The usefulness of Bubble Wrap as a packaging material was an unplanned and fortuitous spin-off: Fielding and Chavannes were planning to create a textured plastic wallpaper with paper backing that could be easily cleaned.
A wealthy manufacturer of tractors and air conditioning and heating units systems after World War II, Lamborghini was an enthusiastic owner of sports cars. After owning and driving a Mercedes-Benz 300SL, a Jaguar E-Type, an Alfa Romeo 1900, a Lancia Aurelia B20 and a Maserati 3500GT, he bought his first Ferrari, a 250GT. He became a Ferrari enthusiast, eventually owning three. However, he had recurring clutch problems, and eventually brought his complaints to Enzo Ferrari. Ferrari insulted Lamborghini, effectively stating that a tractor manufacturer was not qualified to criticize Ferraris. Affronted by Ferrari's reaction, Lamborghini began to repair his clutch himself, at which point he noticed that some of the clutch components were the same as the ones he used on his tractors. He replaced the clutch with one built to a stronger specification, which solved the problem. Lamborghini then decided to build faster and more reliable cars than Ferrari and to prove that supercars did not have to be as temperamental as Ferraris.
The Eiffel tower was almost torn down in 1909, but was saved because of its antenna used both for military and other purposes, and the city let it stand after the permit expired. When the tower played an important role in capturing the infamous spy Mata Hari during World War I, it gained such importance to the French people that there was no more thought of demolishing it.- used for telegraphy at that time.
Closely related to the cooter is the Florida red-bellied turtle, Pseudemys nelsoni. Unless you can see one well enough to notice the patterning or coloration of the carapace, they can be difficult to distinguish from cooters. They are found in the same areas as cooters, but have a different, but also unique, nesting strategy. Females sneak into the territory of nesting alligators and bury their eggs in the mound of vegetation created by the mother alligator to protect and incubate her own eggs. In so doing, the turtles gain protection from nest predators due to the presence of the female alligator, and reap the benefits of the warmth generated by the decomposing vegetation of the gator nest.
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Washington, D.C. It's one of the largest office buildings in the world, with an outside perimeter almost a mile long and containing 17.5 miles of corridors which are walked by some 26,000 employees and personnel. But it's also one of the most efficiently-designed -- any two points within the building are no more than a seven-minute walk apart.
Alien hand syndrome (anarchic hand or Dr. Strangelove syndrome) is an unusual neurological disorder in which one of the sufferer's hands seems to take on a mind of its own. AHS is best documented in cases where a person has had the two hemispheres of their brain surgically separated, a procedure sometimes used to relieve the symptoms of extreme cases of epilepsy. It also occurs in some cases after other brain surgery, strokes, or infections.
An alien hand sufferer can feel normal sensation in the hand, but believes that the hand, while still being a part of their body, behaves in a manner that is totally distinct from the sufferer's normal behavior. They lose the 'sense of agency' associated with the purposeful movement of the limb while retaining a sense of 'ownership' of the limb. They feel that they have no control over the movements of the 'alien' hand, but that, instead, the hand has the capability of acting autonomously--i.e. independent of their voluntary control. The hand effectively has 'a will of its own.' Alien hands can perform complex acts such as undoing buttons, removing clothing, and manipulating tools. Alien behavior can be distinguished from reflexive behavior in that the former is flexibly purposive while the latter is obligatory. Sometimes the sufferer will not be aware of what the alien hand is doing until it is brought to his or her attention, or until the hand does something that draws their attention to its behavior
Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr.) (July 14, 1913 – December 26, 2006) was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974. He was the first person appointed to the vice-presidency under the terms of the 25th Amendment, and became President upon Richard Nixon's resignation at noon on August 9, 1974. Ford was the fifth U.S. President never to have been elected to that position, and the only one to have held both the office of Vice-President and the office of President while never having been elected to either. He was also the longest-lived president in U.S. history, dying at the age of 93 (when six weeks older than Ronald Reagan).
The nectarine is a cultivar group of peach that has a smooth, non-fuzzy skin. Though grocers treat fuzzy peaches and nectarines as different fruits, they belong to the same species. Nectarines have arisen many times from fuzzy peaches, often as bud sports.
