3 Unsokved mysteries..from the net

Placebo Effect







The placebo effect is when a persontakes something they believe is medicine for an ailment they are suffering(which is not really a medicine), and they get better. A placebo is an inert substance, and when taken (with the advice from others that it will cure them)makes


the person get better, simply because they were expecting or believed that it would work. Something similar, called the nocebo effect, is when aperson takes fake drugs and thinks they are experiencing problems that would have been caused by the real drugs. They have been known to reduce pain as well. Why they occur is mysterious and they are only one of the many complicated things related to the body-brain connection. In fact, our own bodies hold many unsolved mysteries.

 
Pan spermia







How didlife on earth appear? Science suggests that life started when the planetwas favourable for habitation. Yet did microscopic organisms just pop out ofnowhere? One hypothesis is panspermia, whichsuggests that €˜seeds of life€™ exist everywhere


around the universe, andthat life on earth started when these €˜seeds€™ came here, probably by ameteor. It also suggests that these


seeds are taken to other habitableplaces in the universe. Something similar to this is exo-genesis. It suggeststhat life was brought to


earth those billions of years ago, however it doesnot say that life is also taken to other habitable places. Somepeople


believe aliens brought life to our planet, as suggested by thetheories of Erich Von Daniken. Although some are sceptical as to how


lifecould exist in space and get carried to other planets, there is substantialevidence that certain life forms, like spores and


certain types of bacteria can actually exist in space, perhaps in a dormant state.
 

 
Mass extinctions







From the death of the dinosaurs, to the disappearance of the creatures inthe Permian Era, mass extinctions are occurring even now.






Sometimes, the cause is clear. We are destroying the biosphere and the atmosphere, and scientists predict that in the next 100 years, 50% of all living species will become extinct. But sometimes, the realreason is unclear. It may have been due to competition from other species,


dramatic climate changes, or the impacts from an asteroid/meteor (the last one being quite a popular one). Yet some questions remain unanswered. Why was it that some species died out, and others survived,some to this day (famous example: the coelacanth).
During the extinction of the dinosaurs, crocodiles and turtles were around, but they survived, even to this day, while the dinosaurs, the pterosaurs, the marine reptiles and others died out. While some people believe that those species were unable to cope with the (possibly) new surroundings, others are not convinced. To this day,they are a mystery, and without a time machine, we may never know. Other popular theories include:- flood basalt events,smaller asteroid showers, global warming/cooling, sea level drops.
 

Camillo Golgi           

Santiago Ramón y Cajal

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1906 was awarded jointly to Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal "in recognition of their work on the structure of the nervous system"

Abstract



Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal were the two main investigators that revealed the morphological organization of the cerebellar cortex, although they never shared the same basic concepts. While for Golgi all axons fused into a large syncytium (the diffuse nerve network), for Cajal they had free endings and communication between neurons was done by contiguity not by continuity. The classical diagrammatic representation of the cerebellar circuitry shown by Cajal in his Croonian lecture (1894), although still valid, has drastically change by the accumulation of the great amount of data generated from 1894 to our days. The topic of this review is to briefly summarize this new knowledge, and to confront it with Cajal's concepts, to determine whether or not the added complexity to the circuit invalidates the Cajal's principles. Our conclusion is that although most of these principles are consolidated, the applicability of the law of dynamic polarization does not adapt to some of them.

Robert Koch..1905

Robert Koch



The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1905 was awarded to Robert Koch "for his investigations and discoveries in relation to tuberculosis".

Ivan Petrovich Pavlov


Ivan Petrovich Pavlov
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1904 was awarded to Ivan Pavlov "in recognition of his work on the physiology of digestion, through which knowledge on vital aspects of the subject has been transformed and enlarged".

Learning Theories

When we talk of learning we usually think of something related to the classroom, such as English or Maths. However, Psychologists refer to learning as a relatively permanent change in behaviour as a result of experience'. Learning is a fundamental process in all animals and the higher up the evolutionary scale the animal, the more important is the ability to learn. All animals need to adapt their behaviour in order to fit in with the environment and to adapt to changing circumstances in order to survive.






