Archives April 2013

The need to moor ships and boats is as old as the vessels themselves. The ancient world—Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome—used whatever came to hand for the task, from a basketful of stones to a sackful of sand, lowered by rope. Single large stones with a rope-hole became common. Use of metal crept in gradually during classical times, as ships increased in size and varied anchor designs were developed for different situations and vessel types. In 500 B.C.E., bronze anchors were cast in Malta. Some crude wooden anchors had pieces of lead or other heavy metals added for weight, while a popular wooden hook design gradually became fashioned entirely in iron instead. Iron anchors have been recovered from Roman merchant vessels. Soon the classic form developed. This featured flukes (the pointed ends of arms at the anchor base) and a stock (a horizontal bar that upends the anchor to ensure more...

Although computers were in use long before the 1970s, they were incredibly difficult to operate. Early computers had barely enough processing power to Solve the problems they were given. Further, nobody had taken time to look into how the computers were given the problems: their user interface. The first big inroads were made at Xerox's legendary Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). PARC's "Alto" computers drew on earlier innovations like Doug Engelbart's computer mouse of 1968. The Alto was the very first computer where a click with a mouse on a file would open it. It also had the earliest "what you see is what you get" word processor, showing documents on its screen just as they would look if printed out. Adding menus and icons to allow the user to make choices easily, and putting programs in different windows on the screen, PARC developed the first graphical user interface. Suddenly, more...

"Inside a big cardboard box, a child is transported to a world of his or her own." National Toy Hall of Fame The cardboard box is one of the most widely used methods of packaging and storing goods. Although in the last few decades its use has been threatened by new materials, the current environmental climate has seen a move back toward card as a sustainable material that can be recycled. Before the invention of the cardboard box, the most common packing material for goods was wood, which was heavy and expensive, and unsuitable for small or light goods. In 1817 Sir Malcolm Thornhill produced the first commercial cardboard box. His invention gained in popularity, but it was not until the Kellogg brothers used it to package their cereals after the turn of the century, that the product truly took off. As card can be printed on, manufacturers recognized the more...

The cinema plays a very important role in the field of education. This very fact is being realized by the educationists these days that cinema is much more than entertainment only. There are many producers who prepare special educational films to teach various subjects. The problems of education can be studied by means of the cinema. There is also an international board for this purpose. The film has become a powerful medium of instruction. The mysteries and wonders of the word can be presented; by means of motion pictures. There are some sneering fellows who doubt about its utility. In their opinion, films can reduce the reading and will destroy literature.   Imagination would become dull and films will be a substitute entertainment for study: But these thinking do not hold good because films are not only means of instructions. They are just like extra aid. Not hold well because more...

We see that there is a great competition now in every field of life. To reach the prospective buyers there is a need of some type of approach. But contact with individual is impossible. This has made advertisements very much important. Businessmen and manufacturers are the most beneficiary of advertisements. Advertisement makes people able to know about which articles being manufactured are on the sale in the market. If there is no advertisement people will not be able  to know about various excellent products in the market. This is the reason for the huge investment on advertisement. There are various ways for advertisement, but the cheapest and the most popular is newspaper publicity. TV, radio, cinema slides, hoardings, posters etc. are other different sources of advertisement. Small documentary films are also prepared by some manufacturers for their products as a means of advertisement.  But newspaper plays an important role for more...

Rice with its outer covering on is called paddy. It is a major food crop in India and is the staple diet of millions of people in India and the world. In our country, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and Kerala are the major rice-producing states. Besides India, rice is grown in Sri Lanka, China, Burma and Egypt. Generally rice grows where rainfall is heavy. Moist and muddy soil is necessary for the cultivation of rice. First, the land is prepared by ploughing to sow seeds in it. Then little paddy saplings are transplanted in larger plots of land. Manure is applied from time to time for their proper growth. Rice fields look very green. After a few months, ripe paddy is harvested from the fields and brought to the farm. Here it is thrashed, winnowed, boiled and dried. Finally paddy is husked either in pedals more...

"... maybe people should be able to have their statin...with their drinking water." Dr. John Reckless, consultant endocrinologist With the knowledge that high cholesterol (blood fat) increases a person's risk of suffering a heart attack (or stroke), the quest was on to discover drugs that could be used to lower cholesterol. In 1959 scientists working at the Max Planck Institute in Heidelberg, Germany, identified the HMG-CoA reductase enzyme as a major contributor to production of internal cholesterol. The  discovery  inspired  scientists worldwide to start searching for drugs to inhibit the enzyme and thereby reduce levels of cholesterol. By 1976 Japanese researcher Akira Endo, from Sankyo, isolated the first inhibitor (Compactin, ML- 236B) of HMG-CoA reductase enzyme from the fungus Penicillium citrinium. Endo had chosen to begin his search in molds and fungi for the sole reason that this was his own particular area of expertise. In 1979 Carl Hoffman and more...

Student unrest is a world-wide phenomenon. There is hardly a country free from it. There are many socio-economic 'actors causing this.  The unrest among students is an outward expression of the resentment that the community feels towards the government,  the society and the institutions that they study in. It is human nature that when a person, especially the youth, is alienated or his problems are not heeded to, or if he is unable to face the realities of life, he resorts to violent means to focus public attention. When the number of such students grows large, they unite on a common platform and together tread on the path of violence. Actually education plays a vital role in moulding one's behaviour and in preparing a child to the world at large. This role, it seems, is not carried out satisfactorily by most institutions nowadays. When a student steps into the world more...

The humble rivet may be small, but is has a lot to answer for—including, quite possibly, the sinking of the Titanic. Rivets have been in widespread use for thousands of years but, because engineers now depend on them to secure boats, bridges, aircraft, and other more complex constructions, their reliability has become paramount. Rivet holes have been found in Egyptian spearheads dating back to the Naqada culture of between 4400 and 3000 B.C.E. Archeologists have also uncovered many Bronze Age swords and daggers with rivet holes where the handles would have been. The rivets themselves were essentially short rods of metal, which metalworkers hammered into a pre-drilled hole on one side and deformed on the other to hold them in place. Today, a wide variety of rivets exist, as do specialized tools for installing them. The extensive use of rivets in modern engineering and architecture has, inevitably, increased the likelihood more...

Ultraviolet (UV) light is found beyond the violet end of our visible spectrum of light, toward the X-rays. It is given off by the sun and is harmful to living things, which is why we need to wear sunscreen when we go out in the sun. Fortunately for us, most of it is absorbed by Earth's atmosphere. Ultraviolet light from places other than the sun can tell us a great deal about the universe—specifically about stars that are between twice and ten times the temperature of the sun. Because Earth's atmosphere gets in the way, astronomers find it hard to see them. By the mid-1960s, however, humans were journeying beyond Earth's atmosphere... Normal cameras pick up only light around the visible spectrum, but on November 11, 1969, astrophysicist Dr. George Carruthers [b. 1939) was granted a patent for an "Image converter for detecting electromagnetic radiation especially in short wave lengths." more...