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What’s the doomsday vault?

The doomsday vault is a Noah’s Ark of sorts which would store samples of the world’s important seeds. It was inaugurated at Longyearbyen, Norway. The vault is a trident-shaped tunnel bored into the permafrost of the Arctic mountain range. It comprises three cold chambers and can hold 4.5 billion batches of seeds from the main crops. This is to ensure …

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What’s special about the encoded cylinder?

The encoded cylinder refers to the Cyrillic Projector sculpture by American artist James Sanborn which was created in the early 1990s. The 32-character Cyrillic alphabet has been used on it with the Russian word for ‘shadow’ — TEHb —appearing several times. For long, no one was able to crack the code but it was finally solved in 2003. The sculpture …

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What’s geometric in geometric progression?

A geometric progression, also known as a geometric sequence, is a sequence of numbers in which each term after the first is found by multiplying the previous one by a fixed non-zero number called the common ratio. Books VIII and IX of Euclid’s Elements analyse geometric progressions and give several of their properties. A geometric progression gains its geometric character …

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What’s the world’s first software?

Ada Lovelace wrote a rudimentary programme for the analytical machine designed by Charles Babbage in 1827, but the machine never became operational. In 1949, the language short code appeared. It was the first computer language for electronic devices and required the programmer to change its statements into 0s and 1s by hand.

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What’s so funny about your ‘Funny-bone’?

Anyone who has ever hurt this ‘funny-bone’ knows that there is nothing funny about this bone at all! In fact, this ‘bone’ is not really a bone at all. It is actually a nerve located at the back of your elbow above your bone and near the surface of your skin. When you hit that area, you get a painful …

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What would we do without wool?

Wool has kept us warm since very ancient times when man first domesticated sheep, and even in this age of synthetic fibers wool still remains a firm favorite with most of us. Britain, especially, has a lot of sheep grazing on the hills of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and has a thriving wool industry. Britain was very important when it …

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