History Of Video Arcade Game

The first video game was invented by Willy Higginbotham. Willy was no teenage computer wizkid, however. In the early 1940s he worked on advanced radar displays for B28 bombers and went on to work for the Manhattan Project where he designed the timing mechanism for the first atomic bomb. In 1958, bored by the displays of the Brookhaven National Labs annual open-day exhibition, Willy designed a tennis game simulation, the world’s first video game. It was called Tennis For Two. Willy did not take out a patent but even if he had the royalties would have been paid to the US government.

Game development on main frame computers continued through the years, with Spacewar! being one of thefirst and certainly one of the most known games. Launched in 1962, it was programmed on a DEC PDP-1 by Steven Russell.

The first game console was called the Brown Box, created by Ralph Baer in 1966 to control a video home console ping-pong game. Baer sold the console to Magnavox Odyssey and went on to design the first game light gun for the Shooting Gallery game.

The first coin-operated video arcade game, Galaxy Game, was launched in September 1971 by Bill Pitts and Hugh Tuck. However, it was beaten to the commercial market by Computer Space, launched two months later by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. In November 1972 Bushnell launched PONG for his Atari company. It would become the first significantly successfull coin-operated video arcade game. Atari would continue with releases, including the famous Asteroids shooting game (pictured), legandary amongst ardent arcade gamers.

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This Rocket Car Running on Nothing but Air

Toyota Industries intends to apply for a Guiness World record for the fastest car driven by a compressed-air engine, after its Ku:Rin, as the vehicle is called, reached 129.2km/h (80.3 mph)on a test run earlier this month. This is a three-wheel, one-seater vehicle that broke the speed record for compressed air-powered vehicles at the Japan Automobile Research Institute test facility.





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World's First Virtual Store

A major South Korean retailer has opened what it appears to be the world's first virtual store geared to smartphone users, with shoppers scanning barcodes of products displayed in a Seoul subway station. Homeplus, the nation’s second largest discount chain, is offering 500 items including food, electronics, office supplies and toiletries at its "store" at Seolleung station in the south of the city of 10 million.


Seven pillars and six platform screen doors have been plastered with images of life-size store shelves filled with goods -- such as milk, apples, a bag of rice or school backpacks -- which each carry a small barcode. Shoppers download a related application on their smartphone and make purchases by taking photos of the barcodes.

"You place an order when you go to work in the morning and can see the items delivered at home when you come home at night," said a spokeswoman for Homeplus.
In fact, consumers don’t have to be anywhere near the virtual store. For example, if you want to order replacements of a bottle of water that you have in your hand, you don’t have to stop by the subway station. You simply scan the bottle’s barcode with the Homeplus app. The products are delivered later to home or office.
Currently, only Android smartphone users will be able to use the service that launched last week. Not that Homeplus hasn’t made an app iPhone, it’s just Steve Jobs and Co. hasn’t approved it yet.

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History of Automobiles

1672:: First steam-powered vehicle, by Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China.
Image via Wikipedia


1770 and 1771:: Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot of France demonstrated his fardier à vapeur, (“steam dray”) an experimental steam-driven artillery tractor,.


1780s to 1791:: Ivan Kulibin of Russia  created first human-pedalled carriage with a steam enginefeaturing flywheel, brake, gearbox, and bearing for the first time.


1784:: William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth.


1789:: The first automobile patent in the United States was granted to Oliver Evans.


1801:: Richard Trevithick created a full-sized vehicle capable of running on the road in Camborne


1805:: First successful self-propelled vehicle, the first automobile in the USA, the first amphibious vehicle was made by Evans.


1806:: The first cars were made which were powered by an internal combustion engine running on fuel gas.


1815:: A professor at Prague Polytechnich, Josef Bozek, built an oil-fired steam car.


1838:: Walter Hancock, builder and operator of London steam buses, bui
Image via Wikipedialt a four-seat steam phaeton.


1871:: The first carriage sized steam-powered automobile in the USA was made by Dr. J.W. Carhart, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Racine, Wisconsin.


1873:: The first “real” automobile was produced by Amédée Bollée.


1885:: Ubiquitous modern gasoline- or petrol-fueled internal combustion engine was made.


1893:: Brothers Charles and Frank Duryea founded the Duryea Motor Wagon Company, which was first American automobile manufacturing company.


1895:: George B. Selden of USA was finally granted a patent of the engine and its use in a 4-wheeled car. 

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Why Fingers Wrinkle in Water?

For the quick answer, water washes away an oily substance that protects your skin.  When that happens, a certain type of dead cell on your skin will absorb the water causing the cells to swell up, but the layer underneath does not.  So the swelling, combined with the places the skin is connected underneath to the non-swelled layer, causes your finger tips to look all wrinkly.
Image via Wikipedia


So that’s the quick, generic answer.  More technically, there is a  waxy/oily substance your skin secretes from the sebaceous glands called “sebum”.  In these glands, sebum is produced within special cells and is then secreted when these cells burst.  This substance, among other benefits, has the dual effect of helping your skin and hair stay hydrated underneath, so it doesn’t get dry and cracked, while also helping to protect your skin from excess moisture from the outside.  You will have probably noticed sebum at some point in your hair if you go a couple days without washing it.  Your hair will start to feel very oily when you run your hands through it.  When you are in water for extended periods, this sebum gets washed away from your skin and hair, removing this protective layer.


