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There are more sounds in the world than the human ear can ever hear
2007-06-09 12:19:00
Our ears are impressively sensitive pieces of apparatus. To make itself heard, a sound need only be strong enough to deflect our eardrum by 0.00000001 mm (40 thousand millionths in). Our ears can pick up a rich variety of sounds from the breathing of a baby to the deafening boom of a supersonic jet. But compared with some of our fellow animals, even those of us with perfect hearing are effectively half deaf.Sound is a vibration of the air and travels as a series of waves. The 'frequency' of the waves - the number of waves per second - determines whether the sound is high-pitched like a scream or low as a bass drum.The human ear by no means picks up all the sound vibrations in the outside world. It can register waves of between 20 and 20 000 vibrations a second (v/s) - the highest C on a piano is 4096 v/s, so 20 000 is just a shrill hiss. But dogs can hear ultrasonic whistles of 35 000 v/s, which are totally inaudible to human beings. Bats are even sharper of hearing: they respond ...
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What is the most sensitive part of the body?
2007-06-08 13:50:00
There are millions of pain receptors distributed around the skin, muscle, bones, and internal organs. Some of these special nerve endings are more sensitive to pain than others.The cornea of the eye, the thin transparent layer that covers the pupil, is the most sensitive part of the body. A nicked or torn cornea can be excruciatingly painful. We tend to develop protective calluses on the parts of the body we regularly put to rough use, such as the hands and feet. Thicker skin has fewer nerve endings and is less sensitive to pain.The sensitivity of internal organs is somewhat curious. In the operating room they can be cut, crushed , or cauterized (burned) without causing a patient pain. But they are extremely sensitive to distension, spastic contraction, inflammation, obstructions, ruptures, and bleeding. Internal tumors tend to cause pain when they grow large enough to push organs out of shape.The least sensitive organ of the body is the brain. Although the brain constantly processe...
More About: Science , Body , The Body , Part , Sens

Is the heart the seat of emotions?
2007-06-07 12:33:00
Poetry, song, and folklore have long portrayed the heart as the province of the emotions, while making rational thought the business of the brain. Actually such emotions as fear, love, hate, anger, elation, greed, lust, envy, and shame have not one cause or source but several, beginning with the internal or external event that provokes them. Although emotions often involve a quicker heartbeat and other "heartfelt" effects, the heart is just one part of a complex story.Each conscious emotion is the result of a welter of signals traveling back and forth on nerve and brain pathways. If there is any one control center for all this activity, it is the limbic system, the collective name (from Latin limbus, meaning "border") for several interconnected structures that lie near the brain's core. Enveloping the top of the brain stem, they form a borderland between the "lower" or "animal" parts of the brain (mainly involved with instincts, drives, and automatic regulation of body processes) a...
More About: Science , Seat , Emotions , Heart , Emotion

Stonehenge : building a massive and mysterious monument
2007-06-06 12:19:00
For more than 800 years, prehistoric people in southern Britain had used the exposed site on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire - today known as Stonehenge - as a place for their rituals. Over those eight centuries two circular banks of earth had been built and two incomplete circles of stones had been erected.But in about 2000 BC, the most challenging task was still ahead. It was then that workers began the job of erecting the largest structures of Stonehenge - the five trilithons forming a horseshoe at the centre of the circle. Each consists of two 50 ton upright stones around 20ft (6m) high with a 7 ton stone resting across the top.Raising a 7 ton lintel some 20ft (6m) onto its pair of uprights was probably the most dangerous and demanding job in building Stonehenge. Most likely, each lintel was raised on a bed of logs, each end of the lintel being levered up alternately while logs were pushed under it.The three phases of StonehengeStonehenge was built in three distinct phases over a per...
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Sleep Champions Of The Animal Kingdom
2007-06-05 04:45:00
Although almost all animals and even plants have regular cycles of activity and inactivity, only mammals and birds seem to have the kind of sleep we experience, with its several stages, including Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep.Based on studies of animals in captivity, the world's champion sleeper appears to be the two-toed sloth, logging a total of 20 hours every 24-hour day. That's truly slothful compared to the elephant, which may sleep as little as three hours a day. Why the difference? One reason may be that in its natural habitat the sloth slumbers in the treetops, relatively safe from danger, while the elephant must be always alert for big cats lurking in the grasslands. Matching the elephant in wakefulness is the giraffe, followed by such creatures as the horse, sheep, cow, and guinea pig.Man and mole tie at eight hours of sleep. Opossums and armadillos fall just short of the sloth's 20 hours, while hamsters, rats, spiny anteaters, jaguars, and pigs snooze for about half o...
