Scientific Explanation of Halal Vs Haram

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20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Death

Newsflash: we’re all going to die. But here are 20 things you didn’t know about kicking the bucket.

1 The practice of burying the dead may date back 350,000 years, as evidenced by a 45-foot-deep pit in Atapuerca, Spain, filled with the fossils of 27 hominids of the species Homo heidelbergensis, a possible ancestor of Neanderthals and modern humans.

2 Never say die: There are at least 200 euphemisms for death, including “to be in Abraham’s bosom,” “just add maggots,” and “sleep with the Tribbles” (a Star Trek favorite).

3 No American has died of old age since 1951.

4 That was the year the government eliminated that classification on death certificates.

Famous Politicians Painted :-)

Click to see clearly. See how many of them can you recognize!!

Clock change may cause tiredness

Even a small change can damage sleep routines, says Dr Stanley

Many people use the clocks going back to gain an extra hour in bed - but a sleep expert says the change can actually leave people tired. Even such small changes, said Dr Neil Stanley, can disrupt sleep routines and cause semisomnia - low grade exhaustion caused by inadequate rest.

He estimated that it could take three days to fully adjust to the change.

The Norfolk and Norwich Hospital expert said people should set aside time to wind down before going to bed.

“People may feel relaxed and refreshed as they wake up this morning after an extra hour in bed, but it will actually take three days for their body to catch up with this one-hour time shift.

The key to getting a good night’s sleep lies in winding down effectively before bedtime Dr Neil Stanley, sleep expert

“With more than 30m people up and down the country suffering from ’semisomnia’, it’s very important for them to realise just how much of a toll daylight saving takes on their body,” he said.

Dr Stanley, in a report commissioned for drinks company Horlicks, suggests that the best way for Britons to help their bodies cope with the impact of daylight savings is to set some extra time aside to relax before bedtime during the next three days.

He said: “The key to getting a good night’s sleep lies in winding down effectively before bedtime, but six out of 10 people are failing to do this regularly and are suffering as a result.

“People need to prepare for sleep in the same way they warm up before exercise.

“This is particularly important in light of the clocks going back, but I hope people will seize the opportunity to adopt new habits and start a permanent new wind-down routine.”

Is your wife like this :P

Compact Disc celebrates 25th anniversary

It was Aug 17, 1982, and row upon row of palm-sized plates with a rainbow sheen began rolling off an assembly line near Hanover, Germany. An engineering marvel at the time, today they are instantly recognizable as Compact Discs, a product that turns 25 years old on Friday — and whose future is increasingly in doubt in an age of iPods and digital downloads.

Those first CDs contained Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony and would sound equally sharp if played today, says Holland’s Royal Philips Electronics NV, which jointly developed the CD with Sony Corp. of Japan.

The recording industry thrived in the 1990s as music fans replaced their aging cassettes and vinyl LPs with compact discs, eventually making CDs the most popular album format.

The CD still accounts for the majority of the music industry’s recording revenues, but its sales have been in a freefall since peaking early this decade, in part due to the rise of online file-sharing, but also as consumers spend more of their leisure dollars on other entertainment purchases, such as DVDs and video games.

As the music labels slash wholesale prices and experiment with extras to revive the now-aging format, it’s hard to imagine there was ever a day without CDs.

Yet it had been a risky technical endeavor to attempt to bring digital audio to the masses, said Pieter Kramer, the head of the optical research group at Philips’ labs in the Netherlands in the 1970s. “When we started there was nothing in place,” he said at Philips’ corporate museum in Eindhoven.

The proposed semiconductor chips needed for CD players were to be the most advanced ever used in a consumer product. And the lasers were still on the drawing board when the companies teamed up in 1979.

In 1980, researchers published what became known as the “Red Book” containing the original CD standards, as well as specifying which patents were held by Philips and which by Sony.

Philips had developed the bulk of the disc and laser technology, while Sony contributed the digital encoding that allowed for smooth, error-free playback. Philips still licenses out the Red Book and its later incarnations, notably for the CD-ROM for storing computer software and other data.

The CD’s design drew inspiration from vinyl records: Like the grooves on a record, CDs are engraved with a spiral of tiny pits that are scanned by a laser — the equivalent of a record player’s needle. The reflected light is encoded into millions of 0s and 1s: a digital file. Because the pits are covered with plastic and the laser’s light doesn’t wear them down, the CD never loses sound quality.

Legends abound about how the size of the CD was chosen: Some said it matched a Dutch beer coaster; others believe a famous conductor or Sony executive wanted it just long enough for Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

Kramer said the decision evolved from ‘long conversations around the table’ about which play length made the most sense.

