Thursday, January 26, 2012

A man in Thailand Married a dead girlfriend to fulfill his promise of love

29-year old Sarinya Kamsook and her 28-year-old boyfriend, Chadil Deffy, were to be married this year. Sarinya Kamsook unfortunately died in a car crash, just day before the big event, Deffy decided to go on with their wedding as planned and married her.
 Sarinya was involved in a car crash, leaving her severely injured. She still could have been saved with timely medical attention. However, the doctors made her wait for 6 hours due to an overcrowded ICU instead of transferring her to another hospital. During this time, she succumbed to her injuries and passed away.

During her funeral in Surin, Thailand, Chadil Duffy placed a ring on his deceased bride’s finger. It thus turned out a wedding/funeral ceremony, one of the rare events in the world.

Till death do us apart...

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Apple’s First iPhone Was Made in 1983

The first iPhone was actually dreamed up in 1983. Forget that silly old touchscreen, this iPhone was a landline with full, all-white handset and a built-in screen controlled with a stylus.The phone was designed for Apple by Hartmut Esslinger, an influential designer who helped make the Apple IIc computer (Apple’s first “portable” computer) and later founded Frogdesign. The 1983 iPhone certainly fits in with Esslinger’s other designs for Apple. It also foreshadows the touchscreens of both theiPhone and iPad.
Images of the 1983 iPhone have been circling the web for a while but there has been renewed interest in Apple’s early designs and history thanks to a peak inside Stanford University’s massive trove of Apple documents. The archives are a close-guarded secret but Stanford is starting to grant access to select journalists and organizations. The archives were donated in 1997 after Steve Jobs rejoined the company and document much of the design and personnel changes that took place in the 1980s.
The 1983 iPhone is just one of many prototypes buried in Apple’s past. There’s even a device that looks eerily similar to an iPad. Despite the phone’s age, it actually looks like a cool concept that could easily be updated into a modern consumer product by replacing simple stylus screen with an iPad-like interface.
Mashable has reached out to Stanford to get a private look into the material. Stay tuned for more, but in the mean time, take a look at some pics of the iPhone that never was.


Friday, January 20, 2012

General Interesting Facts | Truly Amazing

* No piece of normal-size paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
* Blueberry juice boosts memory
* When cats are happy or pleased, they squeeze their eyes shut
* The elephant is the only animal with 4 knees
* Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell
* Each year, about 500,000 detectable earthquakes occur in the world. About 100,000 of those can be felt and about 100 of them cause damage.
* The tongue is the only body muscle that is attached from one end only.
* We, as humans, forget 90% of our dreams
* The percentage of people dreaming in black and white started decreasing after the spread of color TV
* Approximately two-thirds of people tip their head to the right when they kiss
* Just days before the World Cup of 1966 in England, the trophy was stolen and then later retrieved by a dog
* Some Chinese believe that swinging the arms cures headaches
* Coffee drinkers have more sex than non-coffee drinkers. They also enjoy it more.
* The city of Portland in Oregon was named after a coin toss in 1844. Heads for Portland and tails for Boston.
* A queen bee lays 1500 eggs a day
* No president of the United States was an only child for his parents
* Pumice is the only rock that floats in water 

* 80% of all pictures on the internet are of naked women
* 250 to 300 million cell phones are being used in the U.S.
* Cats can hear ultrasound
* Kissing is healthier than shaking hands
* Jaguars are frightened by dogs
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
  An olive tree can live up to 1500 years
* Ants never sleep
* The human brain is 80% water

* There are 318,979,564,000 possible combinations of the first four moves in Chess
* Women blink nearly twice as much as men
* The human heart beats over 100,000 times a day
* Human fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails

* You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV
* Coffee beans aren't beans; they are fruit pits
# 2,520 can be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 without having a fractional leftover
# Human eye detects 10 million colors
# Your thumb is the same length as your nose
# Butterflies smell with their feet

  # Horses can't vomit and pigs can't look up in the sky
#Most lipstick have fish scales
# Barbie's full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts.
# Iceland has the highest concentration of broadband users in the world.
#The average chocolate bar has 8 insect legs in it.
  #Every drop of seawater contains approximately 1 billion gold atoms.
# The oldest known vegetable is the pea.
# The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F is "feedback."
# Russia has the most movie theaters in the world.


