My Science School

According to the Guinness World Records, the oldest dog on record was another Australian dog named Bluey, who was 29 years and five months. Bluey died in 1939.

Bluey – or, known by his full name as Bluey Les Hall – lived from 7 June 1910 to 14 November 1939. He was owned by Les and Esma Hall and is officially the oldest dog according to the Guinness Book of World Records.

Bluey’s age is part of what urged a study to be conducted regarding the longevity of the lives of Australian cattle dogs. This study involved one hundred dogs and found that, on average, this breed of dog had the tendency to live about one year longer than other breeds. As such, Bluey’s case is still considered an outlier as he lived a full decade and a half more than the average life expectancy.

 

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Dogs have a keen sense of hearing. In fact, they are capable of hearing sounds four times further away than the human ear can discern. Their ears are also better designed to gather more available sound waves. They have 15 different muscles that move their ears in all directions. Plus they can move one ear at a time, independently of the other, to absorb even more information.

They can also hear sounds four times further away — so what human ears can hear from 20 feet away; our dogs can hear from 80 feet away.

Even though our dogs can hear better than we can, do they understand what they’re hearing?

Two studies, one published in the journal Current Biology and the other in Science, conclude that the answer is yes! Your dog might not understand everything you say, but he listens and pays attention similar to the way humans do. The researchers discovered that dogs — like humans — respond not only to the words we say to them, but also to the emotional tone of our voices.

 

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If you’ve ever watched your dog twitching, chattering or moving their paws while sleeping, you may have wondered if they are dreaming. The answer is yes. Dogs do dream.

While we know that humans regularly dream during their sleep, for many years it was unclear if animals did. So scientists monitored the brains of rats while awake and performing tasks such as running around tracks for food. They then compared their brain activity while asleep and discovered exactly the same. This indicated that rats were indeed dreaming. In fact it’s likely that all mammals dream. But why?

To understand dreaming, it helps to understand the process of sleep. Sleep is a natural state characterised by reduced consciousness along with reduced or paused sensory and voluntary muscular activity. In other words, you don’t eat, smell or walk during your sleep. We still do not know the reason that sleep is so important to animals but it appears to aid in growth and repair of our body systems. During sleep the brain also appears to process information and experiences gained during the day.

 

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The leading cause of procrastination

Procrastination is the action of delaying or postponing something, and the number one cause for procrastination these days is said to be Facebook. Yes, social media distracts many of us, but Facebook seems to top the list.

The most followed

Instagram is a social networking site.app where around the world share picture stories. It is also a way for people to connect with each. So, do you know who is the most followed person/thing on Instagram? It’s Instagram. Yes, the app’s official account has nearly 313 million folloers!

The most populated

We all know China is the most populated country in the world. But, if social networking sites were to be considered countries, Facebook would be the most populated country in the world, with China coming in second.

On the job

Linkedin is popular social networking platform for professionals and freshers who wish to find jobs and build a network. Do you know the rate at which new users are joining Linkedin? Two users per second!

It’s all in the name

Twitter and tweet are popular terms these days. But did you know that Twitter would have been named friendstalker? Yes, twitter co-founder Evan Williams had thought of the name but it was turned down.

Keep trying till you succeed

Snapchat, the picture-sharing app, which has risen in popularity over the years was the 35th idea of its founders. Evan Speigel, Reggie Brown Poster and Bobby Murphy, the founders of Snapchat, had tried their hands on 34 projects before they came up with the idea of Snapchat.

 

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• The soaring walls of Great Zimbabwe date back to 11th century, during the country’s Late Iron Age.


• The walls rise as high as 32 feet and were constructed from granite blocks of the exposed rock of nearby hills.


• The walls were built by laying stones one on top of the other without the use of mortar.


• It is believed that a maximum of 20,000 people lived inside its walls at its height.


• For many decades, the ruins at Great Zimbabwe were described, by Europeans, as a perplexing 'mystery' and an ancient 'riddle,'. They refused to believe that such a complex site was built by Africans who they considered to be lower people and attributed the site’s construction to foreign sources.


• The Great Zimbabwe and the culture that flourished inside its walls declined by the 15th century.

 

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• Commissioned by the Roman emperor Hadrian to defend the part of Britain the Romans controlled from attacks.


• Some believe that it was constructed to prevent immigration and smuggling.


