Africa is home to two species of rhinoceros – the hook-lipped or black rhinoceros and square-lipped or white rhinoceros. The white rhino is the largest existing species of rhinoceros and the second largest animal after the elephant. An adult male rhino can weigh as much as 3.6 tonnes. Female rhinos are comparatively less heavier, but can still weigh up to 1.7 tonnes….
The Press Freedom Index is an annual ranking of countries released by Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières in French), a Paris-based organization that defends and promotes freedom of information and freedom of the press, based upon the organization’s assessment of press freedom records of the countries in the previous year. It measures the degree of freedom…
The word ‘pip’ means a ‘spot’ or a ‘speck’. The markings on dice and dominoes are also called pips. The word also refers to the symbols on playing cards that give it a specific value, the small seeds of some fruit, the image of an object on a radar screen, each of the stars on the shoulder…
On 20 November 2011, one of the four pairs of Vivek Express trains began serving between Dibrugarh in Assam and Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu, joining the Northeast with the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. The Dibrugarh–Kanyakumari Vivek Express currently holds the record for being the longest running train route in the country in terms of both distance…
American geologist Bruce Heezer and oceanic cartographer Marie Tharp were researchers at the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, New York. In the 1950s, they expedited with a crew across the Atlantic to gather data about the ocean floor from the ocean surface. The observations proved that there was in fact a chain of mountains, as high as halfway till the surface, under the…
The discovery of Teflon, a polymer chemically known as polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), was sheer coincidence, and yet a revolutionary one. The man behind the discovery was an American chemist named Dr Roy J. Plunkett (1910–1994), who was then working for DuPont, an American chemical company. In the year 1938, Dr Plunkett was conducting a coolant gas…
