Odor Tester

Think your job stinks? Try being an odor tester. These employees test the efficacy of deodorants and

antiperspirants by sniffing subjects’ armpits. Thanks to all of their nosing around, we’re spared the

results of faulty products. Photo courtesy of Nancy Rica Schiff.

IMAX Screen Cleaner

The magnificent, larger-than-life images on IMAX screens wouldn’t be quite as powerful if they were cloaked

in a layer of dirt and dust. Luckily, there are companies dedicated to keeping your viewing experience crystal clear.

According to Michael Quaranto, cofounder of IMAX screen cleaning company 1570 Cinema Services, the biggest

challenge to keeping the screens clean is making sure they’re dust-free (they are so dusty, cleaners usually have

to empty their vacuum two or three times per screen). Photo courtesy of 1570 Cinema Services

Professional Whistler

Believe it or not, you can make a living off whistling while you work. Just ask Henry Brady, a 58-year-old

Welsh whistling performer. “A whistler is an artist just like an actor or musician,” he told FOX News.

“My profession has taken me across the world and allowed me to touch people’s hearts.” To be a professional

whistler, not only do you need talent, Brady also stresses the importance of self-promotion. Photo by Shutterstock.

Wrinkle Chaser

When you slip your feet into a brand-new pair of shoes, take a moment to admire their smooth,

wrinkle-free design. Why? Because someone spent a lot of time making sure your footwear is crease-free.

At shoe companies, it’s a wrinkle chaser’s job to use a special iron to ensure shoes are smooth as glass when

they leave the factory. Photo by Shutterstock.

Furniture Tester

If anyone’s ever called you a couch potato before, he may have inadvertently been giving you career advice. Loungers actually get paid to test furniture for companies by sitting on it. Well, sitting and moving. They have to wriggle around, rock, lean back, lean forward and assess the overall level of comfort. Some positions even require furniture testers to try out 200 different pieces in a single day. So they can’t get too comfortable. Photo by Shutterstock.

Food Tester

If pets could talk, people wouldn’t have to taste-test cat and dog food. To make sure the flavors are just right, a group of adventurous eaters chow down on pet food, remarking on everything from texture to tartness. But they only go so far: Simon Allison, a senior food technologist for Marks & Spencer, admits to spitting out the pet food after tasting it and keeping a glass of water on hand to rinse with. Photo by Shutterstock.

Golf Ball Diver

When golf balls are accidentally pitched into a course’s water hazards, they’re usually considered goners. But to people who salvage sunken golf balls for a living, those deep-sixed balls have dollar signs on them. There’s a whole industry devoted to rescuing submerged golf balls and selling them “used” to golf courses. The golf courses like the discounted goods and SCUBA enthusiasts can rake in the dough—sometimes six figures, depending on where they’re based. Photo by Getty Images.

Vomit Cleaner

An unfortunate side effect of a stomach-churning roller coaster ride is losing your lunch. And it happens so often that some theme parks employ cleaners specifically designated to mop up puke. You’d think it would turn the workers off the rides, but Rhys Owen, a vomit collector at Thorpe Park, a theme park in England, says, “I absolutely love roller coasters and the perk of being able to ride them for free makes [the job] worth it.”Photo courtesy of Thorpe Park.

Fake Review Writer

Definitely unethical, but unfortunately some people make cash by writing fake reviews of businesses for consumer-driven sites like Yelp, Citysearch and Urbanspoon. Their false enthusiasm for hotels, restaurants and products is meant to artificially boost ratings and slam the competition. Photo by Shutterstock.

Gross Stunt Tester

How do shows like Survivor and Fear Factor avoid lawsuits when they make their contestants eat worms or swallow a cockroach? They employ gross stunt testers, of course. These brave souls prepare and then have to try out the night’s challenge to make sure it’s safe while still being gross. Photo courtesy of Monty Brinton/CBS Worldwide Inc.

Proffesional Sleeper

People addicted to the snooze button should consider pursuing a career in sleeping. Yes, you can actually get hired to work in your PJ’s and catch some zzz’s. Professional sleepers doze off for a living, usually as part of sleep research projects, to help scientists and doctors figure out the mysteries behind sleep disorders.Photo by Shutterstock.

Paper Towel Sniffer

Paper towel manufacturers prefer that their products be odorless before, during and after use. The only way to ensure a scent-free roll? By employing paper towel sniffers who let manufacturers know if their products harbor any unusual or noticeable scents. Photo by Istockphoto.

Stanley Cup Keeper

Unlike other sports trophies, there’s only one Stanley Cup. Each year’s winning team and its players are engraved on it, but due to the trophy’s high value, it must be chaperoned at all times while it’s away from its permanent home, The Hockey Hall of Fame. So, a “Keeper of the Cup” is employed to accompany the trophy during its travels and make sure it doesn’t get into any trouble. Photo by Getty Images.

Coconut Safety Engineer

In order to protect strolling guests from accidents on their walkways, many resorts employ people to pick ripe coconuts from palm trees before they fall. These coconut safety engineers have to shimmy up the tall tree trunks and dislodge the potentially dangerous fruit. An added perk? Free coconut juice. Photo by Shutterstock.

Resort Waterslide Tester

Zipping down waterslides all day sure beats whiling away the hours in an office cube. Just ask Tommy Lynch, who was hired by British vacation company First Choice to check the height, speed, water quantity and landing as well as all safety aspects of their rides. Though it seems like all play and no work, Lynch takes his job seriously: “There is so much more that goes into the [slides] than people realize. The pools and slides are such an important part of the family holiday so it is vital everything is right,” he told the Daily Mail. Photo by Getty Images.