• The 117.5 km-long wall ran coast to coast from the banks of the River Tyre near the North Sea to the Solway Firth on the Irish Sea.


• It is called Vallum Hadriani in Latin.


• A significant portion of the wall still stands and is considered a British cultural icon. It is one of Britain’s ancient tourist attractions.


• Work commenced on the wall in 122 AD and was completed around six years later. It goes without saying that a construction project of such nation-spanning proportions required significant manpower. Three legions – comprised of around 5,000 infantrymen each – were employed to take care of the major construction work.


• It’s a popular misconception that Hadrian’s Wall marks the border between England and Scotland. In fact, the wall predates both kingdoms, while substantial sections of modern-day Northumberland and Cumbria – both of which are located south of the border – are bisected by it.

 

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• This wall is a national memorial in Washington, D.C. built to honour the U.S. Armed forces who fought the Vietnam war, and the service members who died in service or were unaccounted for during the war.


• The memorial is maintained by the National Park Service, the U.S. and receives around 30 lakh visitors each year.


• The Memorial Wall is made of two long, black granite walls, etched with the names of those being honoured in 140 panels.


• The stone for the panels was quarried from Bengaluru, India.


• Visitors can see a reflection of themselves in the names on the black granite walls, connecting the living to those lost.


• The names are listed in chronological order by date of their casualty and begin and end at the origin point, or center, of the memorial where the two walls meet.

 

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• Built several centuries ago, the walls of Babylon are situated 85km south of Baghdad.


• The ancient city of Babylon in Mesopotamia was protected by these walls.


• The Ishtar Gate, the eighth gate and the main entrance to the inner city of Babylon, was considered one of the world’s wonders for its beautiful design and relief work.


• Many of the walls of Babylon, like the ancient city itself, is now in ruins due to damage caused by reconstruction ordered by former President Saddam Hussein in the 1980s and more recently, the U.S. military occupation.


• Like the Hanging Gardens, they were included among the “world’s seven wonders," and, according to every account given of them, their magnitude and construction were remarkable.


• The supposed height of the walls was improbable, as it is unlikely that mud-brick construction material described would have been solid enough to support the weight of such a structure, and exploration has shown that the length of this wall seems to have been closer to twelve miles around.

 

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• The construction of the Berlin Wall commenced in August 1961 to prevent the people of East Germany from migrating to West Germany in search of better jobs.


• Since it was built in the middle of Berlin, dividing the city into two, it was called the Berlin Wall.


• The 155 km-long wall divided the city for nearly 30 years, bringing misery to a lot of families whose members were split on either side. Many people who tried to cross the wall were killed.


• It was demolished on November 9, 1989 after several uprisings and the beginning of the fall of the Eastern bloc.


• Today, the remains of the Berlin Wall are a tourist attraction.


• No fewer than 327 people died trying to cross the Berlin Wall into West Germany, 10 percent of whom were women. Another 5,000 people were captured trying to escape over (or sometimes, under) the wall.

 

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• These walls were first erected in the Bronze Age between 3000 and 2600 BC.


• They are among the oldest walls standing now.


• Built to protect the city of Troy, the walls were over 5.2 m-tall when erected.


• They have stood the test of time and continue to draw tourists from around the world.


• The city was considerably enlarged and furnished with a massive defensive wall made of cut blocks of stone and rectangular clay bricks.


• Troy archaeologists have found ceramics and bronze axes from southeast Europe, suggesting that that people may have moved into the city from there. 


• Many of the people who reoccupied Troy may not have been Greek colonists but rather people who already lived in the area.  

 

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• Also known as the “Wailing Wall”, the Western Wall is located in Jerusalem.


• It is a famous religious site for Jews.


• The limestone wall was originally erected as an extension of the Second Jewish Temple.


• It was constructed around 19th Century BC by Herod the Great.


• This wall is 488m long.


• It has been a site for Jewish prayer and pilgrimage for centuries, the earliest source mentioning Jewish attachment to the site dating from the 4th century.


• With the rise of the Zionist movement in the early 20th-century, the wall became a source of friction between the Jewish community and the Muslim religious leadership, who were worried that the wall was being used to further Jewish nationalistic claims to the Temple Mount and Jerusalem.


