You are most likely familiar with numbers being used to implicate letters, phrases or even symbols. In SMS (txting) shortcuts, for instance, 2 can also be used for “to”, 4 can mean “for” and the 8 spells “eat” in gr8, meaning great. This is called SMSish or textese or simply SMS language.
When numbers instead of letters are used to spell a whole word it is called leet – which, in leet, is written as 1337. Another example is n00b, a term for newbie. Andsoforth. Read more…
The stars that you see in the night sky are part of the Milky Way, our home galaxy. But the Milky Way is not all around us because we do not live in the middle of the Milky Way; our solar system resides midway between the edge and the center of the Milky Way galaxy. If we could travel at the speed of light (186,000 miles per second), it would take us about 25,000 years to reach either the rim or the center of the Milky Way. Read more…
Pharmaceutical companies have sought for years to protect their expensive brand-name drugs by paying generic rivals handsome sums of money to put off efforts to introduce cheaper, generic alternatives that could steal market share.
The controversial practice, known as “pay for delay,” occurs as part of patent litigation settlements and typically buys a brand-name drug company more time to sell its blockbuster drug exclusively until its patent on the drug expires. Federal Trade Commission regulators have said the practice costs American consumers an estimated $3.5 billion each year, and have pushed for a ban. Read more…
For her 80th birthday in 1947, Queen Mary requested a radio play be written for her by Agatha Christie. The play – broadcast on May 30, 1947 – was called Three Blind Mice but when Christie adapted it to a stage play in 1951 it was renamed The Mousetrap. It debuted on November 25, 1952. [...]
Lee Cooper designed Packit jeans in the 1970s to help a man’s bulge appear larger. Singers such as Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bon Jovi wore the pants to increase their on-stage “presence”. (But that’s not the reason why Bruce Springsteen is called “The Boss!”) Tight jeans is known to hamper concupiscence (libido) whereas the bigger [...]
Leonardo da Vinci, who was born in Vinci, near Florence in 1452, is known for his visionary ideas. He made sketches of scissors, the parachute, helicopter, airplanes, and engineering designs, some of which came into use 400 years after his death in 1519. But his notebooks never provided an explanation on the mechanics of his [...]
Just a pinch of it and it’s worth it. We’re talking salt here. Used throughout human history, mentioned often in the Bible, ubiquitous and cheap. Mined from salt rocks and extracted from sea water, salt is… well, the “salt of the earth.” You can’t live without it healthily. At the same time, you can’t live [...]
Pharmaceutical companies have sought for years to protect their expensive brand-name drugs by paying generic rivals handsome sums of money to put off efforts to introduce cheaper, generic alternatives that could steal market share. The controversial practice, known as “pay for delay,” occurs as part of patent litigation settlements and typically buys a brand-name drug company [...]
Did the earth get hotter? Yes. Is it common? Yes. Since 1900, the average temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees Celsius. Over the past 300 years, the temperature has risen by about 0.6 °C. Of course, we didn’t have cars and electricity for most of this time. So the great climate debate is not if [...]
The first public television pictures were transmitted in 1926. The first TV interview was made with Irish actress Peggy O’Neil in April 1930. The first televised sporting event was a Japanese elementary school baseball game, broadcast in September 1931. The first daily broadcast was started by the BBC in November 1936. The first TV commercial [...]
Rock drawings from the Red Sea site of Wadi Hammamat, dated to around 4000 BC, show that ancient Egyptian boats were made from papyrus and reeds. Yet the world’s earliest known plank-built ship, dated to 2600 BC, was discovered next to the Great Pyramid in 1952. Made from cedar and sycamore wood, it was in [...]
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