skip to main |
skip to sidebar
A sandlot refers to a vacant lot used by children to play games, mostly unorganised ones. Unlike a playground specifically created for certain games, sandlots perhaps developed as informal spaces which children made use of to serve as makeshift playgrounds. In the US, sandlot baseball refers to an advanced version of the game played by teams not affiliated with either the Major or Minor leagues in the country.
The frozen zoo is a collection of biological materials from a wide variety of rare and critically endangered species. The biological material is composed of gametes (sperm and oocytes), embryos, tissue samples (cell lines), serum and other items. It represents a genetic bank vault, an archive of irreplaceable genetic information that can be preserved for perhaps hundreds of years. It is stored in specialised holding tanks filled with liquid nitrogen at a temperature of -196 degrees Celsius or -373 degrees Fahrenheit. If a species nears extinction and its genes are lost, some samples can be thawed and by using assisted reproductive techniques, offspring can be produced. The collected gametes in the frozen zoo are also used in the process of artificial insemination, embryo transfer, and invitrofertilization.
With over 1,000 ports, Europe is perhaps the continent with most number of ports. The UK alone has over 200 ports and European ports handle about 3.5 billion tonnes of cargo.
Hobos is an American word which refers to homeless people wandering about in search of work. In earlier days, hobos were supposed to move around by hopping from one freight train to another, just to save the cost of transportation. Hobos and hobo culture began in mid-19th century, when the ending of the Civil War caused severe unemployment in the US and several people left their homes and started moving about the whole country in search of jobs. A similar phenomenon happened during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Although the term owes its origin to the above phenomena, it is used today to refer to a tramp in general, an aimless traveller not necessarily looking for work. There are several theories related to how the word hobo got coined: some say the word has been derived from the phrase hopping box cars, and some others that it is a shortened version of the rail-road greeting ‘Ho Beau,’ popular in the 19th century.
An e-mail address identifies a location to which e-mail messages can be delivered. The first electronic mail delivery engaging two machines was done in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson, a programmer at Bolt, Beranek and Newman, an engineering company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He needed a way to separate, in the e-mail address, the name of the user from the machine the user was on. He wanted a character that would not, under any conceivable circumstances, be found in the user’s name. He looked down at the keyboard and chose the @ sign among various punctuation marks available on his Model 33 teletype keyboard. He had no idea that he was creating an icon for the wired world. Today, email is the most used application on the internet. Each e-mail account has a unique address. A general format for an e-mail address is: username@computer_name. The part before the @ sign is the local part of the address, the user name of the recipient, and the part after the @ sign is the domain part which is a host computer name.
According to UNESCO, India tops the list with 8,407 universities. It’s followed by the United States (5,759), Argentina (1,705) and Spain (1,415).
Platypus
Whale
A mammal, by definition, breathes air into the lungs, is warm blooded, feeds its offspring milk and has body hair. Mammals evolved from reptiles some 70 million years ago and some like whales returned to the waters approximately 16 million years after leaving it. The platypus is a duck-billed, beavertailed and otter-footed poisonous mammal that is also special because it lays eggs. However, the eggs develop in the uterus for a much longer time than that of egglaying non-mammals and the young ones are fed milk — something unique to mammals. It is believed that monotremes (the class of platypus-like mammals) branched from other mammals early in evolution. The other mammals evolved into either placental or marsupial groups. The class of mammals that evolved into whales do not lay eggs at all.
These vests help users endure virtual blows, literally. An American surgeon has invented a vest that lets computer game users feel physical attacks like shots, stabs, etc. while playing games. The vest uses air pressure and feedback from the computer to simulate thumps on those regions of a person’s torso, which would have been hit if the person were actually fighting in a battle. It’s designed by Mark Ombrellaro and was originally intended for medical purposes.