• After the 1948 Arab-Israeli War the wall came under Jordanian control and Jews were barred from the site for 19 years until Israel captured the Old City in 1967.

 

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• This wall is considered the longest manmade barrier ever built.


• It stretches for nearly 21,000 km, with parts of it in ruins.


• The wall was built across several Chinese dynasties


• The Great Wall was repeatedly breached. The most significant breach was by the Manchus who entered Beijing and established the Qing Dynasty.


• Some claim that this is the only manmade structure visible from space, but it is not true.


• One of the many legends surrounding the wall tells of a helpful dragon who drew out the tracks for the wall, which the workers then followed.


• The most well-known and popular legend of The Great Wall of China is the story of “Men Jiangnu’s Bitter Weeping,” which tells of a woman whose husband was killed building the wall. Her tears were so bitter that the section of the wall collapsed to reveal her husband’s bones so she could bury him.


• The wall is actually not a continuous line. It has spurs going in different directions, and breaks where mountains or lakes offer protection.

 

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Are they the same?

Although the world wide web and the internet are used alternatively, the two are not the same. Internet is a network of networks that links computers together. The world wide web on the other hand is a collection of lined pages that are accessed using the Internet and a web browser.

WWW for free

The World Wide Web was made available to the public for free in 1993. Initially, it was meant only for physicists at the European organisation for nuclear research (CERN) to share data.

Biggest medium of communication

The WWW is the fastest growing communication medium of all time. Imagine, it took a WWW only four years to reach 50 million people. In contrast, it took the radio 38 years and television 13 years to reach the same number.

The Apple connection

Did you know that the entire world wide web stored on a NeXT computer when it was created? NeXT was the company started by Steve Jobs after he was ousted from Apple Inc.

What’s in a name?

Before the name World Wide Web was finalised, there were other options such as Mine of Information, Information Mine, and Mesh. These names don’t sound cooler than the World Wide Web, do they?

 

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Not develop for Microsoft

We might know PowerPoint as software from Microsoft. But unlike Word and Excel, PowerPoint was not developed for Microsoft. The presentation program was created by Robert Gaskins and Dennis Austin at a software company named Forethought, Inc.

Not just for presentations

While PowerPoint is primarily presentation software, one can also use it to make infographics, GIFs, quizzes, photo albums and more!

Designed for MAC

WHEN Gaskins was working on PowerPoint, he designed it for the Macintosh OS (macOS). PowerPoint was released for MAC on April 20, 1987. Just three months after its release, the product was acquired by Microsoft from Forethought, Inc for $14 million.

It’s Karaoke time!

Yes, PowerPoint Karaoke is the current fad, though it does not involve music or singing. It is an improvisational activity, where a participant makes a presentation based on a set of slides he or she has never seen before! Imagine how comical this could turn out to be. PowerPoint Karaoke originated in January 2006 in Berlin as a creation of a collective of writers and artists.

Presenter to PowerPoint

The first version of PowerPoint, which was designed for MAC, was called ‘Presenter’. However, due to Trademark issues, the name had to be scrapped. It was later changed to PowerPoint.

 

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Not always called Word

MS Word was released on October 25, 1983 under the name Multi-Tool Word. However, the marketing department of the company thought the name was too long, so they shortened it to its current name, Word.

Check that spelling?

Word helps thousands today by prompting spelling and grammatical errors. However, the AutoCorrect feature and the red squiggly line you see under misspelt words were introduced with Word 95 in the year 1933.

Before that users had to check their spelling and grammar on their own.

Say ‘Hello’ to Clippy!

With the version of Word 97, Microsoft introduced Clippy, an animated interactive paperclip. Clippy was a word assistant which would assist users with formatting word documents. However, Clippy is said to be despised by many users, as it would distract them. Microsoft finally pulled Clippy out of service with the release of Word 2007.

Not the first word processor

Word is popular around the world, but it wasn’t the first word processor to have been developed. That credit goes to Bravo. In 1981, Microsoft hired Charles Simonyi, the primary developer of Bravo. It was Simpnyi who developed MS Word along with others.

Games for features

While Clippy made its exit with Word 2007, Microsoft introduced the ‘Ribbon’ feature in this version. It was a change in the user-interface for most users. However, to ease the process, Microsoft developed Ribbon Hero, a video game to educate users about the features of MS Word.

 

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