Source Yahoo.com

Today i see AVATAR in Cenima after a long time waite.as in our Country it came on Cenima before couple of days so i get the time to watch it today.I can say about it that it is the Best Science Fiction,Action,Adventure movie Ever Made in Hollywood if i m not wrong to say so…It kept us with it from start till the last second of it and every second of it was Enjoyable unpredictably Amazingly Fantastic and evrything presented in Great depth of 3D Animation…which Makes it More Unique and diffrent from any other movie which are sappose to b  in its league but i m prety sure nothing has been made before like “AVATAR”Action was Amazing with Gr888 Environment which totaly created Graphicaly and all charectors of Motion Capture wasnt acting the same like they do before as in Pandora World their Movments was just like Human evrything was Flawless with their way to walk talk or when they were in action.the Action Sequences was Extraordinarly Fantastic and Unpredictable with great detail of Environments effecting around them.Music was also Great and well suited for the Movie…

Now i know that y he wasnt making any Movie after Titanic well i can say that its Well Done after a Long intence hardwork which required by this Pandora World “AVATAR”

i Give it  10/10…..

if  anyone didnt watch it then i recommend to Watch it as its worth to Surf  some Money to Get this Entertainment which u will miss if u dont….

Bye…..

Earthquake Details

Almost” is the longest commonly used word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order.

“Asthma” and “isthmi” are the only six-letter words that begin and end with a vowel and have no other vowels between.

“Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson was the first video to air on MTV by a black artist.

“Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt”.

“Duff” is the decaying organic matter found on a forest floor.

“Fickleheaded” and “fiddledeedee” are the longest words consisting only of letters in the first half of the alphabet.

“Flushable” toilets were in use in ancient Rome.

“Fortnight” is a contraction of “fourteen nights.” In the US “two weeks” is more commonly used.

“Forty” is the only number which has its letters in alphabetical order. “One” is the only number with its letters in reverse alphabetical order.

“Four” is the only number whose number of letters in the name equals the number.

“Hang on Sloopy” is the official rock song of Ohio.

“Happy Birthday” was the first song to be performed in outer space, sung by the Apollo IX astronauts on March 8, 1969.

“”Kemo Sabe, meaning an all knowing one, is actually a mispronunciation by Native American of the Spanish phrase, Quien lo Sabe, meaning one who knows.”

The lunula is the half-moon shaped pale area at the bottom of finger nails.

“Ma is as selfless as I am” can be read the same way backwards. If you take away all the spaces you can see that all the letters can be spelled out both ways.

“Mad About You” star Paul Reiser plays the piano on the show’s theme song.

“One thousand” contains the letter A, but none of the words from one to nine hundred ninety-nine has an A.

“Ough” can be pronounced in eight different ways. The following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully.

“Rhythms” is the longest English word without the normal vowels, a, e, i, o, or u.

[More...] “Second string,” meaning “replacement or backup,” comes from the middle ages. An archer always carried a second string in case the one on his bow broke.

“Speak of the Devil” is short for “Speak of the Devil and he shall come”. It was believed that if you spoke about the Devil it would attract his attention. That’s why when you’re talking about someone and they show up people say “Speak of the Devil.”

“Stewardesses” is the longest word that can be typed with only the left hand.

“Tautonyms” are scientific names for which the genus and species are the same.

“Taxi” is spelled exactly the same in English, French, German, Swedish, Portuguese, and Dutch.

“Teh” means “cool” in Thai. (Pronounced “tay”).

“The sixth sick sheik’s sixth sheep’s sick” is said to be the toughest tongue twister in English.

“THEREIN” is a seven-letter word that contains thirteen words spelled using consecutive letters: the, he, her, er, here, I, there, ere, rein, re, in, therein, and herein.

“Underground” is the only word in the English language that begins and ends with the letters “und.” $203,000,000 is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.

1 and 2 are the only numbers where they are values of the numbers of the factors they have.

1 in 5,000 north Atlantic lobsters are born bright blue.

1 kg (2.2 pounds) of lemons contain more sugar than 1 kg of strawberries.

1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire are strung across the Unites States.

1.7 litres of saliva is produced each day. In Discovery Channel, its a quart.

10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

10% of human dry weight comes from bacteria

11% of the world is left-handed.

111, 111, 111 X 111, 111, 111 = 12, 345, 678, 987, 654, 321

1200 equals 1 pound (72 rupees).

123,000,000 cars are being driven on highways in the United States.

166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the United States.

1959′s A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.

2 and 5 are the only prime numbers that end in 2 or 5.

203 million dollars is spent on barbed wire each year in the U.S.

22,000 checks will be deducted from the wrong bank accounts in the next hour.

23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks.

25% of a human’s bones are in its feet.

259200 people die every day.

27% of U.S. male college students believe life is “a meaningless existential hell.”

3% of all mammals are monogamous

315 entries in Webster’s 1996 dictionary were misspelled.

315 words in the 1996 Webster’s dictionary were mispelled.

4 tablespoons of ketchup has about the same amount of nutrition as a ripe tomato.

40% of all people who come to a party snoop in your medicine cabinet.

40% of McDonald’s profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

43.7% of all statistics are made up right on the spot

48% of astronauts experience motion sickness.

52% of Americans drink coffee.

55.1% of all US prisoners are in prison for drug offenses.

56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball games each year

67 million pounds of pesticides and about 3 million tons of fertilizer are used annually on lawns in the US.

78 rpm albums, used prior to 1948, were only capable of recording for four minutes. It wasn’t until later that year that Columbia Records introduced 33 rpm albums capable of playing 23 minutes per side.

80% of animals on earth are insects.

80% of arrested criminals are male.

In Disney’s Fantasia, the Sorcerer to whom Mickey played an apprentice was named Yensid, which is Disney spelled backward.

By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.

One in ten people live on an island.

84% of a raw apple is water.

It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.

85% of men who die of heartattacks during intercourse, are found to have been cheating on their wives.

85,000,000 tons of paper are used in the United States each year.

28% of Africa is classified as wilderness. In North America, its 38%.

Charlie Chaplin once won third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.

Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

90% of bird species are monogamous; only 3% of animals are.

90% of New York City cab drivers are recently arrived immigrants.

98% of all murders and rapes are by a close family member or friend of the victim.

98% of the weight of water is made up from oxygen.

99% of the pumpkins sold in the US end up as jack-o-lanterns.

A “2 by 4″ is really 1 1/2 by 3 1/2.

A “Blue Moon” is the second full moon in a calendar month (it is rarely blue).

A “hairbreadth away” is 1/48 of an inch.

A “jiffy” is actually a proper time unit for 1/100th of a second

A “quidnunc” is a person who is eager to know the latest news and gossip.

