Max Birnstiel, who died in November, was a pioneer of molecular biology and a creator of European scientific institutions. Born in Brazil in 1933, his family moved back to their native Switzerland when he was 5 years old, and he completed his education there. When he asked his teachers how he should best train to be a biologist, the counterintuitive answer was that he should study biophysical c...


 Obituary: Alan Jones (1933–2021)

In 1933 the young Russian communications engineer Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kotelnikov published a paper in which he formulated the sampling theorem for lowpass and bandpass signals, and also considered the bandwidth requirements of discrete signal transmission for telegraphy and images. Although Kotelnikov’s name later became known in the West as a result of his subsequent work, particularly tha...

Today machine translation means using a computer to translate natural languages. But it was not always so. The first suggestions that languages could be translated mechanically were made before electronic digital computers were even dreamt of. While the real history of MT began in March 1947 with correspondence between Warren Weaver and Norbert Wiener and with tentative discussions between Weav...

IN estimating vitamin C chemically in milk by the method of Birch et al. [1933], Kon [1933] observed very marked fluctuations in the concentration of that vitamin from day to day. The possible causes of this phenomenon were investigated by Mattick & Kon [1933], who ultimately found that milk which originally gave a positive vitamin C titration failed to reduce the indophenol reagent after a sho...