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Is Helping Others Good For You?
2007-06-04 15:12:00
The warm feeling you get from making someone feel better may prolong your own life. A 14-year study of 2,700 people in Tecumseh, Michigan, found a decline in the mortality rate of men who did volunteer work, compared with that of men who didn't. Another study, at Harvard, showed a rise in disease-fighting antibodies in the saliva of students seeing a film about the work among Calcutta's (now Kolkata) poor of Mother Teresa (died in 1997), one of the most admired altruists of this or any other era.From surveys of people regularly involved in helping others, the picture emerges of altruism lightening depression and bringing increased energy. Many volunteers speak of a "helper's calm" much like the runner's high that comes with exercise. Helping people, like exercise, seems to have a calming effect on the brain and body and may reduce heart stress by curbing anger and irritability.
More About: Human Nature , Good , Ping

Smells Wonderful
2007-06-04 04:33:00
Our sense of smell is remarkably potent. Freshly mown grass, pine needles, Camembert cheese, burning rubber - even the memory of such smells can evoke powerful responses.High inside our noses sit two patches of cells that act as smell receptors. The two patches comprise millions of cells, each with minute hair-like projections waving in a sea of mucus, like a mat of wafting reeds in a riverbed. These hairy cells, called cilia, are incredibly sensitive. A single molecule of some substances is enough to excite them into sending a message to the brain.There are at least 14 different kinds of smell receptor cell, each of which is excited by a different type of smell molecule. This allows our brains to work out not only that something smelly has gone up our noses, but exactly what it is. Most familiar smells - freshly made coffee, cigarette smoke, and delicate perfumes - are complex mixtures of odours.Sum better than its partsSome perfumes that we find highly desirable are made up of sub...
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A Ventriloquist In The Grass
2007-06-02 03:58:00
Anyone who has walked in the country on a summer's day or evening will have heard the seemingly endless chirping of grasshoppers and crickets. Grass hoppers call mainly during the day, crickets at dusk. Children attempting to capture a cricket are often thwarted by the insect's ingenious ability to 'throw its voice' like a ventriloquist. If it senses danger nearby, a cricket can alter the pitch of its calls giving the impression that the sound is coming not from the insect itself, but from a spot some distance away.Crickets' chirping comes entirely from males competing among themselves and advertising their presence to potential mates. In many species of grasshopper, however, the male's song is answered by the female.There are two basic methods of producing these penetrating chirps. Both are forms of stridulation, rubbing parts of the body together to produce a sound. Short-horned grasshoppers rub a row of tiny pegs on the inside of their hind legs against veins on their front ...
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Why was Christopher Wren's plan for rebuilding London rejected?
2007-06-01 05:08:00
'If you seek his monument, look around you,' reads the translation of Sir Christopher Wren's epitaph in St. Paul's Cathedral in London . In the wake of the Great Fire of 1666, Wren had built a new cathedral, along with 51 of the 84 churches that the fire had destroyed. However, this was but minor repair work compared to what Wren had wanted to do - to recreate London from scratch. On September 11, 1666, just nine days after the fire started, Wren had presented King Charles II with his plan for a new metropolis.Lost opportunityThe plan was rejected but, over 200 years later, when there was an outbreak of cholera in London, health experts claimed that had the king adopted Wren's scheme, thereby doing away with the maze of cramped and over-crowded alleyways, the mortality rate might have been as much as a third lower. After Wren's death in 1723, his son lamented that the opportunity had been lost for making the city 'the most magnificent, as well as commodious for health and trad...
More About: History , Rejected , Build , Plan

Why the tiny hummingbird has to work so hard for a living
2007-05-31 03:42:00
Darting hither and thither, beating their wings up to 78 times a second, hummingbirds live life at fever pitch. Weight for weight, they have the greatest energy output of any warm-blooded animal. The burn up so much energy partly because their small size demands a hectic lifestyle. The smaller an animal, the greater surface area it exposes for each gram it weighs. Hummingbirds are found only in the Americas, where there are some 320 different species. With their tiny bodies - most are only 60 to 130 mm long - hummingbirds have exceedingly little mas for producing heat to make up the loss from their relatively large surface area. They therefore require a great deal of fuel to maintain their high rate of metabolism, a normal body temperature of 39 degree to 42 degree C (102 degree to 108 degree F) and a heartbeat rate of about 500 per minute while resting and up to 1000 or more per minute when very active.The energy for this comes partly from eating insects but chiefly from the high-c...