A 1,200-pound horse eats about seven times it’s own weight each year.

A 1.5 oz. milk chocolate bar has only 220 calories. A 1.75 oz. serving of potato chips has 230 calories.

A 10-gallon hat actually only holds about 3/4 gallon.

A 14-year old French girl had extraordinary electrical power. With a gentle touch she could knock over heavy pieces of furniture and people in physical contact with her received an electrical shock.

A 17 year old girl from Miami, Florida started to sneeze on 4th January’66 ant continued till 8th June’66.

A 6 pound sea-hare can lay 40,000eggs in a single minute.

A 7-year study, which concluded in the summer of 2000, found that 33 U.S. deaths were caused by rottweilers, pit bulls were responsible for 27 deaths.

A acre of coffee trees can produce up to 10,000 pounds of coffee cherries. That amounts to approximately 2000 pounds of beans after hulling or milling.

A B-25 bomber crashed into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building on July 28, 1945.

A Baboon called “Jackie” became a private in the South African army in World War I.

A bat is the only mammal that flies.

A bathometer is an instrument for indicating the depth of the sea beneath a moving vessel.

A bean has more DNA per cell than a human cell

A bee could travel 4 million miles (6.5 million km) at 7 mph (11 km/h) on the energy it would obtain from 1 gallon (3.785 liters) of nectar, or it could just sit down on and enjoy that honey properly.

A beaver’s teeth never stop growing.

A bibliophile is a collector of rare books. A bibliopole is a seller of rare books.

A bird requires more food in proportion to its size than a baby or a cat.

A Blue Earth, Minnesota, law declares that no child under the age of twelve may talk over the telephone unless monitored by a parent.

A blue whales heart only beats nine times per minute.

A body decomposes four times as fast in water than on land.

A Boeing 747′s wingspan is longer than the Wright brother’s first flight.

A bowling pin only needs to tilt 7.5 degrees to fall.

A broken clock is right at least twice a day.

A butterfly can look at you through 12,000 eyes.

A Californian doctor has set the record of eating 17 bananas in two minutes.

A Canadian tattoo artist had 4,831 tattoos on his body.

A capon is a castrated rooster.

A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.

A cat has 4 rows of whiskers.

A cat uses it’s whiskers to determine if a space is too small to squeeze through.

A chameleon can move its eyes in two directions at the same time.

A chameleon’s tongue is twice the length of its body.

A Cheetah at full speed takes strides of 8 meters.

A cheetah is the fastest animal, clocked in at: 70mph.

A chef’s hat is tall and balloons at the top so as to counteract the intense heat in the kitchen. The unique shape allows air to circulate around the scalp, keeping the head cool.

A Chicago law forbids eating in a place that is on fire.

A chicken who just lost its head can run the length of a football field before dropping dead.

A chimpanzee can learn to recognize itself in a mirror, but monkeys can’t.

A citizen of Calcutta, India , grew the fingernails on his left hand to a length of 76 inches.

A cluster of bananas is called a hand and consists of 10 to 20 bananas, which are known as fingers.

A cockroach can live nine days without its head before it starves to death.

A cockroaches favorite food is the glue on the back of stamps.

A company, Warner Communications paid $28 million for the copyright to the song “Happy Birthday”.

A Cornish game hen is really a young chicken, usually 5 to 6 weeks of age, that weighs no more than 2 pounds.

A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.

A cow gives nearly 200,000 glasses of milk in her lifetime.

A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

A crocodiles tongue is attached to the roof of its mouth.

A cucumber is 96% water.

A Dalmatian is the only dog that can get gout.

A day on the planet Mercury is twice as long as its year.

A decree declares that anyone caught stealing soap must wash himself with it until it is all used up.

A dentist invented the Electric Chair.

A device invented sometime around the time of the birth of Jesus as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero is used today as a rotating sprinkler.

A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat.

A dime has 118 ridges around the edge. A quarter has 119.

A dog can hear high frequency sounds, which a human ear cannot.

A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule will not.

A dragonfly can fly 25 mph.

A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.

A dragonfly is also known as “devil’s darning needle”, “horse stinger” and “devil’s steelyard”.

A Fag is to work hard or to tire by strenuous activity and cigarettes are sometimes called Fags

A fagot is a bundle of sticks or a bundle of pieces of wrought iron to be shaped by rolling or hammering at high temperature.

A father Emperor penguin withstands the Antarctic cold for 60 days or more to protect his eggs, which he keeps on his feet, covered with a feathered flap. During this entire time he doesn’t eat a thing. Most father penguins lose about 25 pounds while they wait for their babies to hatch. Afterward, they feed the chicks a special liquid from their throats. When the mother penguins return to care for the young, the fathers go to sea to eat and rest.

A father sea catfish keeps the eggs of his young in his mouth until they are ready to hatch. He will not eat until his young are born, which may take several weeks.

A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.

A female mackerel lays about 500,000 eggs at one time.

A female swine or sow will always have an even number of teats or nipples.

A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.

A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.

A fish’s memory span is 3 seconds.

A five and a half year old weighing 250 pounds was exhibited at a meeting of the Physical Society of Vienna on December 4, 1894. She ate a normal diet and was otherwise in good health. The problem: she wasn’t able to sweat.

A flea can jump 350 times is own body length. (say..you jumping the length of a soccer field)thanx seraph

A flock of sheep grazed during Woodrow Wilson’s term. Their wool was sold to raise money for the Red Cross during World War I.

A fly always jumps backwards for a quick getaway when you try to hit it.

A fly hums in the middle octave, key F.

A foal is a baby horse.

A full moon is nine times brighter than a half moon.

A full-grown bear can run as fast as a horse.

A full-grown pumpkin has about 15 miles of roots.

A ghost writer pens an anonymous book.

A giant squid has eyes that can grow up to 20 inches in diameter. (Now think of how big your computer screen is..)

A giraffe and rat can go longer without water than a camel can.

A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue. i know some people who can do some amazing stuff too.

A goldfish has a memory span of 3 seconds.

A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeros. Mathematician Edward Kasner supposedly asked his nephew Milton Sirotta to suggest a name for the number, and he came up with this word.

