Sun, the pivotal element of the solar system, is a middle-aged star that is around 4.6 billion years old. This near-perfect sphere is made up of 70 per cent hydrogen and 28 per cent helium. With the amount of hydrogen left on it, it can survive for another 5 billion years. In the last stages…
Akira Kurosawa (1910–1998), the man who ruled Japanese cinema for five decades, was born to a samurai family, in Tokyo. Young Kurosawa was introduced to cinema by his father, who took his eight children to the movies to familiarize them with Western culture. In his school days, he was attracted to art and painting, after being…
Asia, the largest continent on Earth, has a total land area of 44,579,000 square kilometers. It constitutes 30 per cent of the total available land area. The continent tops the list even in terms of population. More than 4.1 billion people reside in Asia, which is 60 per cent of the entire global population, with a population…
Pulses and beans, belonging to the legume family, are responsible for feeding majority of the world’s poor. Grown abundantly in the tropics, they are cheap, high in nutrient content, and healthy. Beans are an important source of proteins, complex carbohydrates, and micronutrients. People in sub-Saharan Africa consume as much as 66 kilograms of pulses per…
Covering an area of approximately 16,62,43,550 square kilometers, the Pacific Ocean is the largest ocean in the world. It occupies about one-third of the earth’s surface, and can fit all the continents of the world taken together. The basin of the ocean is also the oldest of all ocean basins; some of the earliest rocks present here are…
The Reserve Bank of India, on June 19, 2014, declared that residents and non-residents, except individuals from Pakistan and Bangladesh, would be allowed to carry up to Rs 25,000 when exiting the country. This was a major shift from the earlier limit of Rs 10,000 that was allowed only to residents of India. In 2013,…
