Liquid helium of liquid water. Helium was first liquefied on July 10, 1908, by the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. At that time, helium-3 was unknown because the mass spectrometer had not yet been invented. In more recent decades, liquid helium has been used as a cryogenic refrigerant, and liquid helium is produced commercially for use in superconducting magnets such as those used in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), Magnetoencephalography (MEG), and experiments in physics, such as low temperature Mössbauer spectroscopy. The temperature required to produce liquid helium is low because
Heike Shamisen Heike Shamisen The heike shamisen (Japanese: ), is a Japanese musical instrument, member of the shamisen family. Like its other counterparts, the heike shamisen has three strings, a slender neck, a body taut with skin, and it is plucked with a plectrum called a bachi. What is peculiar about the heike shamisen is that it is made particularly for the use in one song, called Heike Ondo, which is a folk song from Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. As the song calls for a higher range of notes, the heike shamisen is constructed with a shorter neck than conventional shamisen. It