A grasshopper needs a minimum temperature of 62 degrees Fahrenheit in order to be able to hop.

A group od geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group in the air is a skein.

A group of crows is called a murder.

A hamlet is a village without a church and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

A hard-boiled egg will spin. An uncooked or soft-boiled egg will not.

A healthy (non-colorblind) human eye can distinguish between 500 shades of gray.

A healthy individual releases 3.5 oz. of gas in a single flatulent emission, or about 17 oz. in a day.

A hedgehog’s heart beats 190 times a minute on average and drops to only 20 beats per minute during hibernation.

A hedgehog’s skin is so tough that when they get run over, its entrails come out of its mouth and its ass.

A herd of forty-five thirsty, rambunctious elephants stampeded into a brewery in Midnapore, where they smashed vats and slurped up beer in a bender that went on for two days.

A hinny is the offspring of a female donkey.

A hippopotamus can run faster than a man can.

A Holstein’s spots are like a fingerprint or snowflake. No two cows have exactly the same pattern of spots.

A honey bee must tap two million flowers to make one pound of honey

A honey bee travels an estimated 43,000 miles to gather one pound of honey. A pound of honey consists of 29,184 drops.

A honeybee can fly at fifteen miles per hour.

A horse can sleep standing up.

A Horse has 18 more bones than a Human.

A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.

A human has a bone just after the spine ends, which helps proves that humans once had tails (possibly).

A human head remains conscious for about 15 to 20 seconds after it is been decapitated.

A human’s scent membrane in the nose is about the size of a postage stamp. A dog’s is about the size of a handkerchief. It’s olfactory lobe is also 4 times that of a humanThanx liz chell

A humming bird flaps its wings up to 90 times in one second or over 5000 times a minute.

A hummingbird weighs less than a penny

A jellyfish is 95 percent water, and humans around 70%

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

Even after Copernicus simplified and corrected the structure of the solar system by dis- covering that the sun, not the earth, lay at the center of it, he (like all astronomers before him) assumed that the planets orbited the sun in perfect circles. As a result, errors continued to exist in the predicted position of the planets.
Kepler discovered the concept of the ellipse and proved that planets actually follow slightly elliptical orbits. With this discovery, science was finally presented with an accurate pictures of the  position and mechanics of the solar system. After 400 years of vastly improved technology, our image of how planets move is still the one Kepler created. We haven’t changed or corrected it one bit, and likely never will.

How Was It Discovered?

For 2,000 years, astronomers placed the earth at the center of the universe and assumed that all heavenly bodies moved in perfect circles around it. But predictions using this system never matched actual measurements. Scientists invented epi-circles—small circles that the planets actually rolled around that, themselves, rolled around the great circular orbits for each planet. Still there were errors, so scientists created epi-circles on the epi-circles.
Copernicus discovered that the sun lay at the center of the solar system, but still as- sumed that all planets traveled in perfect circles. Most epi-circles were eliminated, but er- rors in planetary plotting continued.
Johannes Kepler was born in Southern Germany in 1571, 28 years after the release of Copernicus’s discovery. Kepler suffered through a troubled upbringing. His aunt was burned at the stake as a witch. His mother almost suffered the same fate. The boy was often sick and had bad eyesight that glasses could not correct. Still, Kepler enjoyed a brilliant— but again troubled—university career.
In 1597 he took a position as an assistant to Tycho Brahe, famed German astronomer. For decades Tycho had been measuring the position of the planets (especially Mars) with far greater precision than any other European astronomer. When Tycho died in 1601 he left all his notes and tables of planetary readings to Kepler.

Kepler rejected the epi-circle on epi-circle model of how planets moved and decided to work out an orbit for Mars that best fit Tycho’s data. It was still dangerous to suggest that the sun lay at the center of the solar system. The all-powerful Catholic Church had burned Friar Giordano Bruno at the stake for believing Copernicus. No other scientist had dared come forth to support Copernicus’s radical notion. Still, Kepler was determined to use Co- pernicus’s organization for the universe and Tycho’s data to make sense of the planets.
Kepler tried many ideas and mathematical approaches that didn’t work. His bad eye- sight prevented him from making his own astronomical sightings. He was forced to rely en- tirely on  Tycho’s existing measurements. In bitter frustration, he was finally driven to consider what was—at the time—unthinkable: planetary orbits that weren’t perfect circles. Nothing else explained Tycho’s readings for Mars.
Kepler found that ellipses (elongated circles) fit far better with the accumulated read- ings. Yet the data still didn’t fit. In desperation, Kepler was forced to consider something else that was  also unthinkable at that time: maybe the planets didn’t orbit the sun at a constant speed.
With these two revolutionary ideas Kepler found that elliptical orbits fit perfectly with Tycho’s measured planetary motion. Elliptical orbits became Kepler’s first law. Kepler then added his Second Law: each planet’s speed altered as a function of its distance from the sun. As a planet flew closer, it flew faster.
Kepler published his discoveries in 1609 and then spent the next 18 years calculating detailed tables of planetary motion and position for all six known planets. This was also the first practical use of logarithms, invented by Scotsman John Napier during the early years of Kepler’s effort. With these tables of calculations (which exactly matched measured plane- tary positions) Kepler proved that he had discovered true planetary motion.

Fun Facts: Pluto was called the ninth planet for 75 years, since its dis- covery in 1930. Pluto’s orbit is the least circular (most elliptical) of all planets. At its farthest, it is 7.4 billion km from the sun. At its nearest it is only 4.34 billion km away. When Pluto is at its closest, its orbit actually slips inside that of Neptune. For 20 years out of every 248, Pluto is actu- ally closer to the sun than Neptune is. That occurred from 1979 to 1999. For those 20 years Pluto was actually the eighth planet in our solar sys- tem and Neptune was the ninth!

6:Jupiter’s Moons

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

Galileo discovered that other planets have moons and thus extended human understand- ing beyond our own planet. His careful work with the telescopes he built launched modern as- tronomy. His discoveries were the first astronomical discoveries using the telescope.
Galileo proved that Earth is not unique among planets of the universe. He turned specks of light in the night sky into fascinating spherical objects—into places—rather than pinpricks of light. In so doing, he proved that Polish astronomer Nicholaus Copernicus had been right when he claimed that the sun was the center of the solar system.
With his simple telescope Galileo single-handedly brought the solar system, galaxy, and greater universe within our grasp. His telescope provided vistas and understanding that did not exist before and could not exist without the telescope.

