Marlon Brando, Jr. (April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004) was an American actor and film director. He is hailed for bringing a gripping realism to film acting, and is widely considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of all time. A cultural icon, Brando is most famous for his Oscar-winning performances as Terry Malloy in …

Although the remarkable properties of the rubber tree were known to the Aztecs and other South American Indians, for perhaps a thousands years, rubber was unknown in Europe until the discovery of the New World. Pietro Martyre d’Anghiera, chaplain to the court of Ferdinand of Aragon, Castile and Leon, gave the first written account of the elastic gum in his …

The first talking movies were produced in France before 1900 by Leon Caumont. They were short films, starring great performers such as Sarah Berhard, in which the movie pictures were synchronized with a gramophone record. By 1912 Eugene Lauste had discovered the basic method for recording sound on film, while Thomas Edison produced several one-reel talking pictures in the United …

Everyone needs salt to stay alive: It’s absolutely essential to our system, and found in most of the foods we eat. Britain alone produces ounce is used up! In fact, we need salt so much that when a group of criminals in Sweden were once given the choice to do without salt for a month, as an alternative to capital …

We all use computers. If you use Windows on your machine, like me, you will have a small button at the the bottom of your screen called ‘Start’. Every machine in the world which has the Windows software installed has to have that button. However, we can have different screen colours, different text sizes, wallpapers etc. Similarly our bodies are …

The alphabet of genetics consists of four letters ATC and G each representing the corresponding nitrogenous base, e.g., A for adenine, T for thiamine, C for cytosine and G for guanine (in case of RNA, T is replaced by U which stands for uracil). These are constituents of a nucleotide monomer along with pentose sugar and phosphoric acid. In the …

Darwin IV is a fictional planet 6.5 light years from the Earth, with two suns and 60% gravity. It was depicted in the series ‘Alien Planet’ based on Wayne Barlowe’s book Expedition. According to the story, after identifying Darwin IV as a world that could support life, Earth sends a pilot mission consisting of the mothership Von Braun and three …

For close to three decades, nucleons (protons and neutrons) were considered to be the ultimate subatomic particles. As scientists delved deeper, they detected shadows of yet another layer of matter inside nucleons. Unable so far to crack open a nucleon and bring out one of these shadowy objects for observation and measurement, they named them quarks. It is believed that …

Satellite and cellular phones are wireless devices. They almost look alike but the way they work is totally different. A cellular phone functions on the basis of cells, and hence are called cell phones. The whole network area is divided into small areas and an antenna is installed in each area. These are also called towers. When a cellular phone …

An Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was the first person to work with telescope. In the beginning of 1609, he disclosed the details about the surface of the sun and the moon, Jupiter’s moon and Saturn’s rings, and discovered many stars too faint to be seen with the naked eye. His observations of the solar system led him to support the …