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Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Some Curious Facts

Here are some amazing and interesting facts.....  

  •  The universe became the size of a pea one million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang and kept on growing!
  • Your skin has more living organisms than the total people living on earth.  In fact the human body itself is like a planet
  • A vehicle travelling at the speed of light can travel around the world in 0.13 seconds.  That means if you were in such a vehicle, you would have travelled around the world even before you finish reading this sentence
  • It is estimated that one in every 2000 babies is born with teeth!
  • The largest living structure on Earth is the Great Barrier Reef.  It extends over 2300 Kms, along the Australian Coast and covers a huge area of 35 million hectares.  Astronauts can actually see it from the Moon!  They have described it as 'fine white line in the blue ocean'.
  • A typical hurricane produces energy equivalent to 8,000 one megaton bombs.  It is really a great wonder that hurricanes cause so much destruction
  • There are some rain bows which are colorless. They are called as fog bows, and are formed when sun shines through a fog.  The drops of water in a fog are too small to split up light into different colors, so the fog bow is white in color
  • Some times if you look at the sky, you see what appears to be three Suns.  This happens when there are thin clouds high in the sky.  The clouds are actually made up of bits of Ice that bend Sun rays so that it appears that there are two more Suns present.  That false Suns ar only an illusion, and it is called as Sun Dogs
  • The Blue Whale is the loudest animal on Earth.  It produces sound of 188 decibels which can be detected 800 Kms away.  The blue whale is much louder than a jet plane engine, which reaches only 140 decibels
  • Snakes do not have eye lids like us.  Instead, they have a transparent moist shield over their eyes.  So the snakes can never blink their eyes or close its eyes.
  • Cheetahs are so fast that they can reach a speed of 1132 Km/hour within few seconds. Their eye sight is so incredible that they can spot their prey which is 5 Kms away!
  • Your body has miles and miles of blood vessels.  if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 99,000 Kilometers.  This is enough to circle the Earth 2.5 times.


dd

Thursday, December 12, 2013

World's first bionic human walks, talks and breathes

He walks, he talks and he has a beating heart, but he's not human — he's the world's first fully bionic man.

Scientists have developed the world's first robot human made up of entirely artificial parts and he can talk, walk and also has a beating heart.  The robot costed about 1 million US dollars was assembled from prosthetic body parts and artificial organs donated by laboratories around the world,   Roboticists Rich Walker and Matthew Godden of Shadow Robot Co in England put together the bionic man.

"You put a prosthetic part on a human who is missing that part. We had no human; we built a human for the prosthetic parts to occupy," Walker said. 

The robot was modelled in some physical aspects after Bertolt Meyer, a social psychologist at the University of Zurich, in Switzerland, who wears one of the world's most advanced bionic hands.

The bionic man has nearly complete set of artificial organs including artificial heart, blood, lungs ( and wind pipe), pancreas, spleen, kidney and also functional circulatory system.  However, he lacks a few major organs, including a liver, stomach and intestines, which are too complex to replicate in a lab.

The bionic man's brain can mimic certain functions of human brain.  He has speech recognition and speech production systems.  The engineers have equipped the bionic man with a sophisticated chat bot program which can carry on a conversation.  The only problem is that it has the voice of a 13 year old boy.

The bionic man simulates about two-thirds of the human body but he lacks few major organs like liver, stomach and intestines which are very difficult to replicate in a lab.


The bionic man made his U.S. debut at New York Comic Con Oct. 10-13, and he will be on display at Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. this fall.






Robot commits suicide - fed up with tedious work

This is the world's first case of a 'Robot suicide'.  A house robot fed up with its tedious job of cleaning works in the house ended its life by climbing onto a kitchen hotplate and destroyed itself in the flames.

The robot was used for cleaning up some split cereal when it has climbed onto a kitchen hotplate and destroyed itself.  The robot was tired of being forced to clean the same house every day, according to reports in Austria.


"It seems to have reactivated itself and made its way along the work surface where it pushed a cooking pot out of the way and that was the end of it", explained a fireman who was called to tackle the blaze at Hinterstoder in Austria.   The robot quickly started to melt underneath and then stuck to the kitchen hotplate and then caught fire.  By the time the fireman has come, there was a pile of ash.

The entire building was to be evacuated as there was severe smoke in the flat where the robot was being used.  It is a mystery how the robot came to be activated and ended up its life on the hot plate.  This is because the house owner says that the robot was switched off.