How Was It Discovered?

This was a discovery made possible by an invention—the telescope. Galileo saw his first telescope in late 1608 and instantly recognized that a more powerful telescope could be the an- swer to  the prayers of every astronomer. By late 1609 Galileo had produced a 40-power, two-lens telescope. That 1609 telescope was the first practical telescope for scientific use.
A paper by Johannes Kepler describing the orbits of the planets convinced Galileo to believe the theory of Polish astronomer Nicholaus Copernicus, who first claimed that the sun was the center of the universe, not the earth. Believing Copernicus was a dangerous thing to do. Friar Giordano Bruno had been burned at the stake for believing Copernicus. Galileo decided to use his new telescope to prove that Copernicus was right by more accu- rately charting the motion of the planets.
Galileo first turned his telescope on the moon. There he clearly saw mountains and val- leys. He saw deep craters with tall, jagged rims slicing like serrated knives into the lunar sky. The moon that Galileo saw was radically different from the perfectly smooth sphere that Aristotle and Ptolemy said it was (the two Greek astronomers whose teachings still formed the basis of all science in 1610). Both the all-powerful Catholic Church and every university and scientist in Europe believed Aristotle and Ptolemy.
In one night’s viewing of the moon’s surface through his telescope, Galileo proved Ar- istotle  wrong—again. The last time Galileo’s observations had contradicted Aristotle’s teachings, Galileo had been fired from his teaching position for being right when he proved that all objects fall at the same rate regardless of their weight.
Galileo next aimed his telescope at Jupiter, the biggest planet, planning to carefully chart its motion over several months. Through his telescope (the name is a combination of the Greek words for “distant” and “looking”) Galileo saw a magnified view of the heavens no human eye had ever seen. He saw Jupiter clearly, and, to his amazement, he found moons circling the giant planet. Aristotle had said (and all scientists believed) that Earth was the only planet in the universe that had a moon. Within days, Galileo discovered four of Jupi- ter’s moons. These were the first discovered moons other than our own.
Aristotle was wrong again.
Still, old beliefs do not die easily. In 1616 the Council of Cardinals forbade Galileo ever again to teach or promote Copernicus’s theories. Many senior church officials refused to look through a telescope, claiming it was a magician’s trick and that the moons were in the telescope.
When Galileo ignored their warning, he was summoned to Rome by the Church’s all-powerful Inquisition. A grueling trial followed. Galileo was condemned by the Church and forced to publicly recant his views and findings. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life, dying in 1640 without hearing even one voice other than his own pro- claim that his discoveries were true. The Church did not rescind the condemnation of Gali- leo and his discoveries until October 1992, 376 years after they incorrectly condemned him.

Fun Facts: Galileo would have been astonished to learn that Jupiter re- sembles a star in composition. In fact, if it had been about 80 times more massive, it would have been classified as a star rather than a planet.

7:Human Circulatory System

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

The human circulatory system represents the virtual definition of life. No system is more critical to our existence. Yet only 400 years ago, no one understood our circulatory system. Many seriously thought that the thumping inside the chest was the voice of the con- science trying to be heard. Most thought that blood was created in the liver and consumed by the muscles. Some still thought that arteries were filled with air.
William Harvey discovered the actual function of the major elements of the circulatory system (heart, lungs, arteries, and veins) and created the first complete and accurate picture of human blood circulation. Harvey was also the first to use the scientific method for bio- logical studies. Every scientist since has followed his example. Harvey’s 1628 book repre- sents the beginning of modern physiology.

How Was It Discovered?

Through the sixteenth century, doctors relied on the 1,500-year-old writings of the Greek physician Galen, who said that food was converted into blood in the liver and was then consumed by the body for fuel. Most agreed that the blood that flowed through arteries had no connection with the blood that flowed through veins.
William Harvey was born in 1578 in England and received medical training at Oxford. He was invited to study at Padua University in Italy, the acknowledged medical center of Europe.
When Harvey returned to England in 1602, he married the daughter of Queen Eliza- beth’s doctor, was appointed a physician in the court of King James I, and was then ap- pointed personal physician to King Charles I in 1618.
While serving the English kings, Harvey focused his studies on veins and arteries. He conducted extensive experiments with animals and human corpses. During these dissec- tions, he discovered the series of flap valves that exist throughout the veins. He was not the first to find these valves, but he was the first to note that they always directed blood flow to- ward the heart. Blood flowed in veins only from the arms, legs, and head back to the heart.
He began a series of animal experiments in which he tied off a single artery or vein to see what happened. Sometimes he clamped an artery and later released it to see where this surge of blood would go. He did the same with veins, clamping a vein and then releasing it. Sometimes he clamped both vein and artery and then released one at a time. These experi- ments proved that arteries and veins were connected into a single circulatory system and that blood always flowed from arteries to veins.
Harvey turned to the heart itself and soon realized that the heart acted as a muscle and pushed blood out to lungs and out into arteries. Following blood as it flowed through vari- ous animals, Harvey saw that blood was not consumed, but circulated over and over again through the system, carrying air and nourishment to the body.
By 1625 Harvey had discovered an almost complete picture of the circulatory system. He faced two problems. First, he couldn’t figure out how blood got from an artery across to a vein, even though his experiments proved that it did. (Harvey had no microscope and so couldn’t see blood vessels as small as capillaries. By 1670—three years after Harvey’s death—Italian Marcello Malpighi had discovered capillaries with a microscope, thus com- pleting Harvey’s circulatory system.)
The second problem Harvey faced was his fear of mob reactions, Church condemna- tion when he said that the heart was just a muscular pump and not the house of the soul and consciousness, and the press (scribes). He was afraid he’d lose his job with the king. In 1628
Harvey found a small German publisher to publish a thin (72-page) summary of his work and discoveries. He published it in Latin (the language of science), hoping no one in Eng- land would read it.
News of Harvey’s book raced across Europe and made him instantly notorious. He lost many patients, who were shocked by his claims. But Harvey’s science was careful and ac- curate. By  1650 Harvey’s book had become the accepted textbook on the circulatory system.
Fun Facts: Americans donate over 16 million pints of blood each year. That’s enough blood to fill a swimming pool 20 feet wide, 8 feet deep, and one-third of a mile long!