Grtttttttttttttttttttttttttttt



Thursday, January 19, 2012

Real-life Superheroes

1. The Man who doesn't Sleep (Thai Ngoc)
 Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known as Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973.
Ngoc currently lives on his farm at the foot of a mountain busy with farming and taking care of pigs and chickens all day. His six children live at their house in Que Trung. Ngoc often does extra farm work or guards his farm at night to prevent theft, saying he used three months of sleepless nights to dig two large ponds to raise fish.
Even if he doesn’t sleep, he was mentally sound and was able to carry 100 kg of pig feed down a 4km road.
Ngoc has refused to be taken abroad for testing, as he has not left his village for sixty years and is afraid of tests.

2. Magical heat energy generators (Buddhist monks)
  Experts have been studying Buddhist monks for more than 20 years, trying to figure out just how in the hell they're doing what they do. By using a meditation technique called Tum-mo, these monks can lower their metabolism by 64 percent. To put it in perspective, your metabolism only drops 10 to 15 percent when you sleep. And yes, you should feel bad that there are people who make you look uptight when you're asleep.

But far more awesome than that, the monks can also increase the temperatures of their fingers and toes by 17 degrees. No one knows how.


3. The man who claps as Loud as a Helicopter (Zhang Quan)
A Chinese man who can clap his hands nearly as loud as a helicopter is hoping to get into the record books. Zhang Quan, 70, of Chongqing city, had his clapping monitored by local environmental protection officials, reports Chongqing Business News. His claps apparently measured 107 decibels - three decibels lower than whirling helicopter blades. Workers from the environmental protection bureau say Zhang could face arrest for noise pollution if he claps too often.

4. Electric Human (Ma Xiangang)
  He can light a bulb with his hand. He can control electrical currents. He is a man who isn't afraid of direct contact with electricity.

Ma Xiangang, an ordinary man living in Daqing, a city in northeastern China's Heilongjiang province, has a strange gift of being able to touch electricity without being shocked. He can touch 220-volt electric wires without any protection and appear as if it is nothing.


The World’s Most Interesting City Cliffs

There are some amazing feats of architecture in our world – not just single beautiful buildings, but entire towns built on the tops of towering cliffs or carved into the sides of mountains. The first glimpse of towns like this can take your breath away. You could get that same thrill when looking out from one of these towns to the ocean or the earth far below. Here are some perfect examples of the world’s most interesting city cliffs.

1Santorini  
 Santorini is a volcanic island in the Cyclades group of the Greek islands. It is famous for its dramatic views, stunning sunsets from the towns of Fira and Oia, the white-washed houses, and its very own active volcano. Oia was built at the top of majestic cliffs overlooking a submerged volcano. Fira, the capital, is a marriage of Venetian and Cycladic architecture, whose white cobblestone streets bustle with shops, tavernas, hotels and cafes, while clinging on the edge of the 400 meter (1,300 ft) high city cliffs. Just above Fira at the highest point of the island is the quintessentially Santorininian town of Oia, with its whitewashed walls sunk into the volcanic rock.

2Positano  
 Positano is a small town located on the Amalfi Coast of Compania and is one of the most popular tourist attraction in Italy. The city seems to be scattered from top to bottom down a hillside leading to the coast. Though the city grew and prospered in medieval times, by the mid 19th more than half of the population was gone. In the 20th century it went from being a poor fishing village to a very popular tourist destination with the help of author John Steinbeck who touted its beauty.


3Al Hajjara
 
Al Hajjara, sometimes spelt as Al Hajara, is a historical cliff city in the Yemen’s Haraz Mountains situated west of the city of Manakhah. It is one of the most impressive and easily accessible mountain villages in Yemen. The village was literally built into the mountain with quarried stone from the mountainside nearby. Al Hajjara dates from the twelfth century. Its fortified houses are made with massive blocks of unmortared stone, cluster to form an uninterrupted rampart. A series of granaries and cisterns have made it possible for this village, like others in the mountains, to withstand a long siege.

4Ronda 
  Ronda is located in the province of Malaga in Spain, famous for it’s city cliffs. It is situated in the mountains at an elevation of 760 meters (2,500 ft). The city is split in two by the Guadalevin River that runs through Ronda, causing it to sit on either side of the El Tajo Canyon formed by the river. There are three bridges that precariously cross the canyon so that you can cross from one side of Ronda to the other. The city’s architecture received its influence from the Romans and Moors who once ruled the area. Ronda has the distinction of being the birthplace of bullfighting and Spain’s oldest bullfighting ring is still there.

