The Sun Does Flips

Scientists say the Sun has just undergone an important change. Our star's magnetic field has flipped.

The Sun's magnetic north pole, which was in the northern hemisphere just a few months ago, now points south. It's a topsy-turvy situation, but not an unexpected one. This always happens around the time of solar maximum. The magnetic poles exchange places at the peak of the sunspot cycle.

The Sun's magnetic poles will remain as they are now, with the north magnetic pole pointing through the Sun's southern hemisphere, until the year 2012 when they will reverse again. This transition happens at the peak of every 11-year sunspot cycle.

Learn more on this.

World's Longest Motorable Road

The Pan-American Highway is a network of roads measuring about 47,958 kilometers (29,800 miles) in total length. Except for an 87 kilometers (54 mi) rainforest break, called the Darién Gap, the road links the mainland nations of the Americas in a connected highway system. According to Guinness World Records, the Pan-American Highway is the world's longest "motorable road". However, because of the Darién Gap, it is not possible to cross between South America and Central America by traditional motor vehicle.

More about Pan-American Highway.

World’s Largest Functional Yoyo

The world’s largest functional yoyo is 11 feet, 6 inches in diameter. The massive toy was designed by the Computer Aided Design or CAD team at Bay College in Escanaba, Michigan. It took the seven members four months to perfect the behemoth, because it had to function like a normal yoyo in order to qualify for the world record. The test run went off without a hitch with the yoyo being dropped from a height of 90 feet.

Over a hundred spectators gathered to watch the yo-yo drop. All were quite impressed with what the team had accomplished. Yo-Yo Factory, which manufactures yo-yo's out of Arizona, helped fund the project. They too felt this was quite an accomplishment. The CAD Team currently has the yo-yo up for sale. They've seen interest from yo-yo museums from as far as San Francisco. They hope to sell the yo-yo for at least $6,000 and the majority of those funds will go toward local charities.

World’s Most Expensive Tea Bag

In 2005, a British jeweller made the world’s most expensive tea bag to celebrate the 75th birthday of PG Tips.

The diamond teabag worth £7,500 has been made by Boodles jewellers to celebrate PG Tips 75th birthday. The tea bag took three months to make has been hand-crafted using 280 diamonds.

Pete Harbour, spokesman for PG Tips said: “As it’s our 75th birthday, we wanted to do something special to remind people just how much they love the great British cup of tea.”

The tea bag was eventually used as part of a prize draw to raise money for Manchester Children's Hospitals, a charity chosen by workers at the PG Tips factory in Trafford Park, Manchester.

 

Where does Space begin?

It starts at an altitude of 100 kilometres. The most widely accepted altitude where Space begins is 100 kilometres, which is about 62 miles.

The U.S. space agency awards astronaut status to persons who fly above 50 miles altitude.

For reference, note that a typical passenger jet cruises at an average altitude of about 30,000 feet which is just under six miles above Earth's surface. The most powerful military jets can't climb much above 100,000 feet, which would be just under 19 miles altitude.

Learn more.

Veronica and Jughead: Search Programs

The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) led to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they searched the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provided a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation and Display) was a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers. While the name of the search engine "Archie" was not a reference to the Archie comic book series, "Veronica" and "Jughead" are characters in the series, thus referencing their predecessor.

More about "Veronica" and "Jughead".

Reindeer or Caribou

The caribou in North America is a deer from the Arctic and Subarctic, including both resident and migratory populations. While overall widespread and numerous, some of its subspecies are rare and one or two has already gone extinct.

The caribou varies considerably in colour and size and both genders grow antlers, though these are larger in the males and there are a few populations where females lack them completely.

Hunting of wild reindeer and herding of semi-domesticated reindeer (for meat, hides, antlers, milk and transportation) are important to several Arctic and Subarctic people. Even far outside its range, the reindeer is well known due to the myth, probably originating in early 19th century America, in which Santa Claus's sleigh is pulled by flying reindeer, a popular secular element of Christmas. In actual Lapland, reindeer would pull a pulk.

The females usually measure 162–205 cm (64–81 in) in length and weigh 79–120 kg (170–260 lb). The males (or "bulls") are typically larger (although the extent to which varies in the different subspecies), measuring 180–214 cm (71–84 in) in length and usually weighing 92–210 kg (200–460 lb), though exceptionally large males have weighed as much as 318 kg (700 lb).

