Knowledge

 Ambergris Ambergris What is it and where does it come from? Ambergris was used to perfume cosmetics in the days of ancient Mesopotamia and almost every civilization on the earth has a brush with Ambergris. Before 1,000 AD, the Chinese names ambergris as lung sien hiang, "dragon's spittle perfume," as they think that it was produced from the drooling of dragons sleeping on rocks at the edge of a sea. The Arabs knew ambergris as anbar who believed that it is produced from springs near seas. It also gets its name from here. For centuries, this substance has also been used as a flavouring for food.  During the Middle Ages, Europeans used ambergris as a remedy for headaches, colds, epilepsy, and other ailments. In the 1851 whaling novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville claimed that ambergris was "largely used in perfumery." But nobody ever knew where it really came from. Experts were still guessing its origin thousands of years later, until the long ages of guesswork ende

                      Travel Books                                     There are many reasons why individuals have traveled beyond their own societies. Some travelers may have simply desired to satisfy curiosity about the larger world. Until recent times, however, did travelers start their journey for reasons other than mere curiosity. While the travelers' accounts give much valuable information on these foreign lands and provide a window for the understanding of the local cultures and histories, they are also a mirror to the travelers themselves, for these accounts help them to have a better understanding of themselves.  Records of foreign travel appeared soon after the invention of writing, and fragmentary travel accounts appeared in both Mesopotamia and Egypt in ancient times. After the formation of large, imperial states in the classical world, travel accounts emerged as a prominent literary genre in many lands, and they held espec

  Going bananas  The banana is among the world’s oldest crops. Agricultural scientists believe that the first edible banana was discovered around 10,000 years ago. It has been at an evolutionary standstill ever since it was first propagated in the jungles of South-East Asia at the end of the last Ice Age. Normally the wild banana, a giant jungle herb card Musa acuminata, contains a mass of hard seeds that make the fruit virtually inedible. But nowand-then, hunter-gatherers must have discovered rare mutant plants that produced seamless, edible fruits. Geneticists now know that the vast majority of these soft-fruited plants resulted from genetic accidents that gave their cells three copies of each chromosome instead of the usual two. This imbalance prevents seeds and pollens from developing normally, rendering the mutant plants sterile. And that is why some scientists believe the worst – the most popular fruit could

 "The Rollfilm Revolution"  The introduction of the dry plate process brought with it many advantages. Not only was it much more convenient, so that the photographer no longer needed to prepare his material in advance, but its much greater sensitivity made possible a new generation of cameras. Instantaneous exposures had been possible before, but only with some difficulty and with special equipment and conditions. Now, exposures short enough to permit the camera to the held in the hand were easily achieved. As well as fitting shutters and viewfinders to their conventional stand cameras, manufacturers began to construct smaller cameras in tended specifically for hand use.  One of the first designs to be published was Thomas Bolas' s 'Detective' camera of 1881. Externally a plain box, quite unlike the folding bellows camera typical of the period, it could be used unobtrusively. The name caught on, and for the next decade or so almost all hand cameral were called 

 POEPLE AND ORGANIZATION: THE SELECTION ISSUE An organisation is only as good as the people it employs. Selecting the right person for the job involves more than identifying the essential or desirable range of skills, educational and professional qualifications necessary to perform the job and then recruiting the candidate who is most likely to possess these ieltsfever help@ieltsfever.com www.ieltsdata.com 4 www.ieltsfever.com skills or at least is perceived to have the ability and predisposition to acquire them. This is a purely person/skills match approach to selection.  Work invariably takes place in the presence and/or under the direction of others, in a particular organisational setting. The individual has to "fit" in with the work environment, with other employees, with the organisational climate, style or work, organisation and culture of the organisation. Different organisations have different cultures (Cartwright & Cooper, 1991; 1992). Working as an engineer at B

  The Spectacular Eruption of Mount St. Helens   The eruption in May 1980 of Mount St. Helens, Washington State, astounded the world with its violence. A gigantic explosion tore much of the volcano's summit to fragments; the energy released was equal to that of 500 of the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.   The event occurred along the boundary of two of the moving plates that make up the Earth's crust. They meet at the junction of the North American continent and the Pacific Ocean. One edge of the continental North American plate over-rides the oceanic Juan de Fuca micro-plate, producing the volcanic Cascade range that includes Mounts Baker, Rainier and Hood, and Lassen Peak as well as Mount St. Helens.   Until Mount St. Helens began to stir, only Mount Baker and Lassen Peak had shown signs of life during the 20th century. According to geological evidence found by the United States Geological Survey, there had been two major eruptions of Mount St. Helens in the r

                                                            Assessing the Risk  Assessing the Risk How do we judge whether it is right to go ahead with a new technology? Apply the precautionary principle properly and you won't go far wrong, says Colin Tudge.   As a title for a supposedly unprejudiced debate on scientific progress, "Panic attack: interrogating our obsession with risk" did not bode well. Held last week at the Royal Institution in London, the event brought together scientists from across the world to ask why society is so obsessed with risk and to call for a "more rational" approach. "We seem to be organising society around the grandmotherly maxim of 'better safe than sorry'," exclaimed Spiked, the online publication that organised the event. "What are the consequences of this overbearing concern with risks?"  The debate was preceded by a survey of 40 scientists who were invited to describe ho

