Surrounded by mountains from all sides, Italian village Viganella does not get enough sunlight from November to February. To solve the problem, the locals have installed a giant mirror on a mountain to redirect the sunlight into the village. It works!
The earliest example of the globe was in 2nd century BC after the theories of a spherical Earth first emerged in the previous 3rd century from Hellenistic astronomy. Sadly, no models of the early globes from that period exist today, but everything derived from that period is what gives us the globe we know today. Humans have used globes for untold centuries to navigate the Earth and, more commonly, as teaching tools. There’s not a person today who doesn’t remember wistfully spinning the globe in their classroom, pondering the mystery of the rest of the world.
Did you know that there are two types of globes? The terrestrial globe is the more common kind of classroom globe that you will have seen in school. The second kind is called a celestial globe which maps out the positions of the stars in the sky. They are commonly made transparent so you can see the stars in their correct position as though looking from the center up at the night’s sky. The design of the globe has evolved through the centuries from the famous globe quoted with “here there be dragons” to the virtual globes contained in modern spacecraft.
Originally globes were made of wood and had strips of a paper map (called gores) glued to it. It had small discs at the poles to cover up irregularities in the map caused by using a flat map to make a spherical globe. Now they’re more commonly molded from thermoplastic in a machine that makes one hemisphere each them joins them together once they’re complete. From there it’s mounted at a 23.5 degree angle to simulate the earth’s tilt so you can easily see how the Earth sits in relation to the sun for the changes in the seasons and days. The history of the globe is just as fascinating as the history of the very planet it represents.
This is a guest post.
This list is a weird one. Not the idea – a lot of people are interested in what very, very expensive houses look like, and that is all well and good. What puzzles us is the mind boggling extent to which people will go to bling their homes; this list features both a T-Rex and a Velociraptor as elements of interior design.
With that, we’ll leave you to explore the six most expensive cribs in the world.
Read more…
Google has renamed Android Market into “Google Play”, in an effort to gather their mobile entertainment products under one roof. From now on market.android.com redirects to play.google.com.
As Google puts it:
…moving files between your computers, endless syncing across your devices, and wires…lots of wires. Today we’re eliminating all that hassle with Google Play, a digital entertainment destination where you can find, enjoy and share your favorite music, movies, books and apps on the web and on your Android phone or tablet.
Ireland’s biggest bookmaker, Paddy Power, recently crafted a commercial that was banned on TV after its fourth day on air, but quickly gained half a million views on Youtube (watch the video below). In this video, Paddy Power shows how they will treat chavs who will be attending Cheltenham Festival, one of Britain’s most famous horse racing events.
Although somewhat controversial, this commercial maybe considered by many as a rightful response to last year’s fight at Royal Ascot caused by two drunk men who had a dispute over a girl. This incident was regarded as extremely inappropriate at the event of such caliber. The Royal Ascot is a pride of Britain and it’s visited by the Royal family members and internationally famous people.
Let’s hope tranquillisers will make Cheltenham Festival a better experience for racegoers.
Sponsored by Paddy Power
Samsung started in 1938 as a company selling dried Korean fish, vegetables and fruit to Manchuria and Beijing.
This is how Samsung looked like 74 years ago when they started.
Some 20 years after its foundation, the company switched to selling flour mills and confectionery machines, which was the fundamental turn of the company towards technology products.
Throughout the course of their early operation, Samsung invested in a clothing company, acquired a Swiss watch company and even negotiated acquisition of a Dutch aircraft maker Fokker, thereby showing interest in a variety of industries.
Still successful, today Samsung sells a very wide range of consumer electronics.
The black swallower is a small fish, known for swallowing fish larger than itself. It swallows prey up to 10 times its mass and 4 times its length.
Their stomach is very distensible and the jaws can swing down to open wide, which allows the black swallower to feed on larger fish. The swallower seizes prey fishes by the tail, and then “walks” its jaws over the prey until it is fully coiled inside the stomach.
