Some More Weird Facts

1) Longest English Word:

 

 Praetertranssubstan tiationalistical ly has 37 letters.

 

2) Book Without Letter "e" :

 

 GADFY, written by Earnest Wright in 1939 is a 50,000+ word book, which doesn't contain a single word with 'e' in it

 

3) Word without Vowel:

 

 Rhythm
 Sky
 Fry
 Cry

 

4) Human Brain:

 

 Organ of body which has no sensation when cut.

 

5) Crocodile :

 

 Only animal & reptile which sheds tear while eating.

 

6) No: of Alphabets, which SOUND AS WORDS : They are

 

 B Bee
 C Sea
 G  Zee
 I Eye
 Q Queue
 R Are 
 S Yes
 T Tea
 U You
 Y Why

 

Fascinating Animals, Birds, Trees :

 

 1) SNAILS have 14175 teeth laid along 135 rows on their tongue.

 

 2) A BUTTERFLY has 12,000 eyes.

 

 3) DOLPHINS sleep with 1 eye open.

 

 4) A BLUE WHALE can eat as much as 3 tones of food everyday, but at the same time can live without food for 6 months.

 

 5) The EARTH has over 12,00,000 species of animals, 3,00,000 species of plants & 1,00,000 other species.

 

 6) The fierce DINOSAUR was TYRANNOSAURS which has sixty long & sharp teeth, used to attack & eat other dinosaurs.

 

 7) DEMETRIO was a mammal like REPTILE with a snail on its back. This acted as a radiator to cool the body of the animal.

 

 8) CASSOWARY is one of the dangerous BIRD, that can kill a man or animal by tearing off with its dagger like claw.

 

 9) The SWAN has over 25,000 feathers in its body.

 

 10) OSTRICH eats pebbles to help digestion by grinding up the ingested food.

 

 11) POLAR BEAR can look clumsy & slow but during chase on ice, can reach 25 miles / hr of speed.

 

 12) KIWIS are the only birds, which hunt by sense of smell.

Do you know this?

MESSAGE GOT FROM A MAIL Do you know this? People who ride on roller coasters have a higher chance of having a blood clot in the brain. People with blue eyes see better in dark. Money isn't made out of paper, it is made out of cotton. A tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion will make it go mad instantly and sting itself to death. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying. A huge underground river runs underneath the Nile , with six times more water than the river above. The USA uses 29% of the world's petrol and 33% of the world's electricity. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear By 700 times. The animal responsible for the most human deaths world-wide is the mosquito. Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people. We exercise at least 30 muscles when we smile. Our nose is our personal air-conditioning system: it warms cold air, cools hot air and filters impurities. Our brain is more complex than the most powerful computer and has over 100 billion nerve cells. When a person dies, hearing is usually the first sense to go. There is a great mushroom in Oregon that is 2,400 years old. It Covers 3.4 square miles of land and is still growing. German Shepherds bite humans more than any other breed of dog. The pupil of the eye expands as much as 45 percent when a person looks at something pleasing Men's shirts have the buttons on the right, but women's shirts have the buttons on the left. The reason honey is so easy to digest is that it's already been digested by a bee. It cost 7 million dollars to build the Titanic and 200 million to make a film about it. The sound you hear when you crack your knuckles is actually the sound of nitrogen gas bubbles bursting. The only part of the body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It takes in oxygen directly from the air.

4000-year-old banana roots in Southeast Asia - origin trail

4000-year-old banana roots in Southeast Asia - origin trail

July 17, 2011

4000-year-old banana roots in Southeast Asia - origin trail

G.S. MUDUR

New Delhi, July 16: Scientists have plucked clues from genetics, archaeology and linguistics to reconstruct a history of the domestication of bananas, showing that some of India’s cultivated bananas have 4,000-year old genomic roots from Southeast Asia.