More About: Living , Animals , Work , Hard , Tiny

Hot And Cold
2007-05-30 11:59:00
Comparatively few people feel absolutely at home with both Fahrenheit and Celsius ('centigrade') temperature scales. Most of us, hearing a temperature expressed in the scale that is less familiar to us, will mentally convert the figure into the one we know better. But imagine how confusing things must have early in the 18th century - when at least 35 different measures of temperature were in use.It was not until 1714, when the German-Dutch instrument maker Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit made the first really efficient thermometer using mercury in a sealed tube, and created his own scale, that a single measure of temperature came into common use.Fahrenheit started with the coldest thing he knew of - a mixture of ice and salt. This he marked on his thermometer as 0 degree. Next, he measured the temperature of the healthy human body. He had originally intended to divide his scale between this point and his zero into only 12 degree, but the mercury in his thermometer moved much further up ...
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Inside The Turbulent Sun
2007-05-29 11:09:00
To the non-astronomer, the Sun is a model of constancy - a featureless white globe that has shone steadily throughout human history. But astronomers know the Sun to be a nuclear powerhouse in constant turmoil, and it may be far less reliable than we think.The Sun is a vast ball of hot gas, principally hydrogen, big enough to swallow up 1.3 million Earths. To express its weight in tonnes you would need to write a 2 followed by 27 noughts. This weight, some 3000 000 times that of the Earth, crushes the Sun's core to a pressure of over 300 million times that of our atmosphere.The temperature at the centre of the Sun is 15 000 000 degree C (27 000 000 degree F). In this furnace rages the nuclear reaction that creates the Sun's light and heat. It is the same reaction that powers the H-Bomb - the nuclear 'burning' of hydrogen into helium. As in all nuclear reactions, matter is converted into energy. The amount of helium produced in the reaction is only 92.3 per cent of the amount of h...
More About: Space , Inside , Side , Lent

Safe From The Butcher
2007-05-28 05:57:00
One-third of the world's cows live in India, yet no one dares to inflict the slightest harm on these animals, let alone kill and eat them. Cows are sacred to the Hindu population in India, and are protected as such by law.To Hindus, cows are a symbol of fertility and motherhood. Cows are revered, loved and protected. They wander about freely and have even been known to hold up trains for hours, while passengers wait for them to move off the track. Hindus hang garlands round cows' necks at festivals and pray for them when they are sick.If this seems strange to non-Hindus, it seems even odder in the light of the fact that the Brahmans, the Hindu priestly caste, originally oversaw the slaughter of cattle. But that was before a huge increase in the population, and a consequent shortage of grazing land, made growing vegetables a much more economic source of food.This radical change in the economy occurred during the 6th century BC. During the 5th century BC, however, the Buddhist relig...
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Catching A Train
2007-05-28 03:04:00
When two railway engines collided in 1838, killing one of the drivers, the English legal system of the day made it quite clear who was to blame. The guilty engine was seized and ordered to be forfeit, under the ancient law of deodand.Deo dandum (a gift to God) was a Saxon precept requiring any chattel that had caused the death of a human being to be surrendered to the king, who would put it to some good use. So the widow of a man who had been run over by a cart might receive the cart as financial compensation. Or, if a farmer fell on his scythe and died, the scythe was sometimes given to charity, as happened in England in 1218.In Victorian times, however, the law was used by opponents of the new railways. After the 1838 collision, and a similar incident involving an explosion on a ship, Parliament eventually abolished the law in 1846.
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Not All Marsupials Have Pouches, So What Do They Have In Common?
2007-05-26 12:24:00
Among the mammals discovered by the first explorers of Australia and America were curious creatures the females of which possessed a pouch of loose skin on the abdomen where they sheltered and suckled their young. Zoologists in the 17th-century classified these animals as Marsupialia, from the Latin word for purse. Of the 270 marsupial species in the world today, around two-thirds are found in Australasia; the rest live in Central and South America, apart from two species in North America. We now know that not all female marsupials have deep, bag-like, forward-opening pouches, like the kangaroo. Such pouches are found only in climbing and leaping species. In burrowing marsupials such as bandicoots and wombats, the abdominal pouch opens backwards, to avoid filling with soil. In mouse opossums, there are merely two narrow flaps of skin, and a few marsupials, such as the numbat (banded anteater), are completely pouchless.Rather than the possession of a pouch, what defines an animal as ...