The colour of the fur varies considerably, both individually, and depending on season and subspecies. Northern populations, which usually are relatively small, are whiter, while southern populations, which typically are relatively large, are darker. In most populations both sexes grow antlers, which (in the Scandinavian variety) for old males fall off in December, for young males in the early spring, and for females in the summer.

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Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas

Ashrita Furman: Holder of Maximum Guinness World Records

Ashrita Furman has captured the public's imagination by breaking Guinness world records under outrageous conditions and in the most exotic places. He currently holds more than 120 Guinness records, including the official record for holding the most records! Since setting his first record of 27,000 jumping jacks in 1979, Ashrita has broken more than 300 records overall.

What compels this 56-year old health food store manager from Queens, New York, to perform these fantastic feats? "I'm trying to show others that our human capacity is unlimited if we can truly believe in ourselves," he says.

Ashrita has broken a Guinness record on every continent including hula hooping for the fastest mile at Ayers Rock (Uluru) in the Australian bush and completing the fastest mile on a pogo stick in Antarctica. Ashrita has also set records at many famous landmarks around the world including standing on a Swiss Ball for the longest time at Stonehenge in England, balancing a pool cue while walking the longest distance at the Pyramids in Egypt, skipping rope the most times in a minute while jumping on a pogo stick at Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and bouncing the fastest mile on a kangaroo ball along the Great Wall of China. More recently, in Mongolia, Ashrita set the mile sack-racing record while racing against a yak.

Check out more of his records.

Interesting Facts About Earth

Ever wondered how much gold has been discovered worldwide to date? Or which are the two major gold-producing countries?

More than 193,000 metric tons (425 million pounds) of gold has been discovered worldwide. If you stuck it all together, it would make a cube-shaped, seven-story structure that might resemble one of Donald Trump's buildings. South Africa produces 5,300 metric tons per year, and the United States produces more than 3,200 metric tons.

What two great American cities are destined to merge?

The San Andreas fault, which runs north-south, is slipping at a rate of about 2 inches (5 centimeters) per year, causing Los Angeles to move towards San Francisco. Scientists forecast LA will be a suburb of the City by the Bay in about 15 million years.

We live on a sphere of extremes and oddities. Some of Earth's valleys dip below sea level. Mountains soar into thin air. Do you know how far it is to the center of the planet or what's there? Where are the planet's hottest, coldest, driest and windiest places?

Here's a list of interesting facts about our planet earth.

Chocolate Billboard

An edible billboard made from 390kg (860lb) of pure chocolate has been eaten in just three hours.

Thorntons invited passers-by to tuck into the 14.5ft by 9.5ft (4.4m by 2.9m) sign in Covent Garden, London.

The Easter creation, a world first, was made of 10 chocolate bunnies, 72 giant chocolate eggs and 128 chocolate panels, each weighing 2kg.

The billboard took three months to plan and 300 hours for the team of 10 to build and was expected to last a week.

Complete news.

Sharks Will Text Lifesavers

An early warning system will be installed in South Australia to help alert lifesavers to the presence of sharks offshore.

In the two-fold system, parts of the seabed along the coastal edge of the capital city Adelaide will be fitted with electronic receivers, while sharks such as bronze whalers will be tagged with transmitters.

When sharks swim within 874 yards (800 meters) of the receiver it will be triggered by the shark's embedded transmitter and send a text message to lifesavers on shore who can then alert swimmers to the menace in the deep. The transmitters will be surgically inserted into the sharks, with the system based on one being used in Western Australia.

Figures show there were 20 shark attacks in Australia in 2009, with about 60 attacks on humans reported worldwide each year.

Complete news.

Disneyland

Disneyland Park is a theme park located in Anaheim, California, owned and operated by the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts division of The Walt Disney Company. Originally, and still often colloquially, called Disneyland, it was dedicated with a televised press preview on July 17, 1955, and opened to the general public on July 18, 1955.

The concept for Disneyland began one Sunday, when Walt Disney was visiting Griffith Park with his daughters Diane and Sharon. While watching his daughters ride the merry-go-round, he came up with the idea of a place where adults and their children could go and have fun together. Construction began on July 16, 1954 with the cost of USD$17 million to complete. The park was opened exactly one year and one day later.

Disneyland holds the distinction of being the only theme park to be designed and built under the direct supervision of Walt Disney himself. In 1998, the theme park was re-branded "Disneyland Park" to distinguish it from the larger Disneyland Resort complex.