Their studies suggest that the earliest cultivation of bananas was in the Kuk Swamp area of Papua New Guinea about 6,600 years ago, and that bananas were ferried by small groups of people from Southeast Asia moving westward into India and beyond.

A Southeast Asian banana species known as Mlali, a short and yellow variety, was carried from the Indonesian islands into India around 4,000 years ago where its genome is still found in three varieties — Pome, Nendra Padithi and Nadaan, their studies show.

The findings appeared this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“It probably arrived 4,000 years ago, give or take a few hundred years. We don’t have enough archaeological data to narrow things down,” said Mark Donohue, a linguist at the Australian National University who was involved in the study.

The researchers combined genetic, archaeological and linguistic information to trace the domestication of the Musa family of bananas, which includes the standard yellow bananas sold around the world. The researchers assumed that any cultivated plant would travel with people along with its name, and when a plant is culturally new, its name would be retained in the places where it had been introduced.

Linguistic data supports the long route of dispersal from Indonesia to India.

Many present-day words for bananas appear to root from the word qarutay that researchers believe had its origins in the Philippines. As the bananas moved, so did their names, slightly tweaked at each new land where it was absorbed.

“Agutay, arutay, kelutay, kalu and the Hindi term kela are all derived from qarutay,” said Xavier Perrier, a systems biologist and research team member at the Centre for Agricultural Research and Development in Montpellier, France. “The word travelled from the Philippines across Vietnam, Thailand and Burma into India,” Perrier told The Telegraph. “This is exactly the route that the Mlali variety took into India,” he said.

“This study confirms that the Indo-China region was the centre of origin of bananas,” said M. Mohamed Mustaffa, the director of India’s National Research Centre for Banana, Tiruchirapalli, who was not associated with the study.

“India has wild bananas native to the northeastern region and some in the Western Ghats, but the bananas cultivated today are products of the crossing of species with part of the genomic makeup coming from Southeast Asian varieties,” Mustaffa said.

Archaeology also supports the westward flow of bananas into South Asia from Southeast Asian islands. Residues of Musa dating back to about 4,000 years have been observed at a site named Kot Diji in Pakistan.

Donohue said the studies also provided clear evidence for movement of people from the east to the west. “We know that the inhabitants of Madagascar are at least in part the descendants of an east-to-west movement about 1,200 years ago,” Donohue told The Telegraph.

“We also have some records of people from Java and Malaysia trading with India about 2,000 years ago,” he said. “It could have been a minor movement in terms of the number of people, but a big transformation in terms of culture.”

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1110717/jsp/nation/story_14249961.jsp#

NUMBERWISE

Observed by Dave Morice in the May 2011 Word Ways:

LUCK requires 7 penstrokes, BLACKJACK 21, FREEZING POINT 32, HOURS IN A DAY 24

· FOUR contains four letters.

· TEN is spelled with ten raised dots in Braille.

· TWELVE is worth 12 points in Scrabble.

· FIFTEEN is spelled with 15 dots and dashes in International Morse Code.

TWENTY-NINE contains 29 straight lines — if you don’t count the hyphen.

15 Spectacular tricks to teach your body

15 Spectacular tricks to teach your body

1.) If you've got an itch in your throat, scratch your ear. When the nerves in the ear get stimulated, they create a reflex in the throat that causes a muscle spasm, which cures the itch.

2.) Having trouble hearing someone at a party or on the phone? Use your right ear…it's better at picking up rapid speech.. But, the left is better at picking up music tones.

3.) If you need to relieve yourself BADLY, but you're not anywhere near a bathroom, fantasize about RELATIONS. That preoccupies your brain and distracts it..

4.) Next time the doctor's going to give you an injection, COUGH as the needle is going in. The cough raises the level of pressure in your spinal canal, which limits the pain sensation as it tries to travel to your brain..

5.) Clear a stuffed nose or relieve sinus pressure by pushing your
Tongue against the roof of your mouth…then pressing a finger between your eyebrows. Repeat that for 20 seconds…it causes the vomer bone to rock, which loosens your congestion and clears you up.