8:Air Pressure
Year of Discovery: 1640

What Is It? Air (the atmosphere) has weight and presses down on us.

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

It is a simple, seemingly obvious notion: air has weight; the atmosphere presses down on us with a real force. However, humans don’t feel that weight. You aren’t aware of it be- cause it has always been part of your world. The same was true for early scientists, who never thought to consider the weight of air and atmosphere.
Evangelista Torricelli’s discovery began the serious study of weather and the atmo- sphere. It launched our understanding of the atmosphere. This discovery helped lay the foundation for Newton and others to develop an understanding of gravity.
This same revelation also led Torricelli to discover the concept of a vacuum and to in- vent the barometer—the most basic, fundamental instrument of weather study.

How Was It Discovered?

On a clear October day in 1640, Galileo conducted a suction-pump experiment at a public well just off the market plaza in Florence, Italy. The famed Italian scientist lowered a long tube into the well’s murky water. From the well, Galileo’s tube draped up over a wooden cross-beam three meters above the well’s wall, and then down to a hand-powered pump held by two assistants: Evangelista Torricelli, the 32-year-old the son of a wealthy merchant and an aspiring scientist, and Giovanni Baliani, another Italian physicist.
Torricelli and Baliani pumped the pump’s wooden handlebar, slowly sucking air out of Galileo’s tube, pulling water higher into the tube. They pumped until the tube flattened like a run-over drinking straw. But no matter how hard they worked, water would not rise more than 9.7 meters above the well’s water level. It was the same in every test.
Galileo proposed that—somehow—the weight of the water column made it collapse back to that height.
In 1643, Torricelli returned to the suction pump mystery. If Galileo was correct, a heavier liquid should reach the same critical weight and collapse at a lower height. Liquid mercury weighted 13.5 times as much as water. Thus, a column of mercury should never rise any higher than 1/13.5 the height of a water column, or about 30 inches.

Torricelli filled a six-foot glass tube with liquid mercury and shoved a cork into the open end. Then he inverted the tube and submerged the corked end in a tub of liquid mer- cury before he pulled out the stopper. As he expected, mercury flowed out of the tube and into the tub. But not all of the mercury ran out.
Torricelli measured the height of the remaining mercury column—30 inches, as ex- pected. Still, Torricelli suspected that the mystery’s true answer had something to do with the vacuum he had created above his column of mercury.
The next day, with wind and a cold rain lashing at the windows, Torricelli repeated his experiment, planning to study the vacuum above the mercury. However, on this day the mercury column only rose to a height of 29 inches.
Torricelli was perplexed. He had expected the mercury to rise to the same height as yesterday. What was different? Rain beat on the windows as Torricelli pondered this new wrinkle.
What was different was the atmosphere, the weather. Torricelli’s mind latched onto a revolutionary new idea. Air, itself, had weight. The real answer to the suction pump mys- tery lay not in the weight of the liquid, nor in the vacuum above it, but in the weight of the at- mosphere pushing down around it.
Torricelli realized that the weight of the air in the atmosphere pushed down on the mer- cury in the tub. That pressure forced mercury up into the tube. The weight of the mercury in the tube had to be exactly equal to the weight of the atmosphere pushing down on the mer- cury in the tub.
When the weight of the atmosphere changed, it would push down either a little bit more or a little bit less on the mercury in the tub and drive the column of mercury in the tube either a little higher or a little lower. Changing weather must change the weight of the atmo- sphere.
Torricelli had discovered atmospheric pressure and a way to measure and study it.

Fun Facts: Home barometers rarely drop more than 0.5 inch of mercury as the weather changes from fair to stormy. The greatest pressure drop ever recorded was 2.963 inches of mercury, measured inside a South Da- kota tornado in June 2003.

Year of Discovery: 260 B.C.

What Is It? The two fundamental principles underlying all physics and engineering.

Why Is This One of the  Greatest?

The concepts of buoyancy (water pushes up on an object with a force equal to the weight of water that the object displaces) and of levers (a force pushing down on one side of a lever creates a lifting force on the other side that is proportional to the lengths of the two sides of the lever) lie at the foundation of all quantitative science and engineering. They rep- resent humanity’s earliest breakthroughs in understanding the relationships in the physical world around us and in devising mathematical ways to describe the physical phenomena of the world. Countless engineering and  scientific advances have depended on those two discoveries.

How Was It Discovered?

In 260 B.C. 26-year-old Archimedes studied the two known sciences—astronomy and geometry—in Syracuse, Sicily. One day Archimedes was distracted by four boys playing on the beach with a driftwood plank. They balanced the board over a waist-high rock. One boy straddled one end while his three friends jumped hard onto the other. The lone boy was tossed into the air.
The boys slid the board off-center along their balancing rock so that only one-quarter of it remained on the short side. Three of the boys climbed onto the short, top end. The fourth boy bounded onto the rising long end, crashing it back down to the sand and catapult- ing his three friends into the air.
Archimedes was fascinated. And he determined to understand the principles that so easily allowed a small weight (one boy) to lift a large weight (three boys).
Archimedes used a strip of wood and small wooden blocks to model the boys and their driftwood. He made a triangular block to model their rock. By measuring as he balanced different combinations of weights on each end of the lever (lever came from the Latin word meaning “to lift”), Archimedes realized that levers were an example of one of Euclid’s pro- portions at work. The force (weight) pushing down on each side of the lever had to be pro- portional to the lengths of board on each side of the balance point. He had discovered the mathematical concept of levers, the most common and basic lifting system ever devised.