Disneyland has a larger cumulative attendance than any other theme park in the world, with close to 600 million guests since July 18, 1955. In 2009, 15.9 million people visited the park, making it the second most visited park.

Find out more details on Disneyland.

World's Deadliest Animals

Since the dawn of man, humans have held sway over the animal kingdom, hunting animals for purposes of food, tools, survival and sport. But animals still do a fair bit of damage to humans, claiming the lives of a more than two million people each year.

So which animals are the worst offenders? It’s not the usual suspects. Sharks, whose attacks receive the most publicity, only kill three to four humans a year. The most poisonous animal on earth, the poison-arrow frog, lives deep within the tropical rainforests of Central and South America and rarely makes contact with humans.

The mosquito rarely lives longer than a month and is not ferocious or visually intimidating but it comes in much higher contact with humans than any other animal. It also leads to the death of more humans than any other member of the animal kingdom. By injecting parasites and viruses into the blood stream, the mosquito causes upwards of two million deaths a year.

Check out the top 10 deadliest animals based on the annual number of human deaths for which they claim responsibility, either through direct contact or disease.

How high is Space?

The moon is at an altitude of 238,794 miles. The Earth’s core is 3,963 miles below ground. Space starts at a mere 62 miles above the surface. The International Space Station is between 200 and 250 miles and a hot air balloon altitude record of 65,000 feet.

For more distance comparisons check out this chart.

Google alias BackRub

In 1996 Larry Page and Sergey Brin collaborated on a web search engine called “BackRub” for Stanford University. Over time, the engine became too large for the university’s servers and started taking up too much bandwidth. They then decided to change its name. They eventually came up with the name “Google,” which was based on the word “googol” - a mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros! They believed this word reflected their goal of organizing the seemingly infinite amount of information stored across the World Wide Web.

Here's a timeline detailing the history of Google.

Obese Cats in UK

British cats will be so fat in ten years’ time they will not be able to fit through a standard cat flap, according to research out Friday.

Currently one in four of Britain's eight million pet cats is officially overweight, according to the survey by More Than pet insurance - and the number of obese felines is set to rocket to four million by 2020.

The research found the average weight of a cat will reach 11lb (5kg) in ten years’ time, a weight that is officially obese, and up from the current average of 8.8lb (4kg).

In response the insurance company has teamed up with UK celebrity vet Joe Inglis to create a cat flap especially for tubby tabbies.

The "Fat Flap" has a conveyor belt to transport overweight cats to its entrance, which is twice the width of traditional cat flaps.

Cat burglars are kept out by electronic sliding doors, which open when activated by a paw-recognition system.

Complete news.

Fun With Mega Lego

This is no normal Lego collection. It has taken two years, 10,000 man hours and more than one million tiny plastic bricks to put together.





Lego Leviathans



Such is the scale and complexity of the project - involving 28 giant Lego sculptures including a water buffalo and a great white shark - that it had to be built in a special factory in the Czech Republic and transported in stages to Sydney.

The huge Lego display, entitled On The Loose, will open on December 22 at Sydney Aquarium and Wildlife World.

Complete news.

Disco Ball to Stop Pigeons

THEY'VE tried trapping them, shooting them, baiting them and scaring them - and failed miserably to win the war against Sydney's pigeons. So how about blinding them with disco lights?

Sounds far-fetched, but Rail-Corp has unveiled its latest weapon to defeat the pigeon plague at city stations and it's a rotating, mirrored pyramid resembling a dance club disco ball.

The devices, called Eagle Eyes, work by reflecting light at various angles to confuse and disorient incoming pigeons. The company behind them claims the birds grow so irritated by the flashing lights they quickly find somewhere else to roost.

Fed up with flocks of pigeons pooping on commuters and staff and creating safety and hygiene issues, RailCorp has installed four of the devices at Central Station, with more to go up in the coming days. The pyramids have been placed in the ceiling of the main CountryLink concourse.

Complete news.

 

Monsters that people believe exist

Do Monsters exist? Are they real?

Its 75 years since this shadowy image purported to be the Loch Ness Monster was published. While the odds on Nessie existing seem remote there is a growing number of people who think that Bigfoot, and a host of other un-catalogued monsters of land and sea – might actually be real.

Check out the monsters that people believe exist.

Mice Hate Cheese

The long-held theory that mice are attracted to the smell of cheese has been debunked by a new study which reveals the rodents actually have a sweet tooth.

According to researchers from Manchester Metropolitan University mice prefer foods with high sugar content.