Much of our behaviour consists of learned responses to simple signals. Can all behaviour be analysed in the same way? Some psychologists believe that behaviour is the sum of many simple stimulus-response connections. However there are other psychologists who think that stimulus-response is too simplistic and that even simple responses to stimuli require the processing of a vast amount of information.






The Behaviourists are a group of psychologists who focus on these stimulus-response connections, the two most famous being Watson and Skinner. Behaviourism arose because there was dissatisfaction with approaches in psychology that involved 'unscientific, techniques such as introspection and dealt with unmeasurable aspects of behaviour such as the role of the unconscious mind. Behaviourists try to explain the causes of behaviour by studying only those behaviours that can be observed and measured. They leave focused their efforts on two types of learning processes known as classical conditioning and operant conditioning.






Classical Conditioning






This is learning by association. A Russian physiologist called Ivan Pavlov, studied salivation in dogs as part of his research programme. Normally, dogs will salivate at the when food is presented, but Pavlov was interested why the dogs had started to salivate when the saw the people that usually fed them (they also responded to the sound of the dishes being used for their meals). Pavlov set up an experiment to find out if the dogs could be trained to salivate at other stimuli such as the sound of a bell or a light. At feeding times, Pavlov would ring a bell and the amount of saliva produced by the dog was measured. After several 'trials' Pavlov rang the bell without presenting the food and found that the dogs salivated in the same way as if food was being presented.






You will note that the conditional response is the same as the unconditioned response, the only difference being that the response is evoked by a different stimulus.






The Classical Conditioning Procedure:






In scientific terms, the procedure for this is as follows.






1 Food is the unconditioned stimulus or UCS. By this, Pavlov meant that the stimulus that elicited the response occurred naturally.






2 The salivation to the food is an unconditioned response (UCR), that is a response which occurs naturally.






3 The bell is the conditioned stimulus (CS) because it will only produce salivation on condition that it is presented with the food.






4 Salivation to the bell alone is the conditioned response (CR), a response to the conditioned stimulus.

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1902

Ronald Ross

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1902 was awarded to Ronald Ross "for his work on malaria, by which he has shown how it enters the organism and thereby has laid the foundation for successful research on this disease and methods of combating it".

Ronald Ross, son of an Army Major, a brilliant and polyvalent mind, poet of romantic lyrics, part time novelist, playwright, painter, musician and mathematician, who never wanted to be a medical practitioner, became a researcher by accident, designed some of the most elegant experiments with sheer instincts and his own shrewd observations and ultimately won the second ever Nobel Prize in Medicine in the year 1902. Having faced a lot of hardship and administrative interference and apathy (what he called "administrative barbarism") and spent from his own pocket to pay the assistants and 'volunteers' for his research, he converted adversity to advantage and overcame all odds with his single minded pursuit to carry out his well designed and elegant experiments. With his penchant for writing, he has left for posterity detailed and poetic accounts of his path-breaking research and work thereafter.onald Ross, son of an Army Major, a brilliant and polyvalent mind, poet of romantic lyrics, part time novelist, playwright, painter, mRusician and mathematician, who never wanted to be a medical practitioner, became a researcher by accident, designed some of the most elegant experiments with sheer instincts and his own shrewd observations and ultimately won the second ever Nobel Prize in Medicine in the year 1902. Having faced a lot of hardship and administrative interference and apathy (what he called "administrative barbarism") and spent from his own pocket to pay the assistants and 'volunteers' for his research, he converted adversity to advantage and overcame all odds with his single minded pursuit to carry out his well designed and elegant experiments. With his penchant for writing, he has left for posterity detailed and poetic accounts of his path-breaking research and work thereafter.

Emil Adolf von Behring..First Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology

Emil Adolf von Behring



The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1901 was awarded to Emil von Behring "for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria, by which he has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and deaths".
 