6.) If you ate a big meal and you're feeling full as you go to sleep, lay on your left side. That'll keep you from suffering from acid reflux…it keeps your stomach lower than your esophagus, which will help keep stomach acid from sliding up your throat.

7.) You can stop a toothache by rubbing ice on the back of your hand, on the webbed area between your thumb and index finger. The nerve pathways there stimulate a part of the brain that blocks pain signals from your mouth.

8.) If you get all messed up on liquor, and the room starts spinning, put your hand on something stable. The reason: Alcohol dilutes the blood in the part of your ear called the cupula, which regulates balance. Putting your hand on something stable gives your brain another reference point, which will help make the world stop spinning.

9.) Stop a nose bleed by putting some cotton on your upper gums…right behind the small dent below your nose…and press against it hard. Most of the bleeding comes from the cartilage wall that divides the nose, so pressing there helps get it to stop.

10.) Nervous? Slow your heart rate down by blowing on your thumb. The vagus nerve controls your heart rate, and you can calm it down by breathing.

11.) Need to breathe underwater for a while??? Instead of taking a huge breath, HYPERVENTILATE before you go under, by taking a bunch of short breaths. That'll trick your brain into thinking it has more oxygen, and buy you about 10 extra seconds.

12.) You can prevent BRAIN FREEZE by pressing your tongue flat against the roof of your mouth, covering as much surface area as possible. Brain freeze happens because the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, so your brain thinks your whole body is cold. It compensates by overheating…which causes your head to hurt. By warming up the roof of your mouth, you'll chill your brain and feel better.

13.) If your hand falls asleep, rock your head from side to side.
That'll wake your hand or arm up in less than a minute. Your hand falls asleep because of the nerves in your neck compressing…so loosening your neck is the cure. If your foot falls asleep, that's governed by nerves lower in the body, so you need to stand up and walk around.

14.) Finally, this one's totally USELESS, but a nice trick. Have
Someone stick their arm out to the side, straight, palm down. Press down on his wrist with two fingers. He'll resist, and his arm will stay horizontal. Then, have him put his foot on a surface that's half an inch off the ground, like a stack of magazines, and do the trick again. Because his spine position is thrown off, his arm will fall right to his side, no matter how much he tries to resist.

15.) Got the hiccups? Press thumb and second finger over your eyebrows until the hiccups are over usually shortly.

20 facts you need to know about India’s growth

20 facts you need to know about India’s growth
The Indian economy is the eleventh largest in the world by nominal GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity (PPP).

India is poised to achieve 9 per cent economic growth in the current financial year itself, driven by robust performance by the agriculture and industry sectors.
The economy grew by 8.9 per cent in the second quarter of the current fiscal.

India has emerged as one of the world's top ten countries in industrial production. The nation's industrial production grew at the fastest pace in three months at 10.8 per cent.
Manufacturing grew 11.3 percent in October after a 4.6 percent gain in September.

India is one of the fastest growing automobile markets in the world, expanding at 35 per cent on average in the first four months of the current financial year.

The Bombay Stock Exchange has been rated as the world's best performing stock market recently. With a 13 per cent gain, Sensex is among the world's 10 biggest markets, according to data collected by Bloomberg.

Indian companies have become bigger and stronger in the last ten years with the average revenue of a company on the Fortune India 500 list standing at Rs 7,632.5 crore (Rs 76.32 billion).
The total revenue of the Fortune India 500 companies stands at Rs 38,16,239.40 crore.

India is the world's largest recipient of overseas remittances. The remittances grew from $49.6 billion in 2009 to $55 billion in 2010.
It is also the country with the second largest number of emigrants after Mexico, according to the World Bank.

India owns over 18,000 tonnes of above ground gold stocks worth approximately $800 billion and representing at least 11 per cent of global stock, according to estimates of World Gold Council.
India ranks 11th in the world with 557.7 tonnes of gold reserves.