Nectarines can be white, yellow, clingstone, or freestone. Regular peach trees occasionally produce a few nectarines, and vice versa. Their flesh is more easily bruised than peaches. The history of the nectarine is unclear; the first recorded mention is from 1616 in England, but they had probably been grown much earlier in central Asia.
http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Nectarine
The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips).[16] Von Karajan suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler's recording of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony from the 1951 Bayreuth Festival.
Billiard cloth (sometimes erroneously called felt) is a specific type of cloth that covers the top of the table's "playing area". Both the rails and slate beds are covered with 21-24 ounce billiard cloth (although some less expensive 19oz cloths are available) which is most often green in color (representing the grass of the original lawn games that billiards evolved from), and consists of either a woven wool or wool/nylon blend called baize.
Réard named his swimsuit the “bikini,” taking the name from the Bikini Atoll, one of a series of islands in the South Pacific where testing on the new atomic bomb was occurring that summer. Historians assume Reard termed his swimsuit the “bikini” because he believed its revealing style would create reactions among people similar to those created by America’s atomic bomb in Japan just one summer earlier.
The United States has less than 5 percent of the world’s population. But it has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners
Indeed, the United States leads the world in producing prisoners, a reflection of a relatively recent and now entirely distinctive American approach to crime and punishment. Americans are locked up for crimes — from writing bad checks to using drugs — that would rarely produce prison sentences in other countries. And in particular they are kept incarcerated far longer than prisoners in other nations.
Criminologists and legal scholars in other industrialized nations say they are mystified and appalled by the number and length of American prison sentences.
The United States has, for instance, 2.3 million criminals behind bars, more than any other nation, according to data maintained by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London.
In June 1974, one of the first UPC scanner, made by NCR Corp. (which was then called National Cash Register Co), was installed at Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. On June 26, 1974, the first product with a bar code was scanned at a check-out counter. It was a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit chewing gum. The pack of gum wasn't specially designated to be the first scanned product. It just happened to be the first item lifted from the cart by a shopper whose name is long since lost to history. Today, the pack of gum is on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History.
Mary I (popularly known in the English-speaking world as Mary, Queen of Scots and, in France, as Marie Stuart) (8 December 1542 – 8 February 1587) was Queen of Scots from 14 December 1542 to 24 July 1567.
She was the only surviving legitimate child of King James V. She was six days old when her father died and made her Queen of Scots. Her mother, Mary of Guise, assumed regency and her daughter was crowned nine months later.
The first written record of spermicide use is found in the Kahun Papyrus, an Egyptian document dating to 1850 BCE. It described a pessary of crocodile dung and fermented dough
Mary was a five ton Asian elephant who performed in the Sparks World Famous Shows circus. Her death is sometimes interpreted as a cautionary tale of circus animal abuse during the early twentieth century.
On September 11, 1916 a hotel worker named Red Eldridge was hired as an assistant elephant trainer by the circus. On the evening of September 12 he was killed by Mary in Kingsport, Tennessee while taking her to a nearby pond to splash and drink. There are several accounts of his death but the most widely accepted version is that he prodded her behind the ear with a hook after she reached down to nibble on a watermelon rind. She went into a rage, snatched Eldridge with her trunk, threw him against a drink stand and deliberately stepped on his head, crushing it.
The details of the aftermath are confused in a maze of sensationalist newspaper stories and folklore. Most accounts indicate that she calmed down afterward and didn't charge the onlookers, who began chanting, "Kill the elephant!" Apparently within minutes, a local blacksmith tried to kill Mary, firing more than two dozen rounds with little effect. Newspapers published claims that Murderous Mary had killed several workers in the past and noted that she was larger than the world famous Jumbo the elephant. Meanwhile, the leaders of several nearby towns threatened not to allow the circus to visit if Mary was included. The circus owner, Charlie Sparks, reluctantly decided that the only way to quickly resolve the potentially ruinous situation was to kill the elephant in public. On the following day, a foggy and rainy September 13, 1916, she was transported by rail to Erwin, Tennessee where a crowd of over 2,500 people (including most of the town's children) assembled in the Clinchfield railroad yard.
