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) …

There are many adhesives and they are used depending on the application and material to be bonded. The most common one is e-600 series, a high-performance elastomeric adhesive, which bonds a broad range of materials.

In a recent survey, an electric nail file, which gives a smooth finish to nails, all for a whopping £250, was voted the most pointless gadget of all times. While laser-guided scissors which helps cut a perfectly straight line came in second, electric candles were third.

There are the towering television masts, some of which are higher than the Eiffel Tower. But to find the answer you have to go to sea, for oil rigs are more massive than any steel structure on land. Some of them may contain five times as much steel as the Eiffel Tower, and match it in height, even though most …

On June 26, 1974, a 10-pack Wrigley’s chewing gum was the first product logged in a grocery store by a barcoding system using the modern universal product code. Later that year, the Uniform Grocery Product Code Council became the UPCC which regulates the issue and use of all universal product codes. At the same time, companies pursued the use of …