More About: Animals , Common , Ouch , Comm

Bombardment From The Sun
2007-05-26 03:57:00
On July 7, 1988, 3000 homing pigeons fluttered from cages in northern France, circled a few times and set off on their annual race for their homes in southern England. But events on the distant Sun were to doom the race.Two days before, a solar flare - a colossal explosion on the surface of the Sun - had fired clouds of electrically charged protons and other subatomic particles into space, some of which had disrupted the Earth's magnetic field. When bad weather prevents them from steering by the Sun or the stars, homing pigeons use internal magnetic 'compasses' to guide them. Misled by the celestial disturbances, the pigeons flew way off course. Few made it to their homes.Pigeons are not the only creatures at risk from solar flares. The high-energy particles they fire out pose a serious risk of radiation sickness and even cancer to space travellers. Space shuttle flights are postponed whenever astronomers observe a flare. If astronauts one day build bases on the Moon or Mars they...
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Grim Foundations
2007-05-25 12:10:00
When the men repairing Edo Castle after the earthquake of 1923 lifted one of the foundation stones, they found a group of human skeletons crushed beneath it. The skeletons were lying with their hands in an attitude of prayer, and gold coins were scattered over their heads and shoulders.The skeletons were those of servants of the Tokugawa shoguns, the most powerful family in Japan. When the castle was built (it was finished in 1640) the servants had volunteered to be buried alive in the belief that a building constructed on living flesh would be impregnable.A Frenchman, Francois Caron, reported in the 17th century that: 'They go with joy to the designated place and, lying down there, allow the foundation stones to be laid upon them.' Many similar stones may still be seen today by the castle's Hirakawa Gate. But nobody knows how many bodies lie beneath them or beneath Japan's other castles and temples.
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What Our Eyes Have In Common With A Television Set
2007-05-24 11:38:00
Even behind a fixed gaze the eyes are in a frenzy of activity, as densely packed nerve cells respond to light in a neverending series of high-speed chemical reactions. The two main type of visual receptor cell are called rods and cones, and there are 125 million of them at the back of each eye, in the retina.Rods are light-sensitive cells that help us to see in dusk and dark conditions. So sensitive are they that it has been estimated that, in total darkness, they would enable the eye to see a lighted candle 8 km (5 miles) away.Cones are less sensitive than rods and help us to see in daylight or bright artificial light. They also filter colour.Both types of cell contain light-sensitive substances called pigments. The pigments change rapidly when light hits them and this acts as a stimulus to send signals to the brain, where they decoded and perceived as pictures. Normally the rods and cones adapt automatically and instantaneously to changes in light and darkness. However, if the shi...
More About: Science , Television , Eyes , Common , Sion

Asteroids - Vermin Of The Skies
2007-05-23 10:46:00
Asteroids, also called minor planets or planetoids. They are so numerous that they have earned the name 'Vermin of the Skies'. Hundreds of thousands of asteroids have been discovered within the solar system and the present rate of discovery is about 5000 per month. The largest is Ceres, 1003 km (623 miles) in diameter, followed by Pallas at 608 km (378 miles) and Vesta at 538 km (334 miles). Only Vesta occasionally comes close enough to Earth to become visible - if only just - to the naked eye.Asteriods were originally given classical names, but as more have been discovered, more inventive names have been devised. Asteroid number 694 is called 'Ekard' - its orbit was computed by students of Drake University, Iowa, and Ekard is Drake reversed. Asteroid 1625 is called 'The NORC', after an early electronic computer, the Naval Ordnance Research Calculator. 'Hapag' is named after a German shipping line, the Hamburg-Amerika Packetfahrt Aktien Gesellschaft. 'Bettina' is named aft...
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Taking A Healthy Interest Is Nothing New
2007-05-22 07:07:00
Modern banks are named after the bench (banco) where an Italian moneylender would once have sat in the marketplace of a Renaissance city. But some historians claim the world's first banks date back much, much further, to the Egypt of some 6000 years ago. Here, a customer's account was kept not in coins or notes, but in cattle - cows and oxen being accepted as local currency. Borrowers have probably always accused banks of charging excess interest. A clay tablet from ancient Babylon, from about 700 BC, records a loan made by bankers Egibi and Son, of 'two-thirds of a manna of silver ... at an interest of one shekel monthly upon the manna'. Since a manna was worth 60 shekels, this implies an interest rate of about 20 per cent per year - much like the rates charged by banks today.