Now you might be wondering why only your finger tips and toes get wrinkly and not the rest of your body (or at least not nearly as fast).  The reason why is not 100% understood, but we do have a pretty good idea of what is going
 on here.  The skin’s outermost layer, the epidermis, contains a protein called keratin.  This protein helps strengthen your skin.  Dead keratin cells also make up the epidermis’ surface layer, called the stratum corneum (Latin for ‘horny layer’, funny enough).  So once all the protective sebum is washed away, these dead keratin cells absorb the water like a sponge and swell.  This is why your skin is much easier to cut or break when it is waterlogged.  The strong outer layer of dead keratin cells loses some of its toughness when waterlogged.   The reason then that your toes and fingers get more wrinkly is that they contain a thicker layer of both living and dead keratin cells than the rest of your body.  This causes them to swell more noticeably then the rest of your skin as the dead keratin cells absorb water.


The wrinkle effect occurs, rather than just general swelling, because the inner layer of living keratin cells stays more or less the same as it was before you were in the water, while the outer layer swells;  the connections between these two layers stay closely bonded while the places not connected are free to swell, hence, the pruney fingers and toes.



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About Apple's 'Spaceship' Campus

The building comprises approximately 2.8 million square feet for up to 13,000 employees.


It also houses:


- A 1,000 seat Corporate Auditorium


- A Corporate Fitness Center


- Research Facilities comprising approximately 300,000 square feet


- A Central Plant


- Associated Parking


"It's a pretty amazing building," Steve Jobs told the Cupertino City Council. "It's a little like a spaceship landed. It's got this gorgeous courtyard in the middle... It's a circle. It's curved all the way around."


The design focused on reducing the use of electricity by generating its own energy on an on-site Central Plant, provide open green spaces "for Apple employees' enjoyment" and to "exceed economic, social, and environmental sustainability goals through integrated design and development".


" If you build things, this is not the cheapest way to build something," Jobs explained.


"There is not a straight piece of glass in this building. It's all curved. We've used our experience making retail buildings all over the world now, and we know how to make the biggest pieces of glass in the world for architectural use. And, we want to make the glass specifically for this building here. We can make it curve all the way around the building... It's pretty cool."


The city said to press that they are very likely to approve the project. It is likely to open on 2015.

It Is Bigger Than the Empire State Building

The diameter of the Apple spaceship as 1615 ft, plus or minus a few ft., depending on where one places the ruler. That’s a radius of 807.5 ft.


The Pentagon is 921 ft (281 m) long. A circle circumscribed on the outside of a pentagon whose sides are 921 ft long has a radius of 783 ft. So a circle that would circumscribe the Pentagon has a diameter of 1,566 ft.




Here’s a rough overlay* showing the Apple HQ, the Pentagon, and top to bottom: a cruise ship, a U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier, what looks like a U.S. Navy Blimp, a WWII battleship, the Empire State Building and a supertanker.

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FBI’s First Ever App Could Be a Lifesaver

If your child gets snatched, it might take some time to come up with a recent, accurate photo to provide the police. Unless you have it on your iPhone—along with all their personal information. FBI to the rescue.


The Child ID app not only stores all the data on your kid you'll want to provide authorities should they vanish, but gives you a quick means of emailing this info to police with a few taps. It won't prevent your child from getting kidnapped, but it could mean saving their life if they do. That's a lot more than you can say about most apps.


The FBI's new Child ID app can be downloaded for free from the App Store on iTunes. Download App

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Dubai through Nineteenth-Century Camera

Photographer Martin Becka took a series of photos of 2008 Dubai using nineteenth-century equipment, and the results are incredible. The ultra-modern city looks like a real life depiction of Fritz Lang's Metropolis.

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What happens on Internet in 60 Seconds?

The World Wide Web is growing almost in the speed-of-light. And it grows in a rate that on average 6 billion pages are added to the internet everyday.

Did You Know?

Did you know that every 60 seconds:

1. The search engine Google serves more than 694,445 queries
2. 6,600+ pictures are uploaded on Flickr
3. 600 videos are uploaded on YouTube videos, creating another 25+ hours of content
4. 695,000 status updates, 79,364 wall posts and 510,040 comments are published on Facebook
5. 70 new domains are registered
6. 168,000,000+ emails are sent
7. 320 new accounts and 98,000 tweets are generated on Twitter
8. iPhone applications are downloaded more than13,000 times
9. 20,000 new posts are published on micro-blogging platform Tumblr
10. The browser FireFox is downloaded more than 1,700 times
11. The blogging platform WordPress is downloaded more than 50 times
12. WordPress Plugins are downloaded more than 125 times
13. 100 accounts are created on LinkedIn
14. 40 new questions are asked on YahooAnswers
15. 100+ questions are asked on Answers.com
16. 1 new article is published on Associated Content, the world’s largest source of community-created content
17. 1 new definition is added on UrbanDictionary
18. 1,200+ new ads are created on Craigslist
19. 370,000+ minutes of Skype voice calls
20. 13,000+ hours of music streaming on Pandora
21. 1,600+ reads are made on Scribd

Added bits

Everyday, 15 petabytes of new information are generated.
The amount of information today is approximately 988 exabytes (equivalent to a stack of books from the Sun to Pluto and back.
Today, the processing power of the Web is almost equivalent to one human brain. By 2040, it will exceed the total processing power of all of humanity.

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Asperatus - The Newest Cloud Type

Asperatus was first “discovered” in 2009, scientists have finally named this dramatic and rare cloud occurence as Undulatus Asperatus.Now Cumulus, nimbus, stratus, cirrus and the new one Asperatus !

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