Emil Adolph von Behring was born on March 15, 1854, at Forsthausen, West Prussia. After training at the University of Berlin and passing the state medical examination in 1880, he entered the army medical service. While in the service, he worked for a time with K. Binz, pharmacologist and chemist, on iodoform, a chemical homolog of chloroform, which was then considered highly effective as a dusting powder for the treatment of deep ulcers. In 1889 he joined the staff of the Robert Koch Institute of Hygiene in Berlin, and it was there that his outstanding contributions were produced.



When Behring began his experiments, the germ theory of disease was becoming well established and immunology was a rapidly developing discipline. In Koch's laboratory Behring worked with the eminent Japanese bacteriologist S. Kitasato. In 1890 Behring presented two papers, one with Kitasato, discussing the immunity of animals to diphtheria and tetanus. They demonstrated that certain substances (antitoxins) in the blood serum of both humans and animals who had recovered from the disease, either spontaneously or by treatment, showed preventive and curative properties. Animals injected with this immune blood were shown to be resistant to fatal doses of bacteria or toxin. Further, animals treated with the serum after contracting the disease could be cured.


For prophylactic immunization against diphtheria, Behring suggested the injection of a mixture of toxin and antitoxin. This method, the forerunner of modern disease prevention, became practicable when certain reagents, for example, formaldehyde, were added to the mixture to produce a "toxoid"; the reagents preserved the immunizing property of the mixture while removing its poisonous characters.


For these advances in serum therapeutics, Behring received the Nobel Prize in 1901, being the first medical man so honored; he was also created privy councilor with the title of Excellenz and received many distinctions and prizes. For the discovery of antitoxins and the development of vaccinations, Behring was honored with the epithet "Children Savior." When he contracted pneumonia, he was already in a weakened state of health and was unable to withstand the strain. He died in Marburg on March 31, 1917.

Barbie doll

                                                                                                                      The first Barbie doll shown at New York Toy Fair in 1959.



The Barbie doll was invented in 1959 by Ruth Handler (co-founder of Mattel), whose own daughter was called Barbara. Barbie was introduced to the world at the American Toy Fair in New York City. Barbie's job was teenage fashion doll. The Ken doll was named after Ruth's son and was introduced two years after Barbie in 1961.



 Handler paid $500000 to become the sole sponsor of the doll
Barbie Facts & Technology






The full name of the first doll was Barbie Millicent Roberts, from Willows, Wisconsin. Barbie's job was that of teenage fashion model. However, the doll has been made in versions connected to over 125 different careers.


She came as either a brunette or blond, and in 1961 red hair was added. In 1980, the first African American Barbie and Hispanic Barbie were introduced, however, Barbie did have a black friend named Christie who was introduced in 1969.






The first Barbie was sold for $3. Additional clothing based on the latest runway trends from Paris were sold, costing from $1 to $5. In the first year (1959), 300,000 Barbie dolls were sold. Today, a mint condition "#1" (1959 Barbie doll) can fetch as much as $27,450. To date, over 70 fashion designers have made clothes for Mattel, using over 105 million yards of fabric.






There has been some controversy over Barbie Doll's figure when it was realized that if Barbie was a real person her measurements would be an impossible 36-18-38. Barbie's "real" measurements are 5 inches (bust), 3 ¼ inches (waist), 5 3/16 inches (hips). Her weight is 7 ¼ ounces, and her height is 11.5 inches tall.






In 1965, Barbie first had bendable legs, and eyes that open and shut. In 1967, a Twist 'N Turn Barbie was released that had a moveable body that twisted at the waist.






The best-selling Barbie doll ever was 1992 Totally Hair Barbie, with hair from the top of her head to her toes.

Barbie turns 50!

Top ten facts you should know about epic French Cup final

Paris: Novak Djokovic, who rose to glory in 2011, became the World No. 1, yet he managed to reach the final of the Roland-Garros for the first time in his career only in this year. Here are top 10 interesting facts about the intriguing encounter.