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When Men Give Birth
2007-05-21 11:56:00
Long before the advent of modern anaesthetics, the expectant mothers of Dumfries, Scotland, had the good fortune to experience totally painless child birth. According to a 1772 report, the local midwives had the power to transfer the pains of labour from wife to husband. How they managed this remains a mystery, but the babies 'kindly came into the world without giving the mother the least uneasiness, while the poor husband was roaring with agony and in uncouth and unnatural pains.'The extraordinary spectacle of husbands suffering more from pregnancy and childbirth than their wives has not, by any means, been limited to one town in Scotland. Known as couvade (from the French for 'brooding' or 'hatching'), the phenomenon occurs in various forms all over the world.In some African tribes, the men will take to their beds for the entire duration of their wives' pregnancy. The women continue to work as usual until a few hours before giving birth. They believe that men are cleverer a...
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How Crystals May Help The Firefly To Survive
2007-05-20 02:28:00
In parts of tropical Asia, you can see trees glowing in the dark - single trees where waves of light ripple from top to bottom and back again, and rows of trees where the light leaps from one tree to another.This extraordinary effect is caused not by the trees themselves, but by the synchronised flashing of thousands of fireflies that have gathered in the branches. Look closely and you will find that each tree harbours a different species of these luminescent insects.Why these mass displays occur is not fully understood. But biologists do know why fireflies flash when flying alone, and how they produce light.Fireflies glow in order to find a mate. The male of one common species of North American firefly, Photinus pyralis, flashes regularly while flying. The female, watching from the ground, flashes back in a rhythm unique to its own species. The male recognises this signal and drops towards a new mate.It is possible that the flashing light also serves as a warning mechanism, remindi...
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Mechanical Madness
2007-05-19 03:43:00
Who invented a device to remove gravy stains from gravel paths? Or a machine for pulling Christmas crackers? Or a system for eating peas without the use of either knife or fork? These were all the brain children of William Heath Robinson - and none was intended to work.Born in London in 1872, Heath Robinson was an inspired cartoonist who satirised machines instead of people. He specialised in drawing plans for elaborate but useless machinery, involving a wealth of pulleys and levers connected with knotted string. These bizarre contraptions were mostly 'labour-saving' devices that involved far more labour than a straightforward way of achieving the same result. Their ingenuity was matched only by their total impracticality.His masterpiece was probably the miniature house he built in 1934 for the Ideal Home exhibition in London. Its occupiers, a staid middle-class couple, descended to breakfast on ropes through trapdoors in the ceiling. As they landed on their chairs, their weight d...
More About: Personalities , Ness , Mechanical , Mecha , Mechanic

Smallest Big, Biggest Small
2007-05-18 11:07:00
The smallest mammal living today is the Etruscan shrew; the smallest bird is the bee humming bird. Each weighs about 2 g (0.07 oz) - less than a bumble bee.The creatures are at the limit of miniaturisation for warm-blooded animals. This is because warm-blooded animals lose heat from the surface of their bodies, and at this size their skin area is so large in proportion to their volume that virtually all the heat the animals generate is lost. Cold-blooded animals can be much smaller, because their body temperature varies with the environment and they do not need to retain heat. The smallest vertebrate (creature with a spinal column) is the pygmy goby, a fish just 8 mm (0.3 in) long - about the width of a pencil. It tips the scales at 4 mg (0.0014 oz), not a catch a fisherman would boast about. Insects may be even tinier - the smallest of all being the fairy fly, at 0.4 mm (0.016 in) long.The creatures are made up of a vast number of individual cells. Early forms of life, the protozoa...
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Are The Brains Of Men And Women Different?
2007-05-16 11:41:00
The average man's brain weighs about 3 pounds, (1.35 kg); the average woman's, 2 pounds, 10 ounces (1.21 kg). Because men have bigger bodies on average, the relation of brain to body weight is about the same in both sexes. In any case, there is no evidence that a large brain means high intelligence. For example, the brain of the brilliant French author Anatole France was a mere 2 pounds, 4 ounces (1.02 kg).Months before birth, a surge of the male hormone testosterone apparently affects the action of certain brain chemicals in the male fetus. Some researchers think this predisposes boys to react more strongly than girls to stress and perhaps causes the greater aggressiveness many boys begin to display at an early age. High testosterone levels in the male fetus may also be a factor in the greater frequency of left-handedness, dyslexia, and stuttering in boys. The same hormone has been linked to a slight male edge in mathematical and spatial skills, but this is speculative and contro...