For years popular belief has held that the best way to catch a mouse is to entice it into a trap with a tasty chunk of cheese.

But as part of a wider study into what foods attract and repel animals, researchers found that a mouse's diet is primarily made up of grains and fruit - both foods high in sugar - and would turn their noses up at something as strong in smell and rich in taste as cheese.

Researchers claims that mice respond to the smell, texture and taste of food and cheese is something that would not be available to them in their natural environment and therefore not something that they would respond to.

More on mice and cheese.

Robots working as waitresses

A new restaurant where all of the waitresses are robots has opened in China. The Dalu Rebot Restaurant, in Jinan, northern China's Shandong Province, has six robot waitresses and can cater for up to 100 diners.

The 21 tables are set in circles and the robots follow a fixed route to serve diners in rotation.

After serving, the robots return to the kitchen to refill their cart for the next round.

However, the food, mainly the Chinese version of fondue, was prepared by humans in the kitchen.

Complete news.

First Internet Search Engine: Archie

Archie is a tool for indexing FTP archives, allowing people to find specific files. It is considered to be the first Internet search engine. The original implementation was written in 1990 by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch, then students at McGill University in Montreal.

The earliest versions of Archie simply contacted a list of FTP archives on a regular basis (contacting each roughly once a month, so as not to waste too many resources of the remote servers) and requested a listing. These listings were stored in local files to be searched using the UNIX grep command.

The name derives from the word "archive" without the v. and there was no association with the Archie Comics.

Find out more about Archie here.

Couple's babies born 8/8/8, 9/9/9, 10/10/10

Having a child born on 10/10/10 is pretty cool, but having that birth follow two others on 8/8/08 and 9/9/09 — that's got to be impossible, right?

Chad and Barbie Soper, from Rockford, Mich. whose daughter Cearra was born on 10/10/10; daughter Chloe was born on 8/8/08 and son Cameron was born on 9/9/09.

Check out more about the news of Sopers, as well as a picture of their family here.

Hydra Regeneration Process

Morphallaxis refers to the type of regeneration in which lost body parts are replaced by the remodeling of the remaining tissue.

A classic example of an organism that regenerates using this mechanism is the hydra. When a hydra is cut into two pieces, two hydra will be regenerated, both smaller than the parental hydra. Once regeneration is completed, the two hydra can continue to grow and reach the size of their original parent.

You can read more about this here.

Motorola Droid Smartphone Exploded

A man talking on his cell phone ended his call and then ended up in hospital. In one of my earlier posts (Cell Phone on Fire) I mentioned about how cell phone can actually start a fire or explode.

Aron Embry, who was in Cedar Hill, Texas, said he had just finished a call when he said he heard a loud "pop."

He then felt something trickling down his face - it was blood.

His ear was bleeding profusely, and he was immediately taken to the emergency room at Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas. He received four stitches, but said there was no hearing loss.

The glass on the face of the Motorola Droid smartphone shattered. He said he had bought it just two days earlier.

"Once I got to the mirror and saw it, it was only then I kind of looked at my phone and realised that the screen had appeared to burst outward," he said.

The phone still appeared to be functioning with its battery intact.

Complete news.

Apple Facts

An apple a day, keeps doctor away! Here are some very interesting facts about the apples.

• Apples come in all shades of reds, greens, and yellows.

• Two pounds of apples make one 9-inch pie.

• 7,500 varieties of apples are grown throughout the world.

• Apples are fat, sodium, and cholesterol free.

• A medium apple is about 80 calories.

• Apples are a great source of the fibre pectin. One apple has five grams of fibre.

• The science of apple growing is called pomology.

• Apple trees take four to five years to produce their first fruit.

• The apple tree originated in an area between the Caspian and the Black Sea.

• Apples were the favourite fruit of ancient Greeks and Romans.

• The largest apple picked weighed three pounds.

• Europeans eat about 46 pounds of apples annually.

• Some apple trees will grow over 40 feet high and live over 100 years.

• It takes the energy from 50 leaves to produce one apple.

• World's top apple producers are China, United States, Turkey, Poland and Italy.

Read more about apples.

Eraser

An eraser is an object that is used to remove marks from paper. Most erasers are designed to remove pencil marks. Other erasers are designed to be used on typewriter marks. Some special pens contain erasable ink that can be removed by erasers.