5Bandiagara Escarpment 
  The Bandiagara Escarpment is a sandstone cliff in the Dogon country of Mali that rises almost 500 meters (1,640 ft) from the lower sandy flats below. These cliffs are dotted with ancient cave dwellings of the Tellem people. These people carved their caves into the cliffs of the escarpment so that their dead could be buried high above the flash floods that are common to the area. They built dozens of villages along the cliffs above the caves. In the 14th century, the Dogon people drove out the Tellem and they remain the inhabitants of this area to this day.

6Mesa Verde 
  Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado, is home to the famous cliff dwellings of the ancient Anasazi people. It may be the most significant archeological preserve of Native American culture in the US. In the 12th century, the Anasazi start building houses in shallow caves and under rock overhangs along the canyon walls. Some of these houses were as large as 150 rooms. The most famous of these are called Cliff Palace and Spruce Tree House. By 1300, all of the Anasazi had left the Mesa Verde area, but the ruins remain almost perfectly preserved. The reason for their sudden departure remains unexplained. Theories range from crop failures due to droughts to an intrusion of foreign tribes from the North.

7Acapulco
  Acapulco is the original Mexican resort town which came into prominence by the 1950s as a getaway for Hollywood stars and millionaires. Still, it remains a popular tourist destination especially among Mexicans and as a spring break destination among US college students. No visit to Acapulco is complete without watching the cliff divers perform their impressive jumps into the shallow stream of water of dangerous tides that forms in the bottom part of La Quebrada. They have been doing it since the 1930s, although today the divers are professionals.

8Bonifacio
  Bonifacio is a city at the southern tip of the island of Corsica. The city and its fortifications extend for some distance along the cliff-tops, which are at about 70 meters (230 feet) elevation. The city cliffs have been undercut by the ocean so that the buildings, which have been placed on the very lip of the precipice, appear to overhang it. The appearance from the sea is of a white city gleaming in the sun and suspended over the rough waters below.

9Rocamadour 
  Rocamadour is a tiny village built on the rocky face above a gorge on the Alzou River in southwest France. The buildings of Rocamadour rise in stages up the side of a cliff. Flights of steps ascend from the lower town to the churches, a group of massive buildings half-way up the city cliff. The village, which dates back to the 12th century, became almost deserted as a result of war and the French Revolution. Today it is popular again by both tourists and pilgrims who come to honor St. Amadour the village’s namesake. According to a legend St. Amadour was a witness to the deaths of St. Peter and St. Paul in Rome and later traveled to this location and became a hermit.

10Castellfollit de la Roca 
  This is considered one of the most beautiful villages in the region of Catalonia in Spain. It is built onto the basalt cliffs between two rivers. Most of the buildings seem to be hovering on the very edge of the cliff, providing the illusion that they could tumble down at any moment. The whole village is less than one-half of a square mile in size. The oldest parts of the village were built in the Middle Ages, made up of narrow streets and dark corners. The houses here are made from volcanic rock.

greatttttttttttttttttttttt 

world’s most expensive parking lot

What you're looking at is the deck of the U.S.S. Ronald Reagan covered in the vehicles of Navy Sailors heading to Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, Washington. At a cost of about $4.5 billion this is probably the world's most expensive parking lot.

It may seem phenomenal, but this is actually a common occurrence for the Navy and a lot cheaper and easier than transporting the vehicles almost any other way. The weight of one E-2C Hawkeye is approximately 43,000 pounds, or about 12 cars, and a Nimitz-class carrier usually carries four of those.

But more to the point, this does save the U.S. Navy money. First, the only other way to get vehicles owned by Navy sailors to their final destinations is to put them in another ship. Second, if they didn't send soldiers' vehicles they'd have to pay for transportation at the final destination. Both of which would absolutely would cost more money.

The U.S.S. Ronald recently served in Asia and was en route to Kitsap for upgrades and repairs.

A Planet with Two Suns

Star Wars' planets with two suns are common, says Nasa - and could be a hunting ground for alien life
 Tatooine, the desert planet with two suns where Luke Skywalker grows up, is one of the Star Wars series' best-loved settings. Nasa's Kepler telescope detected two new planet systems with two suns - named Kepler-34 and Kepler-35 - leading Nasa astronomers to say that planets like the fictional Tatooine are common.
Many could be a good hunting ground for planets that support life, says William Welsh of San Diego University.

