Archives November 2013

Domestic pets are very common in every country. In our country, many families are fond of keeping domestic pets. There are many kinds of domestic pets that are not only a source of pleasure but also useful. Domestic pets are countless. Birds, including parrots, pigeons, sparrows and peacocks, fall under the category of domestic pets. There are cats and dogs, horses, mules and mares. Then, there are cows, she-buffaloes, rabbits, deer, squirrels and mongoose. All these are domestic pets. But every family keeps a pet of its own liking. Dogs are common pets in India as well as in the European countries. Europeans are really very fond of keeping dogs. Sometimes, they care for dogs even more than human beings. Dogs are very faithful. That is why, many people prefer them as domestic pets. Dogs act as protectors of our property and scare away thieves during night. They play very more...

  “The best materials… include obsidian (a form natural glass), chert, flint, and chalcedony.”   -  Floyd Largent, writer The very first human invention consisted of sharp flints, found and used in their natural state by primitive peoples, who then went on to purposely sharpen stones. The practice reaches back to the very dawn of humankind; stone tools found in 1969 in Kenya are estimated to be 2,600,000 years old. The principal types of tools, which appeared in the Paleolithic period, and varied in size and appearance, are known as core, flake, and blade tools. The core tools are the largest and most primitive, and were made by working on a fist-sized piece of rock or stone (core) with a similar rock (hammerstone) and knocking large flakes off one side to produce a sharp crest. This was a general-purpose implement used for hacking, pounding, or cutting. Eventually, thinner and sharper more...

"David defeated Goliath with a sling and a rock. He killed him without even using a sword." Samuel 17:50 The sling is a prehistoric weapon probably dating back more than 10,000 years. The oldest known surviving slings were found in Tutankhamen's tomb, dating from 1325 B.C.E. And of course slings feature in the Bible, most famously in the story of David and Goliath. A sling is used to throw a missile many times farther than is possible with the human arm alone. It consists of a cradle, or pouch, in between two lengths of cord. A stone is placed in the pouch. Both cords are held in the hand, and the thrower draws back his arm and swings the sling up and forward. One of the two cords is released and the stone is projected away. As a weapon, the sling was a great success, being cheap to make, light more...

On December 27, 2004 no newspaper of the world knew any data other than the Tsunami. "TSUNAMI STRIKES', 'BOLT FROM THE BEUE', etc. were the headlines that underlined each newspaper's mast-head. Yes, a deadly Tsunami had struck the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal, on Dec 26. Nobody except some was much aware of 'tsunami'. 'Tsunami' is a Japanese word meaning 'harbour wave'. It is the seismic sea waves that are generated by tectonic displacements in the ocean n bed. This displacement may be an earthquake, a landslide, or a volcanic eruption. It causes a sudden displacement of water above and forms a small group of water waves having wavelengths equal to several thousand metres. Thus, on the sea level, it causes high waves, further causing destruction all around llie region. The December 26 Tsunami was caused by under-water Earthquake of magnitude 9.3 on the Richter scale. The epicenter more...

The crossbow originated in ancient China circa 550 B.C.E. and is thought to have been developed from the horizontal bow trap, which was used to kill game. For use as a Weapon, the Chinese developed many different designs of crossbows and drawstrings. Some had stirrups attached to them to hold the bow down when the bowmen were rearming. Later crossbow- cannons had winches to pull back the strings, because people would not have been strong enough to do this unaided. The Chinese also invented grid sights in 100 C.E. and a machine-gun type of crossbow, which had a magazine of bolts fitted above the arrow groove; as one bolt was fired another dropped into its place. Poisoned crossbow bolts were also used. Knowledge of the crossbow was probably transmitted from China to Europe via the Greeks and Romans. The weapon could be used by an untrained soldier to injure or more...

"Poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko told a television interviewer that 'the price they had to pay was not fair.'" Time magazine on Soyuz 11 Space stations are permanently manned orbiting crafts that are designed to stay in space continuously. The first one, Salyut 1, was launched by the U.S.S.R. on April 19, 1971. It was about 65 feet (20m) in length and 13 feet (4 m) in diameter. The docking mechanism on the first crew's Soyuz 10 spacecraft failed, so it was first occupied by the Soyuz 11 three-man team who stayed in orbit for just under twenty-four days. Sadly all three men died when their capsule depressured on reentry to Earth's atmosphere. 'Later generations of Soviet space stations, such as Mir, had two docking ports and water regeneration facilities. They were designed to be manned permanently. The first U.S. space station, Skylab, was three times the size of Mir and was more...

American inventor Arthur Atwater Kent (1873-1949) had a fascination with electrical and mechanical gadgets. At the age of thirty, he set himself up as a battery maker in a run-down factory where, it was said, the cracks in the floor were so big that he never needed a dustpan. With his first earnings, Kent bought a one-cylinder automobile, and tinkering with it led him to develop his own ignition system. The ignition system is an essential part of any engine. An ignition coil turns the 12 volts in the car battery into the thousands of volts needed for the spark plugs to produce a spark to ignite the fuel in the tank. It works like a high voltage transformer, consisting of a primary and secondary winding wrapped around a metal core. The primary coil has a lower number of turns than the secondary coil and when the circuit is broken more...

"It takes a while before people realize they can do other things with a new medium." Ramanathan V. Guha Computer science is renowned for its use of confusing TLAs—Three Letter Abbreviations. Even in computing, however, RSS is notable for being a tricky example. During its history, RSS has stood for Rich Site Summary, RDF Site Summary, or Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a way of describing websites, especially sites with fast-moving content such as news. The original RSS was created by Ramanathan V. Guha (b. 1965) in 1999, for the popular My.Netscape.Com site. The "portal" site enabled browsers to customize news on a single page. This was only possible because each of the different source websites agreed to publish a description of their news in Guha's common format. Since then, RSS, which grew from Guha's earlier work at Apple's Advanced Technology Group, has been through several incarnations at the hands more...

The term 'religion' applies to the belief and way how and to whom one worships. Its origin dates back to the origin of mankind. It means to say that it grew along with the growth of human being. Primarily there have been four major religions—Hindu, Islam, Christianity and Sikhism. All these religions take human being to its salvation. The followers of these different religions follow different Gods and different ways of their worship. With the growth of humanity, a  number of other sub-religions have been born. But one thing is very clear that followers of all the religions believe in a super power and they try to get its blessing. Its means that religion is the super concept that relates the physic to the metaphysic. But there has been a very dangerous turn in the ideal of religion. Politics has intruded in religion and religion is being used for politics. more...

"Antilocks help by preventing lockup; a vehicle with such brakes remains stable during hard braking." Brian O'Neill, Highway Institute for Traffic Safety The antilock braking system (ABS) was designed by Frenchman Gabriel Voisin (1880-1973), originally as a way of preventing planes from swerving on landing . He first installed a system to keep airplane brakes from locking up in 1920. Several decades later, after limited success with similar systems in cars, a breakthrough came in 1978, when Mercedes-Benz announced the installation of electronic ABS in its S-Class car. Theoretically, ABS can stop a serious car accident from occurring by allowing a driver to maintain control in slippery conditions or during an emergency stop. On an icy road, a car's wheels can lock up, sending the vehicle into a spin. In old cars that did not have ABS, drivers had to try to pump the brakes to prevent this. With ABS, more...