The elephant was hanged by the neck from a railcar-mounted industrial crane. The first attempt resulted in a snapped chain, causing Mary to fall and break her hip as dozens of children fled in terror. The severely wounded elephant died during a second attempt and was buried beside the tracks. Although the authenticity of a widely distributed (and heavily retouched) photo of her death was disputed years later by Argosy magazine, other photographs taken during the incident confirm its provenance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mighty_Mary
Topsy (born circa 1875, died January 4, 1903), was a domesticated elephant with the Forepaugh Circus at Coney Island's Luna Park. Because she had killed three men in as many years (including a severely abusive trainer who attempted to feed her a lit cigarette),[1] Topsy was deemed a threat to people by her owners and killed by electrocution on January 4, 1903.[2] Inventor Thomas Edison captured the event on film. He would release it later that year under the title Electrocuting an Elephant.
A means of execution initially discussed was hanging. However, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals protested and other ways were considered. Edison then suggested electrocution with alternating current, which had been used for the execution of humans since 1890.
To reinforce the execution, Topsy was fed carrots laced with 460 grams of potassium cyanide before the deadly current from a 6,600-volt AC source was sent coursing through her body. She was dead in seconds.[2] The event was witnessed by an estimated 1,500 people and Edison's film of the event was seen by audiences throughout the United States.
On July 20, 2003, a memorial for Topsy was erected at the Coney Island Museum.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topsy_(elephant)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkBU3aYsf0Q (video of electrocution Topsy)
Recent discoveries have brought Iram out of the realm of fable into history.
In the early 1980s a group of researchers interested in the history of Iram used NASA remote sensing satellites, ground penetrating radar, Landsat program data and images taken from the Space Shuttle Challenger as well as SPOT data to identify old camel train routes and points where they converged. These roads were used as frankincense trade routes around 2800 BCE to 100 BCE.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iram_of_the_Pillars
THE archeologists who recently announced the discovery of the legendary lost city of Ubar in the Arabian Peninsula have found the remains of another major emporium in the ancient frankincense trade: the ruins of an even larger city near the coast of the Indian Ocean.
The new discovery is considered a significant step in establishing the full scope of the frankincense traffic at its most prosperous time, at the height of the Roman Empire in the early centuries after Christ, and at one of its major sources, in the Qara Mountains of southern Oman. This seems to remove any remaining questions about how and where the prized commodity was shipped across the Arabian desert by a network of caravan routes to Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean and by ships across the sea to India.
The new find, at the base of the Qara Mountains, is at a site with the modern name of Ain Humran. The discoverers identified it as the ruins of the fortified trading center called Saffara Metropolis on the maps of Claudius Ptolemy, the Alexandrian geographer of the second century A.D.
http://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/21/science/the-frankincense-route-emerges-from-the-desert.html
In the "Greatest Fish Story Ever Told", the first coelacanth known to modern science was discovered in 1938 when a young museum curator named Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer was invited down to the docks to examine a sstrange fish brought in on the trawler, Nerine . She sent a sketch to fish expert JLB Smith, who soon identified the fish as a living coelacanth- a word meaning hollow spine in Greek. The coelacanth fishes were known only from fossils, the most recent of which dated from the late Cretaceous 65 million years ago, so the discovery created a world wide sensation and was called the "biological find of the century"- the same as finding a living dinosaur. The discovery was given the scientific name Latimeria
http://www.dinofish.com/
The current infestation appears to have originated with the release of 24 wild rabbits by Thomas Austin on his property, Barwon Park, near Winchelsea, Victoria, in October 1859 for hunting purposes. While living in England, Austin had been an avid hunter, regularly dedicating his weekends to rabbit shooting. Upon arriving in Australia, which had no native rabbit population, Austin asked his nephew in England to send him 24 grey rabbits, five hares, 72 partridges and some sparrows so that he could continue his hobby in Australia by creating a local population of the species. Many other farms released their rabbits into the wild after Austin. At the time he had stated, "The introduction of a few rabbits could do little harm and might provide a touch of home, in addition to a spot of hunting."
Releasing rabbit-borne diseases has proven somewhat successful in controlling the population of rabbits in Australia. In 1950, after research carried out by Frank Fenner, Myxomatosis was deliberately released into the rabbit population, causing it to drop from an estimated 600 million to around 100 million. Genetic resistance in the remaining rabbits allowed the population to recover to 200-300 million by 1991.