'This discovery broadens the hunting ground for systems that could support life.'The two new planets, named Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b, are both gaseous Saturn-size planets. Kepler-34b orbits its two sun-like stars every 289 days, and the stars orbit one another every 28 days. The planets reside too close to their parent stars to be in the 'habitable zone' - the region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface.At 4,900 and 5,400 light-years from Earth, located in the constellation Cygnus, Kepler-34b and Kepler-35b are among the most distant planets discovered. 'This work further establishes that such 'two sun' planets are not rare exceptions, but may in fact be common, with many millions existing in our galaxy,' said William Welsh of San Diego State University, who led the study. The findings are described in a new study published Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2012 in the journal Nature.

Before this, Scientists detected the new planet in the Kepler-16 system, a pair of orbiting stars that eclipse each other from our vantage point on Earth. When the smaller star partially blocks the larger star, a primary eclipse occurs, and a secondary eclipse occurs when the smaller star is occulted, or completely blocked, by the larger star.
  Astronomers further observed that the brightness of the system dipped even when the stars were not eclipsing one another, hinting at a third body. The additional dimming in brightness events, called the tertiary and quaternary eclipses, reappeared at irregular intervals of time, indicating the stars were in different positions in their orbit each time the third body passed. This showed the third body was circling, not just one, but both stars, in a wide circumbinary orbit. The gravitational tug on the stars, measured by changes in their eclipse times, was a good indicator of the mass of the third body. Only a very slight gravitational pull was detected, one that only could be caused by a small mass. The findings are described in a new study published Friday, Sept. 16, in the journal Science. "Most of what we know about the sizes of stars comes from such eclipsing binary systems, and most of what we know about the size of planets comes from transits," said Doyle, who also is the lead author and a Kepler participating scientist. "Kepler-16 combines the best of both worlds, with stellar eclipses and planetary transits in one system." This discovery confirms that Kepler-16b is an inhospitable, cold world about the size of Saturn and thought to be made up of about half rock and half gas. The parent stars are smaller than our sun. One is 69 percent the mass of the sun and the other only 20 percent. Kepler-16b orbits around both stars every 229 days, similar to Venus’ 225-day orbit, but lies outside the system’s habitable zone, where liquid water could exist on the surface, because the stars are cooler than our sun.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

20 Interesting Facts about Snakes

  • There are around 3000 snake species in the world, and about 375 of these are venomous.
  • Snake venom is a complex mixture of proteins that, once unleashed, rapidly spreads through the victim’s body. Neurotoxic venom, which destroys the nervous system, is the variety that kills quickest.
  • Anaconda can grow up to 38 feet in length, the brahminy blind snake is just 2 inches long, making it the smallest snake.
  • Snakes have two long lungs, a long liver, kidneys and intestines. The last quarter of the snake has a small anal opening covered by a scale called the anal plate, and the rest is tail made up of more bone.
  • The paradise tree-snake of South-east Asia can ‘fly’ through the air by flattening its body into an s-shaped ribbon.
  • Snakes have more than 200 teeth, which they do not use to chew, since they point backwards, but bite and grip their prey securely.
  • Most toxic snake of all is the Inland Taipan of Australia. It could kill 100 people with a single bite.
  • The venom of the king cobra, the world’s largest poisonous snake, is strong enough to kill an elephant.
  • A snake does not look after its eggs or take care of the young ones but leaves the eggs to be hatched on their own. The young snakes therefore have special teeth to break open the eggs and come out.
  • Most snake species lay eggs, but some species give birth to live young. Snakes lay their eggs in a warm location. With the exception of some python species, eggs and young are not cared for by the male or female.
  • Snakes do not chew their food and have a very flexible lower jaw allowing them to open their mouths wide enough to swallow their prey whole, even if it is larger in diameter than the snake itself.
  • A snake’s heart can slide 1 to 1 1/2 times its length from its normal position, to allow the passage of swallowed prey. This is because of the relative mobility of the pericardial sac, which surrounds the heart.
  • Snakes move by relaxing and contracting muscles lengthwise along the body. Sidewinding is a specialized form of motion that allows a snake to travel with speed and relatively little expenditure of energy along loose desert sand. The snake lifts a loop of its body from the surface, using its head and tail. The loop is moved sideways and then back to the ground. This creates the typical series of unconnected parallel tracks.
  • Snakes have no eyelids.Instead of eyelids, snakes have a transparent scale protecting their eye.