Did You Know.....

[Warph]

(Source) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/08/110809-fingerprints-skin-disease-health-science-weird/

...that the condition that causes babies to be born without fingerprints, known as adermatoglyphia, has only appeared in four families in the world. One of those families agreed to partake in scientific research about the condition. In that family 9 of 16 people had no fingerprints. The researchers were able to isolate the gene that had the relevant mutation, SMARCAD1.

                                 

This mutation has been labeled as "immigration-delay disease" because the lack of fingerprints makes it hard to cross borders. Other than the lack of fingerprints and less sweating, immigration-delay disease doesn't have any other side-effects.

[Warph]

Rig Veda, the oldest and perhaps most mystical text ever composed in India, says: "With deep respect, I bow to the sun, who travels 2,202 yojanas in half a nimesha." A yojana is about nine American miles; a nimesha is 16/75 of a second. 2,202 yojanas x 9 miles x 75/8 nimeshas = 185,794 m.

So it says that sunlight travels at 186,000 miles per second! In 1387 A. D. They know the correct figure for the speed of light. Yogis were using the mala to keep track of the number of mantras. It has 109 beads, 108+1 Guru Bead. Why so?:

1] The mala represents the ecliptic. It is divided into 27 equal sections called Nakshatras, and each of these into four equal sectors called paadas, or "steps," marking the 108 steps that the sun and moon take through heaven.

2] They stop at the 109th "guru bead," flip the mala and continue reciting backwards.

The guru bead represents the summer and winter solstices. Using a mala is a symbolic way of connecting ourselves with the cosmic cycles governing our universe. Yet there are another astronomical references to it:

1] The distance between the earth and the sun is approximately 108 times the sun's diameter. Distance between earth & sun is 149,597,890 km and diameter of sun is 1,392,000 km i.e. 107.45 times.

2] And the distance between the earth and the moon is 108 times the moon's diameter. Distance between earth & moon is 375,403km and moon diameter is 3,476 km i.e. 108 times.

3] The diameter of the sun is about 108 times the earth's diameter. Sun diameter is 1,392,000 km and Earth diameter at equator is 12756 km i.e. Sun is 109 times that of earth. That is why Gurumani is considered as of 109th.


The invention of Zero:
The Zero was invented in India by Indian mathematicians dating as early as 5th century. They widely used it in calculations, astronomy and astrology. Zero was spread by Arabians to the Europe and there on it was spread all over. Before this, all Europeans used roman numerical which were difficult to calculate on as they were in the form of Symbols, lengthy and had limits.

New Math Multiplication Method:

[Diane Amberg]

Sorry, not into Sanscrit. I did that math the old fashioned way, much faster.

[Warph]

....that many of the items we use every day, like zippers and escalators, were once brand names.  Even heroin, which no one should use any day, was a brand name.  Here are some trademarked names that are often used as generic terms today:

1. You might think you're riding around on a Jet Ski, but if it's not made by Kawasaki Heavy Industries, it's just a personal watercraft.

2. Bubble Wrap is probably the greatest contribution made to our society by Sealed Air Corporation, which they rightly trademarked.

3. The term Onesies, referring to infant bodysuits, is owned by Gerber Childrenswear. According to their website, the trademark is aggressively enforced. (Twosies and Funzies also belong to Gerber.)

4. Jacuzzi is not only brand of hot tubs and bathtubs; they also make mattresses and toilets.

5. The Crockpot, a brand name for the slow cooker, was originally developed as a beanery appliance.

6. Fluffernutter is a registered trademark of the makers of Marshmallow Fluff, Durkee-Mower, Inc.

7, 8 & 9. Frisbee is currently owned by WHAM-O, but a legal battle to make this word and several others generic is underway. In 2010, Manley Toys Ltd. challenged WHAM-O, arguing that the terms Frisbee, Hula Hoop and Slip'n Slide have already become generic in the public lexicon. Personally, I think Ultimate Flying Disc sounds cooler than Ultimate Frisbee anyway.

10. Chapstick is a brand name of lip balm produced by Pfizer. In the event that you find yourself enjoying this product too much, websites dedicated to helping Chapstick addicts are available.

11. The perfect time to remind a friend or family member that Kleenex is a brand name for a tissue is right when they are desperately begging you to hand them one.

12. Ping-Pong was trademarked in 1901 as a brand of table tennis products named for the sound the ball makes when it hits the table.

13. On their website, Microsoft suggests that unless you are using their software, your PowerPoint is a "presentation graphics program."

14. When Q-tips were originally released, they were called Baby Gays. The name was changed to Q-tips—the "Q" standing for quality—in 1926. Although they have changed hands several times since then, Unilever owns the brand today.

