Thousands of leeches are used for medical emergencies every year. The leech’s blood sucking accelerates healing on any deep wound but especially after re-attaching a severed limb or any other deep wound. The leech feeds off the oxygenated blood that would otherwise cause swelling and gangrene. The sucking assists the flow of blood and an anticoagulant in the leech prevents scabbing. The sucking is painless because the leech releases an anesthetic. Read more…
The fastest trending viral brand is YouTube. Created in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube grew to become the second-most used search engine in the world, parent-company Google being the biggest search engine.
Following Google and Facebook, YouTube has grown into the third most visited website with 48 hours of videos uploaded every minute. That is the equivalent of 240,000 full-length films every week or nearly 8 years of viewing content uploaded every day. 3 billion YouTube videos are viewed by 20 million people every day. Hard to believe, but that is an average of 150 video views per visitor per day… even with many videos being only a few seconds in duration. 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.
Agatha Christie donated the rights to the play to her grandson, Matthew Prichard, as a present for his 7th birthday. The movie rights were sold in 1956 – to British producer John Woolf – but on condition that a film version won’t be released within 6 months after the staging. 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 Packit Jeans
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 the genius
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 [...]
10 good uses for salt
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 [...]
Pay-for-Delay Drugs
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 [...]
Television firsts
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 [...]
Oldest boats
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 [...]
