Archives April 2013

Agriculture has a significant role in our economy. Being the main occupation of the people of India, about sixty four percent of our workforce is employed in agriculture. Both industry and agriculture are important for the progress of country and since independence we have made great efforts in the field of industrial development. However, almost twenty nine percent of our national income still comes from agriculture. Hence, its role in our country's economy cannot be ignored. Agriculture provides us with our very basic requirement that of food in the form of grains, vegetables, fruits and many other edibles. In addition it provides raw materials for many industries thus it not only fulfils one of our essential needs but also gives support to industries. There are many agricultural products which are exported and in return valuable foreign exchange is earned which strengthens the economic system of our country. Hence, it is more...

An interview can be defined as the oral test of a candidate who had applied for a post for employment or admission. No one knows about his future like it one cannot know about the questions to be: asked by an interviewer. As the field of knowledge is very vast so the field of questioning is very vast. Interviewer is at a liberty to ask question from any field of knowledge. This is luck of the candidate if his field of knowledge coincides with that of the members of the interview board. This is the matter of fate if the replies appeal to Them. The difference of giver and seeker makes the members of the interview board on the superior side as they are givers and we are seekers. They are on a vantage ground. As there is a vast difference in demand and supply they are again on the more...

Some of the earliest known examples of maps—in the form of Babylonian tablets—are Egyptian land drawings and paintings discovered in early tombs. However, in 1961 a town plan of Catalhoyuk in Turkey was unearthed, painted on a wall. Featuring houses and the peak of a volcano, it is around 8,500 years old. The sixth-century tablet known as Imago Mundi shows Babylon on the Euphrates, with cities on a circular land mass, surrounded by a river. Some maps are known as T and O maps. In one, illustrating the inhabited world in Roman times, T represents the Mediterranean, dividing the continents, Asia, Europe, and Africa, and O is the surrounding Ocean. The T and O Hereford Mappa Mundi of 1300, drawn on a single sheet of vellum, includes writing in black ink and water painted green, with the Red Sea colored red. Greek scholars developed a spherical Earth theory using astronomical more...

Bioethanol is a high-octane alcohol produced from sugar or starch and is considered an important alternative fuel to petroleum-based products. One of the first fuels used in the automobile business, it was used extensively during World War II in Germany, the United States, Brazil, and the Philippines. After the war, bioethanol was generally replaced by cheaper petroleum-based fuels. Brazil has been the worldwide leader of bioethanol development since the 1973 oil crisis, with the initiation  of the Brazilian  Alcohol   Program (PROALCOOL), whose aim was to produce bioethanol to combine with gasoline. Sugar cane was to be used as the source of bioethanol, and in the first phase of the project (from 1975 to 1979), distilleries were attached to existing sugar mills. In the later phase of the project, autonomous distilleries were built for bioethanol production. The 1979 crisis, when the price of crude oil soared following the Iranian Revolution, more...

"Since ICSI has been introduced... more than 95 percent of males can father their own genetic child." Paul Devroey and Andre van Steirteghem, 2004 Intracytoplasmic sperm injection, or ICSI, is the process whereby a single sperm is injected into an egg. It is helpful when infertility is linked to sperm problems, such as difficulties with the sperm penetrating the egg or low sperm count. Its success rates are equal to in vitro fertilization (IVF) and it is recommended to more than half of all couples having IVF treatments. Andre van Steirteghem (b.1940) and colleagues from Vrije Universiteit Brussels were behind the technique. After the birth of Louise Brown, the first successful "test tube" baby IVF was used to treat many couples with fertility problems, but it was found to be least effective in cases of male factor infertility. This began the exploration of new procedures of assisted fertilization. Van Steirteghem's more...

The first webcam in the world was born from the desire of computer science students at Cambridge University, England, for fresh coffee. Having only a single coffee pot situated at some distance from the computer labs meant that a freshly brewed supply soon ran out. To overcome this difficulty Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky had the idea of focusing a camera on the coffee pot. A computer with a simple frame grabber was connected to a camera, which was focused on the coffee pot. Jardetzky wrote a server program that collected images from the camera every three minutes, while Stafford-Fraser developed the software to run on the computers of all the members of the "Trojan Room coffee club." Connecting to the server then provided an up-to-date, icon-sized image of the pot on-screen. The camera was connected to the Internet in 1993 and became a popular symbol of the early World more...

"It is a wretched business to be digging a well just as thirst is mastering you." Titus Maccius Plautus, playwright An aqueduct is any artificial conduit for the delivery of water, though the term is often misunderstood to refer only to the arches sometimes used to enable these channels to span low ground. Ancient civilizations on the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile diverted water from these great rivers for irrigation, but the paucity of supply in Minoan Crete encouraged the development of complex storage and distribution systems for the first time in the second millennium B.C.E. It is the Romans who are best known for their innovative water supply systems. Between 312 B.C.E. and 226 C.E. the Romans constructed eleven major aqueducts to provide Rome with water. Aqueducts did not become commonplace again until the late nineteenth century, when rising populations in the United Kingdom outgrew local water sources, and engineers more...

Since its infancy, modern computer memory, namely RAM, has suffered from a fundamental problem. It remembers things when it has power, but pull the plug out and its carefully held pattern of Os and 1s fades and dies. The traditional solution is to use disks or tapes to save the contents of the computer's memory more permanently but these have disadvantages. They are slower than RAM, and their motors and other moving parts use more electricity and do not like being shaken around. In 1967 Simon Sze and Dawon Kahng invented a transistor that could remember a programmed state even without power. They programmed their "floating gate transistor" by forcing electrons onto a part of the transistor that was normally electrically isolated—the floating gate. When the power was turned off, this electrical charge was trapped, potentially for years. While memory chips based on Sze and Kahng's invention were produced, they more...

"The Analytical Engine... can do whatever we know how to order it to perform" Ada Lovelace Ada Byron (1815-1852) was the daughter of the English poet Lord Byron. Under her mother's guidance, Ada was tutored from an early age in mathematics and science; she later married the Earl of Lovelace. In 1835 Ada was introduced to Charles Babbage and learned of his ideas for his "analytical engine." In 1842, Babbage was invited to give a seminar at the University of Turin in Italy. Interest in his work spread when an Italian engineer, Federico Luigi Menabrea, published an account of the lecture in a leading French scientific journal. Babbage asked Lovelace to translate Menabrea's work; the notes and comments she made were considerably more extensive than the original paper and were published in their own right. In the last of her seven notes, Lovelace describes an algorithm that would enable the more...

"Curran revolutionized... skiing by designing an easy... method for skiers to ascend the mountain." Press release from the Ski Hall of Fame The idea of using ropes to climb mountains is almost as old as rope itself, and evidence can be found from the 1600s for people using ropes to cross chasms or valleys suspended below a rope bridge (although some consider rope to have been used as far back as 15,000 B.C.E.). Where this practice first began to be adapted to aid the sport of skiing (saving the time and tedium of having to climb the mountain before skiing back down) is somewhat uncertain, and also depends on your definition of "ski lift." Broadly, ski lifts fall into a number of categories. The first of which is where skiers appropriate an existing lift system. A good example of this was on Gold Mountain (later named Eureka Peak) in the more...