The book Our Created Moon: Earth’s Fascinating Neighbor reveals some ways the Moon benefits mankind. One obvious way is the light it reflects at night, which has guided travellers on land and sea for…
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A total eclipse
A total eclipse is one of the most beneficial events for human knowledge. Astronomers, physicists and historians learn all kinds of things from them (this is how astronomers confirmed that gravity bends…
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Feeling dizzy?
Do you realise that you should be dizzy right now? That’s because you are, right now, travelling at the speed of 66,000 miles per hour around the Sun. That’s how fast the…
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Earth: The perfect home
…the universe is a very inhospitable place. As far as we know, there’s no other place in it that can support human life except this little dot of a planet called Earth.…
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Penicillin, the miracle drug
On a September morning in 1928, Alexander Fleming sat at his work bench at St. Mary’s Hospital after having just returned from a vacation at The Dhoon (his country house) with his…
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“Eureka! Eureka”
Archimedes (c. 287-c. 212 BC) was a Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor from the ancient city of Syracuse in Sicily. Although few details of his life are known, he is regarded as one of the leading scientists in classical antiquity. Considered the greatest…
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The Curies discover radium
A few days before the Christmas of 1898, Pierre Curie scrawled the word ‘radium’ in his notebook as the name for a new element he and his wife Marie had brought laboriously…
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The forgetful genius
Albert Einstein’s name is synonymous with ‘genius.’ We know he was a simple soul but it is hard to believe that the propounder of the most complex Theory of Relativity and quantum…
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How would you like to be remembered?
About a hundred years ago, a man looked at the morning newspaper and to his surprise and horror, read his own name in the obituary column. The newspapers had reported the death…
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Learning from mistakes
Thomas Edison tried two thousand different materials in search of a filament for the electric light bulb. When none worked satisfactorily, his assistant complained, “All our work is in vain. We have…