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Do The Starts And Planets Influence Human Life?
2007-05-13 03:37:00
The ancient science, or pseudoscience, of astrology is the study of the position and movement of the sun, moon, stars, and planets as influences on one's personality and life. Astrology began in Babylon about 4,000 years ago, and its followers number in the tens of millions today. Worldwide, there may be many more astrologers than scientists.Present-day champions of astrology try to link ancient conjectures with more recent scientific discoveries. They claim, for example, that the variations in earth's magnetic field caused by the changing patterns of the planets influence the neural circuits of the brain of human embryos. But physicists point out that a pregnant woman in a modern household is subject to far greater magnetic forces from a refrigerator and a television.Some events in outer space do affect the earth. The gravitational pull of the moon influences the tides, and meteorites sometimes fall to earth, even though science was slow to accept their extraterrestrial origin. S...
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Torturous Embarrassment Of Tourette's Syndrome
2007-05-12 04:15:00
The symptoms can be unsettling, to say the least: a person may suddenly start twitching uncontrollably and shouting obscenities. Called Tourette's syndrome after Dr. Gilles de la Tourette, who first described it in 1884, the strange disorder was thought to be a psychological problem, but psychotherapy proved useless in controlling the behavior of Touretters, as sufferers of the syndrome are called.Doctors now believe that Tourette's syndrome is a neurological disorder that affects the chemical balanced of neurotransmitters in the brain. However, little is known, and many Touretters are not properly diagnosed. For some reason it afflicts more males than females. Many researchers think the syndrome may be inherited. It generally begins in childhood with facial tics and can progress to spasms involving much of the body. As one Touretter described it, keeping his muscles from twitching was like "trying to stop a sneeze." Only during sleep are the symptoms absent.In medieval times, som...
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What Is Unique About The Human Brain?
2007-05-11 04:52:00
In certain ways that involve their brains, some animals are clearly superior to human beings. Eels, salmon, caribou, and many kinds of birds perform astonishing feats of navigation in their long-distance migrations. Owners of dogs or cats know that these mammals have senses of smell and hearing that are better than our own. Behind each such superhuman talent is an area of the animal's brain, enlarged or tailored in some way that makes the special skill possible.In turn, what distinguishes the human brain from other brains is the relative size of the cerebral cortex, the quarter-inch-thick covering of gray matter on the lobes and hemispheres of the cerebrum. Only in human beings is the cerebral cortex so large in relation to body size.The human cerebral cortex is further distinguished by its great quantity of foldings and refoldings (convolutions, or gyri), valleys (fissures and sulci) and ridges, all of which increase the surface area of the cortex and allow a maximum amount of gra...
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A Chance Revelation
2007-05-08 04:55:00
It was not so much as a physicist but rather as a keen amateur photographer that Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen uncovered the secret of the X-ray and its potential use as a tool in medical diagnosis in 1895.As Professor of Physics at Wurzburg University in Germany, Roentgen was working in his laboratory when he made his discovery - by accident. He was experimenting with an electric current flow through a gas-filled tube when he noticed a strange glow coming from a small scree, covered in a chemical called barium platino-cyanide, which he had left lying around. Putting his hand between the tube and screen he saw, to his surprise, the shadowy images of the bones of his hand in eerie outline. With his keen interest in photography, Roentgen hit upon the idea of substituting a photographic plate for the screen. Using his wife's left hand he took the first known X-ray picture: a clear, permanent image of the bone structure of her hand, obscured only at the place where she was wearing her gold r...
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Not Quite As Free As A Bird
2007-05-06 06:07:00
Although Turkeys were imported from America in the 16th century, the festive roasting bird for most English people remained the goose. But at the tables of royalty and the nobility, geese were considered humble fare, and the dish that would be served at a grand banquet was roast swan.Only the king and substantial landowners were allowed to keep swans, which were marked with nicks on their beaks to show who owned them. There were hardly any wild mute swans in the kingdom, since their wings were regularly pinioned. Even so, swans were not domesticated like farmyard poultry; they were free to swim wherever they liked, and matings between birds belongings to different flocks on the same river took place every year. The Royal Swan Master and his deputies travelled the country setting disputes over the ownership of each new crop of cygnets.In the 18th century, swan-keeping gradually declined, largely because swans are so much more trouble to manage than geese or turkeys - they require a l...
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