Fifteen years later, in 245 B.C., Archimedes was ordered by King Hieron to find out whether a goldsmith had cheated the king. Hieron had given the smith a weight of gold and asked him to fashion a solid-gold crown. Even though the crown weighed exactly the same as the original gold, the king suspected that the goldsmith had wrapped a thin layer of gold around some other, cheaper metal inside. Archimedes was ordered to discover whether the crown was solid gold without damaging the crown itself.
It seemed like an impossible task. In a public bathhouse Archimedes noticed his arm floating on the water’s surface. A vague idea began to form in his mind. He pulled his arm completely under the surface. Then he relaxed and it floated back up.
He stood up in the tub. The water level dropped around the tub’s sides. He sat back down. The water level rose.
He lay down. The water rose higher, and he realized that he felt lighter. He stood up. The water level fell and he felt heavier. Water had to be pushing up on his submerged body to make it feel lighter.
He carried a stone and a block of wood of about the same size into the tub and submerged them both. The stone sank, but felt lighter. He had to push the wood down to submerge it. That meant that water pushed up with a force related to the amount of water displaced by the object (the object’s size) rather than to the object’s weight. How heavy the object felt in the water had to relate to the object’s density (how much each unit volume of it weighed).
That showed Archimedes how to answer the king’s question. He returned to the king. The key was density. If the crown was made of some other metal than gold, it could weigh the same but would have a different density and thus occupy a different volume.
The crown and an equal weight of gold were dunked into a bowl of water. The crown displaced more water and was thus shown to be a fake.
More important, Archimedes discovered the principle of buoyancy: Water pushes up on objects with a force equal to the amount of water the objects displace.

Fun Facts: When Archimedes discovered the concept of buoyancy, he leapt form the bath and shouted the word he made famous: “Eureka!” which means “I found it!” That word became the motto of the state of Cali- fornia after the first gold rush miners shouted that they had found gold.

2:The Sun Is the Center of the Universe

Year of Discovery: A.D. 1520

What Is It? The sun is the center of the universe and the earth rotates around it.

Who Discovered It? Nicholaus Copernicus

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

Copernicus measured and observed the planets and stars. He gathered, compiled, and compared the observations of dozens of other astronomers. In so doing Copernicus chal- lenged a 2,000-year-old belief that the earth sat motionless at the center of the universe and that planets, sun, and stars rotated around it. His work represents the beginning point for our understanding of the universe around us and of modern astronomy.
He was also the first to use scientific observation as the basis for the development of a scientific theory. (Before his time logic and thought had been the basis for theory.) In this way  Copernicus launched both the field of modern astronomy and modern scientific methods.

How Was It Discovered?

In 1499 Copernicus graduated from the University of Bologna, Italy; was ordained a priest  in  the Catholic Church; and returned to Poland to work for his uncle, Bishop Waczenrode, at the Frauenburg Cathedral. Copernicus was given the top rooms in a cathe- dral tower so he could continue his astronomy measurements.
At that time people still believed a model of the universe created by the Greek scientist, Ptolemy, more than 1,500 years earlier. According to Ptolemy, the earth was the center of the universe and never moved. The sun and planets revolved around the earth in great cir- cles, while the distant stars perched way out on the great spherical shell of space. But careful measurement of the movement of planets didn’t fit with Ptolomy’s model.
So astronomers modified Ptolemy’s universe of circles by adding more circles within circles, or epi-circles. The model now claimed that each planet traveled along a small circle (epi-circle) that rolled along that planet’s big orbital circle around the earth. Century after century, the errors in even this model grew more and more evident. More epi-circles were added to the model so that planets moved along epi-circles within epi-circles.
Copernicus hoped to use “modern” (sixteenth-century) technology to improve on Ptol- emy’s measurements and, hopefully, eliminate some of the epi-circles.
For almost 20 years Copernicus painstakingly measured the position of the planets each night. But his tables of findings still made no sense in Ptolemy’s model.
Over the years, Copernicus began to wonder what the movement of the planets would look like from another moving planet. When his calculations based on this idea more accu- rately predicted the planets’ actual movements, he began to wonder what the motion of the planets would look like if the earth moved. Immediately, the logic of this notion became apparent.
Each planet appeared at different distances from the earth at different times throughout a year. Copernicus realized that this meant Earth could not lie at the center of the planets’ circular paths.
From 20 years of observations he knew that only the sun did not vary in apparent size over the course of a year. This meant that the distance from Earth to the sun had to always remain the same. If the earth was not at the center, then the sun had to be. He quickly calcu- lated that if he placed the sun at the universe’s center and had the earth orbit around it, he could completely eliminate all epi-circles and have the known planets travel in simple cir- cles around the sun.
But would anyone believe Copernicus’s new model of the universe? The whole world—and especially the all-powerful Catholic Church—believed in an Earth-centered universe.
For fear of retribution from the Church, Copernicus dared not release his findings dur- ing his lifetime. They were made public in 1543, and even then they were consistently scorned and ridiculed by the Church, astronomers, and universities alike. Finally, 60 years later, first Johannes Kepler and then Galileo Galilei proved that Copernicus was right.

Fun Facts: Approximately one million Earths can fit inside the sun. But that is slowly changing. Some 4.5 pounds of sunlight hit the earth each second.

3:Human Anatomy

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

The human anatomy references used by doctors through the year A.D. 1500 were actually based mostly on animal studies, more myth and error than truth. Andreas Vesalius was the first to insist on dissections, on exact physiological experiment and di- rect observation—scientific methods—to create his anatomy guides. His were the first reliable, accurate books on the structure and workings of the human body.
Versalius’s work demolished the long-held reliance on the 1,500-year-old anatomical work by the early Greek, Galen, and marked a permanent turning point for medicine. For the first time, actual anatomical fact replaced conjecture as the basis for medical profession.

How Was It Discovered?

