The invention was the parachute which was invented by the French scientist, Louis Lenormand, in 1783. His first jump was an experimental descent from a tree-top, suspended beneath two parasols. (The parasol is so-named because it gives protection against the sun, and the parachute gives protection against the sun, and the parachute gives protection against a chute or fall.) The …

Most boats cannot travel very fast because they have to force their hulls through the water. Hydrofoils, which can carry people at speeds of 80 km/h (50 mph) an hour or more, overcome this problem. At rest, a hydrofoil looks much like any other boat. But beneath the hull are winglike foils, which rise as the hydrofoil begins to move …

If the balls are the same size, and the thrown with equal force on a pavement, then the steel ball will bounce higher. What determines the bounce of a ball is the speed with which it returns to its shape after it has been compressed on impact. This return to shape is what forces the ball up into the air. …

The longest mobile is NEED, a concept phone created by designer Tamer Koseli, which is about 14 cm long and is narrow in width. Koseli bucked the current trend in mobile phones which come with features like a camera and MP3 players. He wanted to create a phone pared of these so-called superfluous features. Need has an OLED display which …

For many years, Tokyo and Shanghai headed the world league table of the largest cities, but in the early 1980s Mexico City pulled ahead. Present forecasts suggest that it will have 30 million people by AD 2000. The expansion of Mexico City is part of a trend throughout developing countries for poor people to leave the hard life in the …

The bhut jolokia variety which grows in north-eastern India, was given a rating of 8,55,000 Scoville heat units by Ritesh Mathur and his colleagues at the Defence Research and Development Establishment, Gwalior. They reported their finding in an August 2000 issue of Current Science. The scientists tested a Tezpur variety of the bhut, or Capsicum Frutescens var. (botanists know it …

Nearly two-thirds of the world’s farmland is used to grow cereals, including barley, maize, millet, oats, rye and wheat. However, the basic food of about half of the world’s people is rice, which flourishes in warm, wet areas, especially in Asia. The popular custom of throwing rice at weddings probably originated in India.

Kishore Mahbubani is Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. He has served in the Singapore Foreign Service, and was posted as Singapore’s Ambassador to the UN and as President of the UN Security Council. He has been listed among the top 100 public intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy …

There are many thousands of different ports throughout the world. Some lie island on rivers and lakes, and can be reached by boats big enough to carry raw materials and manufactured goods. On coasts, there are fishing ports and seaports which handle trade. Seaports are situated on natural or specially built harbours, which offer safe anchorage for ocean-going vessels. The …

About six million years ago, the Colorado plateau in the south-western USA was a flat coastal plain. Winding slowly across it was the Colorado River. Gradually, earth movements pushed the plain upwards, making the river run faster and faster. The force of the flow began wearing out the Grand Canyon. This, the world’s largest gorge, is 446 km (277 miles) …