Burundanga is the other name of the drug ‘Scopolamine’, used for criminal activities like rape or to rob innocent victims. The drug is passed on to the victim through business cards, pamphlets, etc. Even if the skin, through touch, absorbs just a very small quantity of the drug it has the desired effect. The drug is also administered through tablets …

Trees have to be pruned to protect their health, improve their appearance or remove danger to people or property. Sometimes it is necessary to remove broken, dead or diseased branches, to restore vigour to an ageing tree by cutting back and to admit more air and light by thinning out the center. One of the most obvious reasons for pruning …

Heat and humidity are the greatest enemies of any electrical equipment, so in tropical countries, such equipment is manufactured to withstand those climatic conditions. In a radio set, tropicalized means coating the electrical windings with resin, sealing the speaker hole with acoustically transparent cloth, installing felt washers on the control knobs, and sealing openings for the antenna and earth connections.

The word ‘robot’ was coined by the Czech playwright, Karel Capek, in a play called R.U.R., which stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots. In the play, people have mechanical servants which look like people and do manual work for them. Capek called these machines robots from the Czech work robota which means labour.

Bt brinjal, a genetically modified version of the common brinjal, is a transgenic vegetable created by inserting a gene (Cry 1Ac) from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) into it. The insertion of the gene is said to give the brinjal plant resistance against insects like the brinjal fruit and shoot borer and fruit borer.

Living on the bottom the skate naturally feeds on the other animals it finds there crabs, lobsters and oysters and other molluscs. It has strong curshing teeth to deal with these shelled creatures. To get at choice mollucs buried in the sand the skate will flap away with its pectoral fins and gradually work its way under the surface. It …

Our lungs are like two spongy bags. Just as sponge can be filled with water and then squeezed dry again, so our lungs fill with air when we breathe in and then release most of the air again when we breathe out. As air enters the lungs it passes down a series of smaller and smaller tubes, which are known …

From watching cinema films, you could be forgiven for thinking that all deserts are covered by sand. However, sand deserts make up only a fifth of the world’s desert. The rest are covered by small stones or just bare rock. Desert landscapes are called by Arabic names. Sand desert is called erg, stony desert reg, and areas of bare rock …

Dogs are what we call domesticated animals, meaning that for thousands of years they have played a very close and important part in men’s lives. One of the most valuable jobs a dog can be trained for is to act as a guide dog. These dogs are owned by blind people and lead the way when they want to go …

The ‘overgrown lizard’ is that most frightening of extinct animals. Tyrannosaurus Rex. There were some dinosaurs even larger than Tyrannosaurus, but they were harmless, placid, grazing animals. Tyrannosaurus was a carnivore a meat eater and its breakfast was probably another, less powerful dinosaur. Thanks of fossil remains, we have a good idea of what this monster looked like. It stood …