Archives July 2013

Pratibha Patil, a woman of Maharashtrian origin, has been elected as the 13th President of India. She has made history by becoming the first woman President in the history of India.  Smt. Patil was born on 19th December, 1934inNadgaonofMaharashtra. Her father was Narayan Pagloo Rao. She got her school education at R.R. School, Jalgaon. Thereafter she got the M.A. degree from Mooiji Jaitha (M.J.) College, Jalgaon which was an affiliated unit to North Maharashtra University, Jalgaon. Then she obtained her degree in law from the Government Law College, Mumbai an affiliated unit of the University of Bombay. During her college days she excelled in the table tennis and won various inter-college tournaments. In 1962 she was voted 'College Queen' of M.J. College. In the same year she began her political career by winning an assembly election from Ediabad Assembly Constituency on the Indian National Congress ticket. She was married to more...

Charles Drew (1904-1950) is widely credited as the father of the modern blood bank. In 1937, Drew made the key discovery that separating red blood cells from the plasma (the liquid part of blood that can be given to anyone), and freezing the two separately, allowed blood to be preserved for longer and reconstituted at a later date. In February of 1941, Drew was appointed director of the first American Red Cross Blood Bank, and launched the "Plasma for Britain Project" where he collected thousands of units of plasma for the British war effort. From these samples the British Army established its own blood transfusion service, where dried and powdered plasma could be stored and turned into a liquid with the addition of sterile, distilled water. After the war, doctors who had seen the effectiveness of transfusion therapy in battle began to demand that blood be made available for treatment more...

The earliest lenses were made of circular pieces of rock crystal or semiprecious stone, such as beryl and quartz, which were ground and polished so that they produced a magnified image when looked through. The oldest known lens artifact was one made of rock crystal dating from around 640 B.C.E. and excavated in Nineveh, near the modern city of Mosul, Iraq. The most common form was circular and thicker in the middle than around the edge, and having both its front and back surfaces the same shape. The modern convex lens developed from the ancient Greek burning glass. Here a spherical vase of water would be used to concentrate the rays of the sun onto a small area, which heated up. The heat was used to ignite fires in temples or to cauterize wounds. The Iraqi mathematician and optics engineer Ibn Sahl (c 940-1000) wrote the treatise On Burning Mirrors more...

The neighbour is the nearest person with whom one has social contact. He can render his services at the time of need. They are partners in one's sorrows and joys. Having a good neighbour is a blessing and a bad neighbour is a curse. This is our good luck that our neighbours are decent. Our nearest neighbour is Mr. Agnihotri. His house is next to ours. He has good manners and a very sweet nature. We always find him with a smiling face. He has three sons and a daughter. Every member of his family is cultured and good mannered. You will never find them quarrelling with others. They are always ready for any type of help to their neighbours. Mr. Agnihotri's daughter who is a B. Corn first year student is always ready to solve the problems of the children of their neighbours In the entire colony she is more...

The Pitot (pronounced pea-tow) tube is an eighteenth- century invention still flying high amid twenty-first- century technology. Designed by French astronomer, engineer, and mathematician Henri Pilot (1695-1771), this deceptively simple device is essentially a differential pressure gauge and can be used for a variety of flow-rate or speed-measuring purposes. Pitot's pet interest was water flow, and his personal research led him to conclude that much of the accepted wisdom of the day was incorrect. He would not accept, for example, the prevailing theory that, other things being equal, the speed of flowing water increased with depth. His tube, demonstrated at the French Academy of Sciences in 1732, would show that he was right: it does not. As well as being used in a fixed position to determine the flow rate of a liquid or gas the  L-shaped tube may be attached to a boat or airplane to measure the craft's more...

Games and sports are an important part of education. In the past there was no provision for them in Indian schools and colleges. But now no educational institution is complete without some arrangement for different games and sports.  Games and sports have many advantages. They improve health and help in building up a good body. As games are played in the open air. the body gets plenty of sunshine and fresh air. The value of good health is well expressed in the proverb-"A sound mind in a sound body". Hockey, football and other games provide better health than walks can. Games have another advantage. They develop a spirit of comradeship. Students do not play for themselves only but for the team as a whole. Thus a sportsman develops a broad outlook and learns the value of co-operative work. These habits prove highly useful in life. Besides comradeship games provide good more...

“Vases and shards ...the true alphabet of archeologists in every country" Sir William Flinders Petrie, archeologist As applies to all early inventions, we do not know the name of the man or woman who invented pottery. No first potter carved his or her name or initials in the base of a pot to claim first prize. However, it has long been assumed that whoever the creative person was, he or she would have lived somewhere in the Near East of Asia. It was therefore something of an archeological shock when, in the 1960s, pots dating to around 10,000 B.C.E. were discovered on the Far Eastern side of Asia, thousands of miles away at Nasunahara on the island of Kyusu in Japan. These pots, found in caves, were made by nomadic hunter-gatherers, rather than settled farmers or urban dwellers. Just as important, the pots were made by firing or heating the more...

"[The artificial skin] is soft and pliable, unlike other substances used to cover burned-off skin." John F. Burke Human skin is a marvel of engineering. It is tough yet stretchy and pliable, and acts as an impermeable barrier against water loss, infection, and cell damage from the sun's ultraviolet (UV) rays. With this range of properties, it is a very difficult material to duplicate. John F. Burke, a surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States, was looking for a reliable skin replacement for the treatment of burn victims. Skin is usually grafted from other parts of the patient's body, but in cases where the burns cover 50 percent or more of the body, often there is not enough healthy skin to cover the damaged area. In the 1970s Burke teamed up with loannis V. Yannas, a chemistry professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who was studying a more...

Ever since the invention by Alhazen (965-1040) of the pinhole camera, which projected an image onto a surface, people sought a way of "fixing," and thus recording, that image. By accident, in 1727, the German chemist Johann Schuize discovered that a mixture of chalk, nitric acid, and silver darkened when exposed to sunlight, and the rate of darkening increased if more silver was added. By 1777 the Swedish chemist Carl Scheele had been able to fix, or make permanent, the results of this change using ammonia. Joseph Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) produced the first permanent photographic image in 1826. He first used a flat pewter plate covered with bitumen, but then quickly moved on to silver compounds. Louis Daguerre produced silvered images that were very delicate and could not be copied. Although the exposure time was about ten minutes, he managed to produce daguerreotypes of famous people such as Abraham Lincoln more...

"Steam is no stronger now than it was a hundred years ago but it is put to better use." Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer In the late eighteenth century, there were many wagonways and tramways in Europe. These had iron rails and horsedrawn wagons fitted with flanged wheels. The first steam locomotive to run on rails was built by Richard Trevithick (1771-1833) of Cornwall, England. Trevithick was encouraged to develop an engine that was more efficient and cheaper to run than the low-pressure Watt and Newcomen type; he was the first to harness high-pressure steam. Trevithick's Puffing Devil (1801) and London Steam Carriage (1803) were demonstration steam vehicles, but on February 21, 1804, his Penydarren locomotive pulled five wagons, seventy passengers, and 10 tons of iron down an iron railway between Merthyr Tydfil and Abercynnon in south Wales. This reasonably reliable and robust machine proved that heavy trucks could be hauled more...