The first erasers were pieces of bread. There was no better substance for removing pencil marks until rubber was available. In 1735, the French scientist Charles de la Condamine described a substance known as caoutchouc and sent samples to Europe. Caoutchouc was derived from a fluid produced under the bark of a tree found in tropical areas of the New World. This milky liquid, known as latex, is still used to make natural rubber.

Caoutchouc was first suggested for use as an eraser in the Proceedings of the French Academy in 1752, probably by Jean de Magellan. In 1770, the English scientist Joseph Priestley suggested that caoutchouc be named rubber, because of its ability to rub away pencil marks.

Find out more about the history of erasers.

History of the Lead Pencil

Lead pencils, of course, contain no lead. The writing medium is graphite, a form of carbon. Writing instruments made from sticks cut from high quality natural graphite mined at Cumberland in England and wrapped in string or inserted in wooden tubes came into use around 1560.

The term "black lead pencil" was in use by 1565. By 1662, pencils were produced in Nuremberg, in what is now Germany, apparently by gluing sticks of graphite into cases assembled from two pieces of wood.

By the early 18th century, wood-cased pencils that did not require the high quality graphite available only in England were produced in Nuremberg with cores made by mixing graphite, sulphur and various binding agents. These German pencils were inferior to English pencils, which continued to be made with sticks cut from natural graphite into the 1860s. The 1855 catalogue of Waterlow & Sons, London, offered "Pure Cumberland Lead Pencils."

Read more about pencil history.

QWERTY Keyboard Layout

The "QWERTY" layout of typewriter keys became a de facto standard and continues to be used even now.The 1874 Sholes & Glidden typewriters established the "QWERTY" layout for the letter keys.

During the period in which Sholes and his colleagues were experimenting with this invention, other keyboard arrangements were apparently tried, but these are poorly documented. The near-alphabetical sequence on the "home row" of the QWERTY layout (a-s-d-f-g-h-j-k-l) demonstrates that a straightforward alphabetical arrangement was the original starting point. The QWERTY layout of keys has become the standard for English-language typewriter and computer keyboards.

The QWERTY layout is not the most efficient layout possible, since it requires a touch-typist to move his or her fingers between rows to type the most common letters. A popular story suggests that it was designed and used for early typewriters exactly because it was so inefficient; it slowed a typist down so as to reduce the frequency of the typewriter's type bars wedging together and jamming the machine. Another story is that the QWERTY layout allowed early typewriter salesmen to impress their customers by being able to easily type out the example word "typewriter" without having learnt the full keyboard layout, because "typewriter" can be spelled purely on the top row of the keyboard.

Find out more on the QWERTY layout.

Tyrannosaurus: One of the Biggest Flesh-Eating Predators of All Time

Paleontologists were shocked when they unearthed a near-complete skeleton of Tyrannosaurus in 1902. By its bones alone, the scientists knew they had found one of the biggest flesh-eating predators of all time. Its head was the size of an adult person.

The Tyrannosaurus body could extend the entire width of a tennis court. Up to seven tons of muscle and other tissues filled out the rest of its sturdy frame. This was a monster carnivore that must have terrified all other dinosaurs during the Late Cretaceous.

Find out more about this giant creature.

Frog Facts

Frogs rely on their vision and hearing to catch prey and avoid predators. They have good hearing and vision, although their ears and eyes aren't situated quite like those of most other animals. Frogs don't have external ears. Instead, they have an eardrum called the tympanum that sits just behind each eye.

Frogs' eyes also play an important role in eating. Frogs don't have the skull structure or the necessary muscles to chew their food. Instead, they have to swallow their prey in a couple of gulps.

This is tricky since, unlike people, their tongues aren't usually anchored in the back of their mouths. That means a frog can't use its tongue to push food down its throat and toward its stomach. For this reason, when a frog swallows, its eyes sink down into its skull to help push the food along.

Read more.

The First Steering Wheel

The first automobiles were steered with a tiller, but in 1894 Alfred Vacheron took part in the Paris-Rouen race with a Panhard 4 hp model which he had fitted with a steering wheel. That is believed to be one of the earliest employments of the principle.

From 1898 the Panhard et Levassor cars were equipped as standard with steering wheels. C S Rolls introduced the first car in Britain fitted with a steering wheel when he imported a 6 hp Panhard from France in 1898. Arthur Constantin Krebs replaced the tiller with an inclined steering wheel for the Panhard car he designed for the Paris-Amsterdam race which ran from the 7th to 13 July 1898.

Interested in knowing more about steering wheel read here.