Andreas Vesalius was born in Brussels in 1515. His father, a doctor in the royal court, had collected an exceptional medical library. Young Vesalius poured over each volume and showed immense curiosity about the functioning of living things. He often caught and dis- sected small animals and insects.
At age 18 Vesalius traveled to Paris to study medicine. Physical dissection of animal or human bodies was not a common part of accepted medical study. If a dissection had to be performed, professors lectured while a barber did the actual cutting. Anatomy was taught from the drawings and translated texts of Galen, a Greek doctor whose texts were written in
50 B.C.
Vesalius was quickly recognized as brilliant but arrogant and argumentative. During the second dissection he attended, Vesalius snatched the knife from the barber and demon- strated both his skill at dissection and his knowledge of anatomy, to the amazement of all in attendance.
As a medical student, Vesalius became a ringleader, luring his fellow students to raid the boneyards of Paris for skeletons to study and graveyards for bodies to dissect. Vesalius regularly  braved  vicious  guard  dogs  and  the  gruesome  stench  of  Paris’s  mound  of Monfaucon (where the bodies of executed criminals were dumped) just to get his hands on freshly killed bodies to study.
In 1537 Vesalius graduated and moved to the University of Padua (Italy), where he be- gan a long series of lectures—each centered on actual dissections and tissue experiments. Students and other professors flocked to his classes, fascinated by his skill and by the new reality he  uncovered—muscles, arteries, nerves, veins, and even thin structures of the human brain.
This series culminated in January 1540, with a lecture he presented to a packed theater in Bologna, Italy. Like all other medical students, Versalius had been trained to believe in Galen’s work. However, Vesalius had long been troubled because so many of his dissec- tions revealed actual structures that differed from Galen’s descriptions.
In this lecture, for the first time in public, Vesalius revealed his evidence to discredit Galen and to show that Galen’s descriptions of curved human thighbones, heart chambers, segmented breast bones, etc., better matched the anatomy of apes than humans. In his lec- ture, Vesalius detailed more than 200 discrepancies between actual human anatomy and Galen’s descriptions. Time after time, Vesalius showed that what every doctor and surgeon in Europe relied on fit better with apes, dogs, and sheep than the human body. Galen, and every medical text based on his work, were wrong.
Vesalius stunned the local medical community with this lecture. Then he secluded himself for three years preparing his detailed anatomy book. He used master artists to draw what he dissected—blood vessels, nerves, bones, organs, muscles, tendons, and brain.
Vesalius completed and published his magnificent anatomy book in 1543. When med- ical professors (who had taught and believed in Galen their entire lives) received Vesalius’s book with skepticism and doubt, Vesalius flew into a rage and burned all of his notes and studies in a great bonfire, swearing that he would never again cut into human tissue.
Luckily for us, his published book survived and became the standard anatomy text for over 300 years.

Fun Facts: The average human brain weighs three pounds and contains

100 billion brain cells that connect with each other through 500 trillion dendrites! No wonder it was hard for Vesalius to see individual neurons.

4:The Law of Falling Objects

Why Is This One of the Greatest?

It seems a simple and obvious discovery. Heavier objects don’t fall faster. Why does it qualify as one of the great discoveries? Because it ended the practice of science based on the ancient Greek theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy and launched modern science. Galileo’s discovery brought physics into the Renaissance and the modern age. It laid the foundation for Newton’s discoveries of universal gravitation and his laws of motion. Galileo’s work was an essential building block of modern physics and engineering.

How Was It Discovered?

Galileo Galilei, a 24-year-old mathematics professor at the University of Pisa, Italy, often sat in a local cathedral when some nagging problem weighed on his mind. Lamps gently swung on long chains to illuminate the cathedral. One day in the summer of 1598, Galileo realized that those lamps always swung at the same speed.
He decided to time them. He used the pulse in his neck to measure the period of each swing of one of the lamps. Then he timed a larger lamp and found that it swung at the same rate. He borrowed one of the long tapers alter boys used to light the lamps and swung both large and small lamps more vigorously. Over many days he timed the lamps and found that they always took exactly the same amount of time to travel through one complete arc. It didn’t matter how big (heavy) the lamp was or how big the arc was.
Heavy lamps fell through their arc at the same rate as lighter lamps. Galileo was fasci- nated.  This observation contradicted a 2,000-year-old cornerstone of beliefs about the world.
He stood before his class at the University of Pisa, Italy, holding bricks as if weighing and comparing them—a single brick in one hand and two bricks that he had cemented to- gether in the other. “Gentlemen, I have been watching pendulums swing back and forth. And I have come to a conclusion. Aristotle is wrong.”

The class gasped, “Aristotle? Wrong?!” The first fact every schoolboy learned in be- ginning science was that the writings of the ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, were the foundation of science. One of Aristotle’s central theorems stated that heavier objects fall faster because they weigh more.
Galileo climbed onto his desk, held the bricks at eye level, and let them fall. Thud! Both bricks crashed to the floor. “Did the heavier brick fall faster?” he demanded.
The class shook their heads. No, it had not. They landed together.
“Again!” cried Galileo. His students were transfixed as Galileo again dropped the bricks. Crash! “Did the heavy brick fall faster?” No, again the bricks landed together. “Aris- totle is wrong,” declared their teacher to a stunned circle of students.
But the world was reluctant to hear Galileo’s truth. On seeing Galileo’s brick demon- stration, friend and fellow mathematician Ostilio Ricci admitted only that “This double brick falls at the same rate as this single brick. Still, I cannot so easily believe Aristotle is wholly wrong. Search for another explanation.”
Galileo decided that he needed a more dramatic, irrefutable, and public demonstration. It is believed (though not substantiated) that, for this demonstration, Galileo dropped a ten-pound and a one-pound cannonball 191 feet from the top of the famed Leaning Tower of Pisa. Whether he actually dropped the cannonballs or not, the science discovery had been made.

Fun Facts: Speaking of falling objects, the highest speed ever reached by a woman in a speed skydiving competition is 432.12 kph (268.5 mph). Italian  daredevil Lucia Bottari achieved this record-breaking velocity above Bottens, Switzerland, on September 16, 2002, during the annual Speed Skydiving World Cup.

In December 2008 the CTO of Blitz Games announced that they would bring stereoscopic 3D gaming and movie viewing to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 with their own technology.[196] According to Blitz Games, SCE confirmed that they intend to support stereoscopic 3D games and Blu-ray movies and that the functionality will be introduced to the PlayStation 3 via a firmware update in 2009.[197] This technology was first demonstrated publicly on the PS3 in January 2009 at the Consumer Electronics Show. Journalists were shown Wipeout HD and Gran Turismo 5 Prologue in 3D as a demonstration of how the technology might work if it is implemented in the future…………..