The jump into mass production in Germany was a milestone for the CD, and by 1982 the companies announced their product was ready for market. Both began selling players that fall, though the machines only hit US markets the following spring.

Sony sold the first player in Japan on Oct 1, with the CBS label supplying Billy Joel’s ‘52nd Street’ as its first album.

The CD was a massive hit. Sony sold more players, especially once its ‘Discman’ series was introduced in 1984. But Philips benefited from CD sales, too, thanks to its ownership of Polygram, now part of Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group.

The CD player helped Philips maintain its position as Europe’s largest maker of consumer electronics until it was eclipsed by Nokia Corp in the late 1990s. Licensing royalties sustained the company through bad times.

“The CD was in itself an easy product to market,” said Philips’ current marketing chief for consumer electronics, Lucas Covers. It wasn’t just the sound quality — discs looked like jewelry in comparison to LPs.

By 1986, CD players were outselling record players, and by 1988 CDs outsold records.

“It was a massive turnaround for the whole market,” Covers said. Now, the CD may be seeing the end of its days.

CD sales have fallen sharply to 553 million sold in the United States last year, a 22 percent drop from its 2001 peak of 712 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

Napster and later Kazaa and BitTorrent allowed music fans to easily share songs over the Internet, often illegally. More recently, Apple Inc. and other companies began selling legal music downloads, turning the MP3 and other digital audio formats into the medium of choice for many owners of Apple’s iPods and other digital players.

“The MP3 and all the little things that the boys and girls have in their pockets … can replace it, absolutely,” said Kramer, the retired engineer.

CDs won’t disappear overnight, but its years may be numbered. Record labels seeking to revive the format have experimented with hybrid CD-DVD combos and packages of traditional CDs with separate DVDs that carry video and multimedia offerings playable on computers. The efforts have been mixed at best, with some attempts, such as the DualDisc that debuted in 2004, not finding lasting success in the marketplace.

Kramer said it has been satisfying to witness the CD’s long run at the top and know he had a small hand in its creation. “You never know how long a standard will last,” he said. “But it was a solid, good standard and still is.”

Beware the Mars Hoax

July 7, 2005: Just when you thought it was safe to read your email….

There’s a rumor about Mars going around the internet. Here are some snippets from a widely-circulated email message:

“The Red Planet is about to be spectacular.”

“Earth is catching up with Mars [for] the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history.”

“On August 27th … Mars will look as large as the full moon.”

And finally, “NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN.”

Only the first sentence is true. The Red Planet is about to be spectacular. The rest is a hoax.

Here are the facts: Earth and Mars are converging for a close encounter this year on October 30th at 0319 Universal Time. Distance: 69 million kilometers. To the unaided eye, Mars will look like a bright red star, a pinprick of light, certainly not as wide as the full Moon.

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Disappointed? Don’t be. If Mars did come close enough to rival the Moon, its gravity would alter Earth’s orbit and raise terrible tides.

Sixty-nine million km is good. At that distance, Mars shines brighter than anything else in the sky except the Sun, the Moon and Venus. The visual magnitude of Mars on Oct. 30, 2005, will be -2.3. Even inattentive sky watchers will notice it, rising at sundown and soaring overhead at midnight.

You might remember another encounter with Mars, about two years ago, on August 27, 2003. That was the closest in recorded history, by a whisker, and millions of people watched as the distance between Mars and Earth shrunk to 56 million km. This October’s encounter, at 69 million km, is similar. To casual observers, Mars will seem about as bright and beautiful in 2005 as it was in 2003.

Although closest approach is still months away, Mars is already conspicuous in the early morning. Before the sun comes up, it’s the brightest object in the eastern sky, really eye-catching. If you have a telescope, even a small one, point it at Mars. You can see the bright icy South Polar Cap and strange dark markings on the planet’s surface.

Above: Painted green by a flashlight, astronomer Dennis Mammana of California points out Mars to onlookers on Aug. 26, 2003, the last time Mars was so close to Earth. Photo credit: Thad V’Soske.

One day people will walk among those dark markings, exploring and prospecting, possibly mining ice from the polar caps to supply their settlements. It’s a key goal of NASA’s Vision for Space Exploration: to return to the Moon, to visit Mars and to go beyond.

Every day the view improves. Mars is coming–and that’s no hoax.

 

Did You Know?

 

* In India, pickled ginger, minced mutton and a cottage cheese like substance are popular pizza toppings.

* During one seven year period, Thomas Edison obtained approximately three hundred patents. In is whole life he obtained over one thousand patents.

* Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.

* In India, a 9-year-old girl was ‘married’ to a stray dog, which tribal custom requires in order to protect a child whose first tooth appears on the upper gum.