15. Two hockey-player brothers designed Rollerblade inline skates from a pair of old roller skates in 1979. They were the only brand of inline skates until the mid-eighties, when several other companies emerged.

16. According to legend, Scotch tape earned its name when a frustrated customer told a 3M scientist to "take it back to your Scotch bosses and tell them to put more adhesive on it." Today, Scotch "Magic Tape" is only manufactured in one place in the world: Hutchinson, Minn.

17. The permanent marker was invented in 1956, but the Sharpie wasn't introduced until 1964. Today, the products are almost synonymous with one another.

18. In 1899, Pearle Wait sold his recipe for Jell-O to Orator Woodward for $450. In 1902, sales for the product were around $250,000. Today, the gelatin dessert is owned by Kraft.

19. Tupperware is a brand that got its name from its creator, Earle Silas Tupper.

20. George de Mastreal invented Velcro when he discovered that burrs stuck to matted dog fur. Today, it is the world's most prominent brand of hook and loop fasteners.

21. Weed Eater is owned by Husqvarna Outdoor Products.

22. Don't ask BIC what's in their line of correction fluid. The exact ingredients of Wite-out are confidential.

23. Johnson & Johnson manufactured gauze and adhesive tape separately until Earle Dickinson had the idea to combine them to create Band-Aids for his accident-prone wife.

24. The Zamboni is an ice resurfacer named after its inventor, Frank Zamboni.

25. TASER is a trademark of TASER International, and shouldn't technically be used as a verb. To be fair, "Don't hit me with that electroshock weapon, bro!" is probably hard to shout under duress. Bonus fact: TASER is an acronym. It stands for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle."

[W. Gray]

At one time all mechanical pencils were called eversharps after the first mechanical pencil, the Eversharp that came out around 1920.

Eversharp went out of business in the 1960s but the name did not stick to subsequent mechanical pencils.

[Diane Amberg]

Magic Markers, Zerox,Thermos bottle and yo-yo?

[Warph]

Bonus Fact:




....that there is a war against Pyrex. Chances are, somewhere in your kitchen, you have a version of the measuring cup pictured above — if not multiples. Pyrex-brand measuring cups are incredibly common because they're made to withstand thermal shocks — that is, you can use one to measure hot water and, immediately after, cold water, and they won't likely break. Try that with a regular glass and you'll find it, in shards, all over the floor.

For decades, Pyrex was made of borosilicate glass, a special type of glass in which boron oxide is added to the mix. The added boron allows Pyrex to handle heat much better than typical glass, so Pyrex is commonly found in kitchens, laboratories, and in use with aquarium heaters (as the heaters are, necessarily, submerged in much cooler water). But in 1998, Corning, the company which made Pyrex, sold the brand to World Kitchen LLC. World Kitchen decided to stop the manufacture of borosilicate glass, and since then, Pyrex sold in the United States is made of tempered soda-lime glass, which does not handle heat as well as borosilicate glass does. (It may, however, be more resilient to drops.) In most cases that does not matter much, as tempered soda-lime glass is still pretty good at withstanding thermal shocks.

But it's not great. In 2010, Consumer Reports (as reported by its quasi-independent blog, Consumerist), tested some Pyrex and and found that taking the newer glass out of a hot oven and placing it on a wet granite countertop yielded poor results: the glass shattered almost instantly, and violently so. (There's a video at the Consumerist link). And as Popular Science demonstrated, super-heating a measuring cup (in their case, with a blowtorch) and then adding just a drop of water has a similar effect — shattered glass, everywhere. Test tubes in chemistry labs are still made of borosilicate glass to avoid this very problem.

Of course, there are few cases where one is going to expose a Pyrex measuring cup to such extreme temperatures, so, if you do have a soda-lime one in your kitchen (and you probably do), there is little reason to worry — your recipes are almost certainly safe. Even the restaurant and food services industries can use the newer version of Pyrex without much concern. But one industry was struck very hard by the switch: the crack cocaine trade.  It turns out that turning cocaine into crack requires bringing the solution of water and powdered cocaine to a very high temperature and then rapidly cooling it. And for years, crack makers would use Pyrex — borosilicate glass ones, that is — to accomplish this step, successfully. The soda-lime glass alternatives cannot withstand the thermal shock.

As a result, the drug trade needed to find another way to obtain borosilicate glass. The unintended consequence of World Kitchen's switch? An uptick in theft from an unlikely place. As PopSci so eloquently notes, "[the crack-making] industry was forced to switch from measuring cups purchased at Walmart to test tubes and beakers stolen from labs."

