The Mumbai the world knows today is the result of a series of tremendous changes. Whether geographically, politically, or even name-wise, the city has travelled quite a lot! One of the most important cities in India and the world, Mumbai was once an archipelago of seven islands that slowly merged, during the 18th century, into a…
A person’s DNA, short for deoxyribonucleic acid, is a molecule that functions as a storehouse of genetic information. The discovery of DNA was a major breakthrough in medical science. While Watson and Crick gave the actual structure of the molecule, the credit of its discovery and identification goes to Friedrich Miescher. In 1869, Swiss-born Friedrich Miescher…
The year was 1938. World War II was about to begin. A wonderful invention, which only became ubiquitous with time, happened: The ballpoint pen. The biro, or the first ballpoint pen, was named after its inventor Ladislao José Biro (1899–1985). Biro was a Hungarian journalist and painter. On his visit to a newspaper printing press, he could not help…
Cotton gets its name from the Arabic word ‘qutun’, which means fine textile or fabric. Archaeologists have found samples of cotton fabric, as old as 7000 years, at the sites of ancient civilizations, such as Mohenjo Daro, Egypt, and Mexico. Nonetheless, it is difficult to determine the exact period or place when cotton was first…
Ancient Indian mathematician Baudhayana is perhaps the first person to calculate the value of ‘pi’. In his text Baudhayana Shulba Sutra, he mentions that the perimeter of the pit is thrice its diameter, so the approximate value of π is 3. Since Baudhayana was essentially a priest, he used mathematical calculations for facilitating religious constructions…
What if snowflakes actually looked like pizza slices and hail stones resembled pretzels? In a research conducted as a part of NASA’s Global Precipitation Measurement mission, scientists have discovered that raindrops look like hamburger buns! It has been a long-standing belief that raindrops are tear-shaped. Cartoonists, illustration artists, doodle experts, and anyone who wishes to represent…