• Rafael Nadal has now won French Open for record seven times. He surpassed legend Bjorn Borg who won the tournament six times. Rafa now shares the feat with former women tennis player Chris Evert, who won the women’s singles Roland-Garros seven times.






• Nadal ended Djoker’s 27-match winning streak in Grand Slams, which was just two wins short of Rod Laver’s tally who won 29 in a row from the start of the Australian Open in 1969 through to Wimbledon 1970.






• Nadal and Djokovic were facing each other in the fourth consecutive Grand Slam final, which is also an Open Era record.






• It was for the first time that the French Open did not finish on the allotted Sunday, as the match was suspended due to rain.






• Djoker became the only player to have won a set against Nadal in French Open 2012.






• Spain now holds the command in terms of men’s singles titles here at Roland Garros. Nadal’s seventh win was the 13th for the country overall. Andres Gimeno (1), Sergi Bruguera (2), Carlos Moya (1), Albert Costa (1) and Juan Carlos Ferrero (1) are the other Spaniard’s who have emerged victorious at the Roland Garros.






• Djokovic was seeking to become the first man in 43 years to win four Grand Slam tournaments in a row. Rod Laver in 1969 won four straight major titles.






• This seventh French Open title was Nadal’s 11th Grand Slam. He has achieved this feat at the age of 26 years and 7 days, making him the third-youngest player to do so, after Borg (25 years and one day) and Roger Federer (25 years and 334 days).






• Since his French Open debut in May 2005, Rafa is 52-1 for his career at the tournament now and has defeated Djokovic four times.






• This was Nadal's 11th Grand Slam title. The ones who have won more Grand Slams are Roger Federer (16), Pete Sampras (14) and Roy Emerson (12).

Interesting facte about the world.

Meteora Factas:
Meteora, an area that attracts thousands of tourists from all over the world every year is situated in Greece. Meteora is famous for its monasteries that are built on eroded rocks. The name itself means "suspended in the air". The monks built these monasteries on the top of the rocks. Earlier there were many monasteries but now only six are left. Meteora was inhabited by hermit monks first.


MOUNT PELEE
Mount Pelee is a volcano located on the French island of Martinique in the Caribbean. it is well known for his destructive past. It was the early morning, may 8th in 1902, when eruption started destroying everything in its path. Killing in one day more than 30000 people. Completely destroying the city of Saint-Pierre, leaving only two survivors. 


FACTS ABOUT ASIA:
The continent largest in landmass and that of population is Asia. Asia has the world's 60% of population that accounts to almost 4 billion people. The statistics prove that two countries hold half of Asia's population; one being India and other is China. Though China is ahead India but it is believed that in another 20 years India will have the highest population. The boundaries of Asia are made of Suez Canal and Ural Moun..

Top ten inventions

An Oldowan tool, the earliest type of stone tool. These were used by hominins in Africa from 2.6 million years ago up until 1.7 million years ago.



Credit: José-Manuel Benito Álvarez
Creative CommonsA history of ingenuityHumans are an ingenious species. From the moment someone bashed a rock on the ground to make the first sharp-edged tool, to the development of Mars rovers and the Internet, several key advancements stand out as particularly revolutionary. These are our picks for the 10 most important inventions of all time.
2)
Before the invention of the wheel in 3500 B.C., humans were severely limited in how much stuff we could transport over land, and how far. Wheeled carts facilitated agriculture and commerce by enabling the transportation of goods to and from markets, as well as easing the burdens of people traveling great distances. Now, wheels are vital to our way of life, found in everything from clocks to vehicles to turbines.

Without nails, civilization would surely crumble. This key invention dates back more than 2,000 years to the Ancient Roman period, and became possible only after humans developed the ability to cast and shape metal. Previously, wood structures had to be built by interlocking adjacent boards geometrically — a much more arduous construction process.



