Valentine’s Day originates from the ancient Roman fertility festival of Lupercalia, which was celebrated on 15 February in honor of the gods Lupercus and Faunus, as well as the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. During the festival, young men would draw the names of women from a box, and each couple would be paired until next year’s celebration. Often they would fall in love and marry.
At around 270AD Rome was facing battles and civil uprising. The men were not keen to join the army. Emperor Claudius II believed that the men did not want to leave their loved [more...]

In 1637 Rene Descartes, the French mathematician and philosopher, predicted that it would never be possible to make a machine that thinks as humans do. That was a rather astonishing observation considering that the concept of the analytical machine was devised by Charles Babbage only two hundred years later. Babbage never completed his analytical engine but his theories laid the early foundation for artificial intelligence.
The father of Artificial Intelligence is British mathematician Alan Mathison Turing. In 1950 he declared that in the future there would be a machine that would duplicate human intelligence. He devised a specialised test, known as [more...]

What runs all around the yard without moving?
The fence
What is it that someone else has to take before you can get it?
Your photograph
When asked how old she was, Suzie replied, “In two years I will be twice as old as I was five years ago.” How old is she now?
12 years old
How would you rearrange the letters in the words “New Door” to make one word?
“ONE WORD”
There is a town where a quarter of all the people living have unlisted phone numbers. If you select 100 names at random from the town’s phone book, on average how many of these [more...]

Tobacco is a $200 billion industry, producing six trillion cigarettes a year – about 1,000 cigarettes for each person on earth. And this is what you’ll find in cigarettes:
~ Formaldehyde, which embalmer use to preserve dead bodies;
~ Toluene, which is commonly used as an ingredient in paint thinner;
~ Acetone, an active ingredient in nail polish remover;
~ Ammonia, which scientists have discovered lets you absorb more nicotine, keeping you hooked on smoking.
If you smoke, you and those around you also inhaling arsenic, benzene, cadmium, hydrogen cyanide, lead, mercury and phonol. In all, 4000 harmful chemicals, including 44 types of poison, of [more...]

In 1834, Charles Babbage (1792-1871) designed the Analytical Engine, the precursor of the computer. He was unable to obtain funding for it from the government, who thought it would be worthless.
There are many examples of inventions that were way ahead of their time. So much so that some would not come into use for another thousand years and some would only come into general use almost 100 years after they were designed.
The first fax process was patented in 1843 by Alexander Bain, but fax machines went into service only in 1964. In 1888, Frank Sprague completed an electric railway, but [more...]