Bonus Fact:
Fill a bowl with Wesson brand vegetable oil and dip a (borosilicate) Pyrex test tube in it — and the test tube will disappear, as seen in this video. What's going on? The oil and test tube have the same indices of refraction; that is, the speed of light passing through either medium is identical. As light is not refracted nor reflected as it passed from the oil to the test tube, the test tube seems to disappear before our very eyes.

[Warph]

....that contrary to popular belief, Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden not because they ate the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, but in order to prevent them from eating from the tree of life (both forbidden trees are in Genesis 2:9) which would have made them eternal. God doesn't like competition! Here is the verse (Genesis 3:22-23): "And he said: Behold Adam is become as one of us, knowing good and evil: now, therefore, lest perhaps he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever. [23] And the Lord God sent him out of the paradise of pleasure, to till the earth from which he was taken."


...that "God helps those who help themselves" – a wise and good quote that everyone knows is from the Bible. But, in fact, it isn't. It was a man, not a god who coined the well known (and overused) proverb. It was Benjamin Franklin in his Poor Richard's almanac.


....that the Bible does not condemn drinking alcohol (remember that Jesus' first public miracle was turning water into wine at a wedding party), or gambling and betting. The closest it comes to the latter is to recommend against get rich quick schemes (Ecclesiastes 5:10) and loving money excessively. Be sure to remember that next time you are sipping your wine at the local casino. Addendum: "The Bible does NOT condemn the drinking of alcohol – that misconception is a holdover from Calvinistic and Purtanical Prtotestantism – which worked its way into Methodism etc; What the Bible DOES say is "Be not DRUNK of the fruit of the vine" – at the same time many gainsayers will claim that the water was turned into grape juice – but the original Gospels clearly use a word which translates from the original Greek as WINE a "fermented grape beverage". [addendum courtesy of carra 23]. Traditionally drunk means "falling down drunk" – in other words, the loss of the will to control oneself.


....that the "Rapture" is not in the Bible! Despite being believed by a large number of protestants (many of whom also believe that only that which is in the Bible can be true) it was actually invented in the 1600s by one Cotton Mather – otherwise famous for murdering women by strangling them to death (by hanging) in the Salem witch trials. The term in the Bible commonly mistranslated to the word "rapture" actually comes from the Greek ἁρπάζω (harpazo) which actually means "caught up" or "taken away" and it refers to one person only (Philip).

[Warph]

This picture is of a green-marked killer T cell from the body's immune system attacking a Cancer Cell under a Microscope:   

 


This video below is of a green-marked killer T cell from the body's immune system attacking a cancer cell.  The body's killer T cells, also called Cytotoxic cells, identify and destroy infected or cancerous cells without harming healthy cells nearby.  The T cell does this by recognizing the infected cell and releasing several toxins that enter the target cell and lead to cell death.  Cambridge Institute for Medical Research student Alex Ritter recorded this video using an electron microscope and sped it up 92 times:

Uploaded by CambridgeUniversity on Feb 3, 2012

In this video we see a killer T cell of the immune system attacking a cancer cell.

Under the Microscope is a collection of videos that show glimpses of the natural and man-made world in stunning close-up. They are released every Monday and Thursday for the next few weeks and you can see them here: http://bit.ly/A6bwCE

Professor Gillian Griffiths:
"Cells of the immune system protect the body against pathogens. If cells in our bodies are infected by viruses, or become cancerous, then killer cells of the immune system identify and destroy the affected cells. Cytotoxic T cells are very precise and efficient killers. They are able to destroy infected or cancerous cells, without destroying healthy cells surrounding them. The Wellcome Trust funded laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths, at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, investigates just how this is accomplished. By understanding how this works, we can develop ways to control killer cells. This will allow us to find ways to improve cancer therapies, and ameliorate autoimmune diseases caused when killer cells run amok and attack healthy cells in our bodies."

Cytotoxic T cells are just 10 microns in length: approximately one-tenth the width of a human hair. These movies are 92 times real time.

The original footage shown was made by Alex Ritter, a PhD student on the NIH-OxCam programme, in the laboratory of Professor Gillian Griffiths at the Cambridge Institute for Medical Research and the Department of Medicine of the Clinical School of the University of Cambridge. The images were acquired using an Andor Revolution spinning disk system with an Olympus microscope. Professor Griffiths is a Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow.

Links for more information:

http://www.cimr.cam.ac.uk

http://www.cimr.cam.ac.uk/investigators/griffiths/index.html

http://www.immunology.cam.ac.uk/about

Music by Intercontinental Music Lab
http://www.intercontinentalmusiclab.com

Find more Cambridge research here:
http://www.cam.ac.uk/research

[Diane Amberg]

Great footage! Thanks.