Archives August 2013

Human rights are those rights which a person should  have in order to be a human being. These are the rights which every person should enjoy to lead an honorable life as s human being. All individuals should enjoy these rights without Any distinction of race, religion, caste, colour or sex. These laws have been given a proper place in the constitutions of almost all the democratic' countries of the world. In the present day world, there is a lot of concern about the protection of human rights. The United Nations on Decembers 10, 1948 adopted the Universal declaration of Human Rights and called upon the different member nations to assure all the human rights to their people. December 10 thus became a historic day in the annals of the world history. As such this day, i.e.  December 10 is therefore celebrated all over the world   year as Human more...

Educational tours are of great importance as they not only broaden our outlook but enhance our knowledge to a great extent. That is why, we, the students await for this precious moment impatiently. Recently I got such an occasion. It was the time of summer vacation when all of a sudden a programme was made for all India tour. It was a tour of twenty days. All the students who were willing to enjoy this tour, had to deposit Rs. 5000/- to bear the expenses of travelling, fooding and lodging. I being a great advocate of educational tours, joined it whole heartedly. My parents supported me with required money. We had our reservations in a special bogie. We were a group of fifty students all from XIIth class, three teachers and two attendants. We had already taken those things which we thought were necessary during the travel. As it was more...

Oliver Smithies [b. 1925), a scientist working at the University of Toronto in the 1950s, discovered a way for scientists to separate proteins quickly and easily by their size, using potato starch to create a type of microscopic sieve. Smithies, who was one of three scientists sharing the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was looking for a way to separate insulin from its precursor when he developed starch-gel electrophoresis. Using potato starch, Smithies created a gel that allowed proteins to be separated by size. He found that the best potato starch came from a powder produced in Canada. Later, when Smithies worked at the University of Wisconsin, he made many trips from Madison, Wisconsin, to Toronto to obtain this special powder. The powder was used as a matrix in the gel. The proteins were applied to the gel and exposed to an electric charge, which allowed them to more...

Years before the format war between VHS and Betamax, and decades before DVDs came onto the scene, there was film. But film was hard to use and eventually videotape was invented. It was much faster to edit than film and speeded up the news business. But these first video machines were so big that they were stationary, and the roving reporters of the world stuck to film until portable versions eventually appeared. The first portable broadcast recorder, which had a huge backpack in which the tape sat, allowed news to be filmed on video outside a studio, although at a lower quality than film. The videotape was stored on reels, just like film, but this changed in 1971 when Sony released the U- Matic video recorder. The U-Matic had been designed for home use, and the tape was in cassette form, which made it easy to handle, although the units more...

Outline: You are sitting in an over-crowded bus—An old lady some- how manages to get into the crowded bus, you think in your mind—whether to offer the lady a seat. At last you decide to offer her the seat—She thanks you.    The transport system in a big city like Delhi is far from satisfaction, a It is a total dismal, a complete failure. Here commuters increase by  thousands every day and the number of buses remain the same. They rather decrease. Most of them are unserviceable, Most of these buses are only in name otherwise they are junk, must be piled up in a junk dealer's shop. You have to travel in such rickety and shaky buses. There are hundreds of buses with many depots and workshops But still they are insufficient, they cannot cope with the need of growing population. Their condition is horrible, they let out plenty more...

Before the introduction of plastics, iron was one of the most multipurpose materials, used to make almost everything. However, the only pure iron on Earth fell from space as meteorites, and that is far too rare to rely on. Most iron has been pushed up to the Earth's crust by activity in the planet's core, but this has reacted with many other elements, resulting in iron ore, rather than pure elemental iron. The process of separating iron from ore is called smelting: The ore is heated to a temperature at which it becomes a liquid, and then the metal is separated from the waste. Charcoal is one of the few materials that burns hot enough to melt iron. In Britain the iron industry originally moved around the country, burning forests and then moving on, but by the seventeenth century the industry was running out of trees and wood was becoming more...

Willem J. Kolff (b. 1911), a doctor working in occupied Holland during World War II, cobbled together the first kidney dialysis (hemodialysis) machine. When kidneys are not functioning correctly, waste products accumulate in the blood, and can be fatal. Kolff was aware of experiments showing that when two solutions of different chemical concentrations are separated by a permeable membrane an exchange of molecules takes place from the area of greater concentration to the area of lower concentration. Kolff's machine consisted of 66 feet (20 m) of cellophane tubing wound around a wooden drum that was suspended horizontally inside a tank filled with saline. As the drum was rotated by a motor, the patient's blood was forced through the tubing and its waste products crossed the membrane into the saline. A severe shortage of materials due to the war forced Kolff to improvise; he used cellophane that came from sausage casings. more...

On December 26, 1783, before a large public gathering at the base of the Montpellier Observatory in Paris, the French scientist and physicist Louis-Sebastien Lenormand jumped from the observatory's tower clinging to a 14-foot (4.2 m) parachute attached to an improvised wooden frame. Lenormand's leap of faith was the first ever documented use of a parachute and followed on from an earlier attempt at a slowed descent when he leaped from a tree holding on to nothing more than two modified parasols. Lenormand's inspiration likely came from the popular writings of a former French ambassador to China whose memoirs included an account of Chinese acrobats floating to earth using umbrellas. Chinese legends dating to 90 B.C.E. also tell of a group of prisoners who cheated death by leaping from a tower and slowing their descent with the aid of conical straw hats. Leonardo da Vinci sketched his famous pyramid- shaped more...

Plain old concrete—undeniably useful and popular though it may be—is really not as spectacular a material as you might at first think. Yes, It is good for making good, hard pavements and keeping fence- posts firmly in place in the ground, but if you are hoping to build « multistory car park out of it, or an overpass that runs above a busy motorway, you will quickly discover that concrete itself is not enough. In the 1860s, however, French gardener Joseph Monier (1823-1906) demonstrated the reinforced garden tubs he had made using ferroconcrete—a concrete and chicken-mesh combination that fellow Frenchman Joseph-Louis Lambot had pioneered. The garden tubs made their debut at the Paris Exposition of 1867, and Monier applied for a patent the same year. Monier was not the first to think of strengthening concrete with metal, but his patent design clearly established the principle of reinforced concrete for structural more...

At the heart of a quartz watch is a 4-mm bar of quartz piezoelectric crystal that is made to vibrate by applying a small voltage. The crystal is laser trimmed so that it oscillates exactly 32,768 times per second. Higher-frequency crystals would need too large a driving current and guickly drain a watch battery, and lower-frequency ones would be physically too large. The signal, one cycle per second, either drives a second hand or triggers an LCD (liquid crystal display). Quartz is used because it has a very low coefficient of thermal expansion and thus is not affected by changes in the weather. A fairly standard mass- produced quartz watch typically gains or loses less than one second per day. The first quartz oscillator was produced in 1921. By 1927 Warren Marrison, a telecommunications engineer at Bell Laboratories in Canada, had made the first quartz clock. Unfortunately, its valve-driven counting more...