                                                               THE SEEDHUNTERS  With Q uarter of the world's plants set to vanish within the next 50 years, Dough Alexander reports on the scientists working against the clock to preserve the Earth's botanical heritage.  They travel th e fou r corn ers of th e globe, scou rin g ju n gles, forests an d savannas. But they're n ot lookin g for an cien t artefacts, lost treasure or undiscovered tombs. Just pods. It may lack the rom an tic allu re of archaeology, or the w hiff of danger that accompanies goin g after big game, bu t seed hu nting is an increasingly seriou s bu siness. Some seek seeds for profit — hunters in the em ploy of biotechnology firms, pharm aceutical companies an d private corporations on the lookou t for species th at w ill yield th e drugs or crops of th e future. Oth ers collect to conserve, w orkin g to h alt th e sad slide in to extin ction facin g so m an y plan t species.  Among the pioneers of this bo

                                                         GOING NOWHERE FAST  THIS is ludicrous! W e can talk to people anywhere in the world or fly to m eet them in a few hours. W e can even send probes to other planets. But when it com es to getting around our cities, we depend on system s that have scarcely changed since the days of G ottlieb Daimler.  In recent years, the pollution belched out by millions of vehicles has dominated the debate about transport. The problem has even persuaded California - that hom e of car culture - to curb traffic growth. But no m atter how green they becom e, cars are unlikely to get us around crowded cities any faster. And persuading people to use trains and buses will always be an uphill struggle. Cars, after all, are popular for very good reasons, as anyone with small children or heavy shopping knows.  So politicians should be trying to lure people out of their cars, not forcing them out. There's certainly no shortage of alternatives. Perhaps t

 The Ingenuity Gap Ingenuity, as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments.  How much and what kinds of ingenuity a society requires depends on a range of factors, including the society's goals and the circumstances within which it must achieve those goals—whether it has a young population or an aging one, an abundance of natural resources or a scarcity of them, an easy climate or a punishing one, whatever the case may be.  How much and what kinds of ingenuity a society supplies also depends on many factors, such as the nature of human inventiveness and understanding, the rewards an economy gives to the producers of useful knowledge, and the strength of political opposition to social and institutional reforms.  A good supply of the right kind of ingenuity is essential, but it isn't,

  Alfred Nobel Since 1901, the Nobel Prize has been honoring men and women from all corners of the globe for outstanding achievements in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and for work in peace. The foundations for the prize were laid in 1895 when Alfred Nobel wrote his last will, leaving much of his wealth to the establishment of the Nobel Prize.  Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm on October 21, 1833. His father Immanuel Nobel was an engineer and inventor who built bridges and buildings in Stockholm. In connection with his construction work Immanuel Nobel also experimented with different techniques for blasting rocks. Successful in his industrial and business ventures, Immanuel Nobel was able, in 1842, to bring his family to St. Petersburg. There, his sons were given a first class education by private teachers. The training included natural sciences, languages and literature. By the age of 17 Alfred Nobel was fluent

 Designed to Last: Could Better Design Cure Our Throwaway Culture? Jonathan Chapman, a senior lecturer at the University of Brighton, UK, is one of a new breed of 'sustainable designers'. Like many of us, they are concerned about the huge waste associated with Western consumer culture and the damage this does to the environment. Some, like Chapman, aim to create objects we will want to keep rather than discard. Others are working to create more efficient or durable consumer goods, or goods designed with recycling in mind. The waste entailed in our fleeting relationships with consumer durables is colossal.  Domestic power tools, such as electric drills, are a typical example of such waste. However much DIY the purchaser plans to do, the truth is that these things are thrown away having been used, on average, for just ten minutes. Most will serve 'conscience time', gathering dust on a shelf in the garage; people are rel

 The Lost City Thanks to modern remote-sensing techniques, a ruined city in Turkey is slowly revealing itself as one of the greatest and most mysterious cities of the ancient world. Sally Palmer uncovers more.  A The low granite mountain, known as Kerkenes Dag, juts from the northern edge of the Cappadocian plain in Turkey. Sprawled over the mountainside are the ruins of an enormous city, contained by crumbling defensive walls seven kilometers long. Many respected archaeologists believe these are the remains of the fabled city of Pteria, the sixth-century BC stronghold of the Medes that the Greek historian Herodotus described in his famous work The Histories. The short-lived city came under Median control and only fifty years later was sacked, burned and its strong stone walls destroyed.  B British archaeologist Dr Geoffrey Summers has spent ten years studying the site. Excavating the ruins is a challenge because of the

  Conquest of Malaria in Italy, 1900-1962 Mal-aria.  Bad air. Even the word is Italian, and this horrible disease marked the life of those in the peninsula for thousands of years. Yet by 1962, Italy was officially declared malaria-free, and it has remained so ever since. Frank Snowden's study of this success story takes us to areas historians have rarely visited before.  A. Everybody now knows that malaria is carried by mosquitoes. But in the 19th century, most experts believed that the disease was produced by "miasma" or "poisoning of the air". Others made a link between swamps, water and malaria, but did not make the further leap towards insects. The consequences of these theories were that little was done to combat the disease before the end of the century. Things became so bad that 11m Italians (from a total population of 25m) were "permanently at risk". In malarial zones the life expectancy of land workers was a terrifying 22.5 years. Those who es

                                     Health In The Wild Health In The Wild Many animals seem able to treat their illnesses themselves. Humans may have a thing or two to learn from them.  For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at Britain's Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behaviour in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject. In a talk at the Edinburgh Science Festival earlier this month, she explained that the idea that animals can treat themselves has been regarded with some scepticism by her colleagues in the past. But a growing number of animal behaviourists now think that wild animals can and do deal with their own medical needs.  One example of self-medication was discovered in 1987. Michael Huffman and Mohamedi Seifu, working in the Mahale Mountains National Park in Tanzania, noticed that local chimpanzees suffering from