India is among the top 10 nations in terms of foreign exchange reserves. The country's foreign exchange reserves breached the $300-billion mark for the first time since 2008 with an addition of $2.2 billion on the back of a healthy rise in foreign currency. The nation's forex reserves currently stand at $296.40 billion

India's services sector, backed by the IT revolution, remains the biggest contributor to the country's GDP, with a contribution of 58.4 per cent.

The industry sector contributed 24.1 per cent and the agriculture sector contributed 17.5 per cent to the GDP.

India's civil aviation sector will be among the top five in the world in the next five years.
Indian domestic air traffic is expected to reach 160-180 million passengers per year, while international traffic will exceed 80 million.

India's exports during November jumped by 26.8 per cent to $18.9 billion year-on-year. India's exports during April-September aggregated to $103.65 billion registering a year-on-year growth of 28 per cent.

India, China and Brazil are the top three target countries for foreign direct investment until the end of 2012 with the United States, for years number one, now in fourth place, according to the UN trade and development agency UNCTAD.

The Indian telecommunications industry is the world's fastest growing telecommunications industry, 723.28 million telephone (landlines and mobile) subscribers and 687.71 million mobile phone connections as of September 30, 2010.

The number of Internet users in India is estimated at 81 million. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India pegs the number of broadband subscribers at 10.08 million in August 2010.

The Indian IT-BPO industry is expected to exceed $70 billion in fiscal 2011.
The Indian IT-BPO exports are projected to grow by 13 per cent to 15 per cent while domestic IT-BPO will grow slightly more by 15 per cent to 17 per cent during fiscal 2010-11.

India has the largest number of post offices in the world. The world's highest post office, Hikkim is located at 15,500 feet in the Lahaul Spiti district of Himachal Pradesh.

The largest employer in India is the Indian Railways, employing over 1.6 million people. Indian Railways started operations on April 16, 1853.

India ranks second in farm output globally. India is one of the largest producer in the world of milk, cashew nuts, coconuts, tea, ginger, turmeric and black pepper.

Tourism is the largest service industry in India, with a contribution of 6.23 per cent to the national GDP. The number of foreign tourists visiting the country during September this year is higher than that of the same month last year.
Around 3.69 lakh (369,000) foreign tourists came to India in September this year as compared to 3.28 lakh (328,000) during the same month in 2009.

HINDUISM AND CARL SAGAN

HINDUISM AND CARL SAGAN

Carl Sagan says in this book the Cosmos:

"The Hindu religion is the only one of the world's

great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos

itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number

of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in

which the time scales correspond, to those of modern

scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary

day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64

billion years long. longer than the age of the Earth or

the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. And

there are much longer time scales still.

There is the deep and appealing notion that the

universe is but the dream of the god who, after a

Brahma years, dissolves himself into a dreamless sleep.

The universe dissolves with him -- until, after another

Brahma century, he stirs, recomposes himself and begins

again to dream the great cosmic dream.

The Chola bronzes, cast in the 11th century, include

several different incarnations of the god Shiva.

The most elegant and sublime of these is a

representation of the creation of the universe at the

beginning of each cosmic cycle, a motif known as the

cosmic dance of Lord Shiva. The god, called in this

manifestation Nataraja, the Dance King. In the upper

right hand is a drum whose sound is the sound of

creation. In the upper left hand is a tongue of flame,

a reminder that the universe, now newly created, with

billions of years from now will be utterly destroyed.

The late scientist Carl Sagan, asserts that the dance

of Nataraja signifies the cycle of evolution and

destruction of the cosmic universe (Big Bang Theory).

"It is the clearest image of the activity of God which

any art or religion can boast of."

These profound and lovely images are, I like to

imagine, a kind of premonition of modern astronomical

ideas."

Source - "The Cosmos " by Carl Sagan.

- - -

"The sun and the moon, the Lord created like the suns

and the moons of previous cycles." - The Ved