by not being well received within the community, the drug was not developed for mass distribution until World War II when Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain developed a method of purifying penicillin to a form that was useful for medical treatment of infection.

     For his achievements, Fleming was knighted in 1944 and shared the Nobel prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1945 with Florey and Ernst Boris Chain. Florey was later given the higher honour of a peerage for his monumental work in making penicillin available to the public and saving millions of lives in World War II. Florey's work proceeded over the misgivings of Fleming, who believed that penicillin, for all its intrinsic worth, would not be able to be produced in sufficient quantities to have an appreciable effect in a war situation.

     Fleming was long a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, a private club for artists of all genres, founded in 1891 at the suggestion of the painter James McNeil Whistler. Fleming was admitted to the club after he made "germ paintings," in which he drew with a culture loop using spores of highly pigmented bacteria. The bacteria were invisible while he painted, but when cultured made bright colours.

Serratia marcescens - red

Chromobacterium violaceum -purple

Micrococcus luteus - yellow

Micrococcus varians - white

Micrococcus roseus - pink

Bacillus sp. - orange

Fleming died in 1955 of a heart attack. He was buried as a national hero in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral in London. His discovery of penicillin had changed the world of modern medicines by introducing the age of useful antibiotics.

Alexander Graham Bell

Alexander Graham Bell (March 3, 1847 - August 2, 1922) was a scientist, inventor, and founder of the Bell telephone company. In addition to his work in telecommunications technology, he also was responsible for important advances in aviation and hydrofoil technology.

Formative years

Bell was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He came of a family associated with the teaching of elocution: his grandfather in London, his uncle in Dublin, and his father, Mr. Alexander Melville Bell, in Edinburgh, were all professed elocutionists.

The latter has published a variety of works on the subject, several of which are well known, especially his treatise on Visible Speech, which appeared in Edinburgh in 1868. In this he explains his ingenious method of instructing deaf mutes, by means of their eyesight, how to articulate words, and also how to read what other persons are saying by the motions of their lips. Graham Bell, his distinguished son, was educated at the Royal High School of Edinburgh, from which he graduated at the age of thirteen. At the age of sixteen he secured a position as a pupil-teacher of elocution and music in Weston House Academy, at Elgin in Morayshire. The next year he spent at the University of Edinburgh. From 1866 to 1867 he was an instructor at Somersetshire College at Bath, England. While still in Scotland he is said to have turned his attention to the science of acoustics, with a view to ameliorate the deafness of his mother.

In 1870 he moved with his family to Canada where they settled at Brantford, Ontario. Before he left Scotland, Alexander Graham Bell had turned his attention to telephony, and in Canada he continued an interest in communication machines. He designed a piano which could transmit its music to a distance by means of electricity. In 1873 he accompanied his father to Montreal, Quebec, where he was employed in teaching the system of visible speech. The elder Bell was invited to introduce the system into a large day-school for mutes at Boston, but he declined the post in favour of his son, who soon became famous in the United States for his success in this important work. Alexander Graham Bell published more than one treatise on the subject at Washington, and it is mainly through his efforts that thousands of deaf mutes in America are now able to speak almost, if not quite, as well as persons who are able to hear.

At Boston he continued his researches in the same field, and endeavoured to produce a telephone which would not only send musical notes, but articulate speech. With financing from his American father-in-law, on March 7, 1876, the U.S. Patent Office granted him Patent Number 174,465 covering "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound.", the telephone. (It should be noted that the question of who invented the telephone continues to be debated. It is clear that several people were researching similar devices. However, supporters of Bell claim that his was the first fully working design. After obtaining the patent for the telephone, Bell continued his experiments in communication, which culminated in the invention of the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light -- a precursor of today's optical fiber systems. He also worked in medical research and invented techniques for teaching speech to the deaf. The range of Bell's inventive genius is represented only in part by the 18 patents granted in his name alone and the 12 he shared with his collaborators. These included 14 for the telephone and telegraph, four for the photophone, one for the phonograph, five for aerial vehicles, four for hydroairplanes, and two for a selenium cell. In 1888 he was one of the founding members of the National Geographic Society and became its second president. He was the recipient of many honors. The French Government conferred on him the decoration of the Légion d'honneur (Legion of Honor), the Académie française bestowed on him the Volta Prize of 50,000 Francs, the Royal Society of Arts in London awarded him the Albert medal in 1902, and the University of Würzburg, Bavaria, granted him the Degree of Ph.D.

Bell married Mabel Hubbard on July 11, 1877. He died in Baddeck, Nova Scotia in 1922.

In 2004, Alexander Graham Bell was nominated as one of the top 10 "Greatest Canadians" by viewers of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.