Meanwhile, the screw — a stronger but harder-to-insert fastener — is thought to have been invented by the Greek scholar Archimedes in the third century B.C.
The compassAncient mariners navigated by the stars, but that method didn't work during the day or on cloudy nights, and so it was unsafe to voyage far from land.




The Chinese invented the first compass sometime between the 9th and 11th century; it was made of lodestone, a naturally-magnetized iron ore, the attractive properties of which they had been studying for centuries. (Pictured is a model of an ancient Chinese compass from the Han Dynasty; it is a south-indicating ladle, or sinan, made of polished lodestone.) Soon after, the technology passed to Europeans and Arabs through nautical contact. The compass enabled mariners to navigate safely far from land, increasing sea trade and contributing to the Age of Discovery.
The printing pressThe German Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press around 1440. Key to its development was the hand mold, a new molding technique that enabled the rapid creation of large quantities of metal movable type. Printing presses exponentially increased the speed with which book copies could be made, and thus they led to the rapid and widespread dissemination of knowledge for the first time in history. Twenty million volumes had been printed in Western Europe by 1500.



Among other things, the printing press permitted wider access to the Bible, which in turn led to alternative interpretations, including that of Martin Luther, whose "95 Theses" — a document printed by the hundred-thousand — sparked the Protestant Reformation.
 
The internal combustion engineIn these engines, the combustion of a fuel releases a high-temperature gas, which, as it expands, applies a force to a piston, moving it. Thus, combustion engines convert chemical energy into mechanical work. Decades of engineering by many scientists went in to designing the internal combustion engine, which took its (essentially) modern form in the latter half of the 19th century. The engine ushered in the Industrial Age, as well as enabling the invention of a huge variety of machines, including modern cars and aircraft.



Pictured are the operating steps of a four-stroke internal combustion engine. The strokes are as follows: 1) Intake stroke - air and vaporised fuel are drawn in. 2) Compression stroke - fuel vapor and air are compressed and ignited. 3) Power stroke - fuel combusts and piston is pushed downwards, powering the machine. 4) Exhaust stroke - exhaust is driven out.
 
The telephoneThough several inventors did pioneering work on electronic voice transmission (many of whom later filed intellectual property lawsuits when telephone use exploded), Alexander Graham Bell was the first to be awarded a patent for the electric telephone in 1876. His patent drawing is pictured above.



The invention quickly took off, and revolutionalized global business and communication.
The light bulbWhen all you have is natural light, productivity is limited to daylight hours. Light bulbs changed the world by allowing us to be active at night. According to historians, two dozen people were instrumental in inventing incandescent lamps throughout the 1800s; Thomas Edison is credited as the primary inventor because he created a completely functional lighting system, including a generator and wiring as well as a carbon-filament bulb like the one above, in 1879.



As well as initiating the introduction of electricity in homes throughout the Western world, this invention also had a rather unexpected consequence of changing people's sleep patterns. Instead of going to bed at nightfall (having nothing else to do) and sleeping in segments throughout the night separated by periods of wakefulness, we now stay up except for the 7 to 8 hours allotted for sleep, and, ideally, we sleep all in one go.

PenicillinIt's one of the most famous discovery stories in history. In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-filled Petri dish in his laboratory with its lid accidentally ajar. The sample had become contaminated with a mold, and everywhere the mold was, the bacteria was dead. That antibiotic mold turned out to be the fungus Penicillium, and over the next two decades, chemists purified it and developed the drug Penicillin, which fights a huge number of bacterial infections in humans without harming the humans themselves.



Penicillin was being mass produced and advertised by 1944. This poster attached to a curbside mailbox advised World War II servicemen to take the drug to rid themselves of venereal disease.
 
ContraceptivesNot only have birth control pills, condoms and other forms of contraception sparked a sexual revolution in the developed world by allowing men and women to have sex for leisure rather than procreation, they have also drastically reduced the average number of offspring per woman in countries where they are used. With fewer mouths to feed, modern families have achieved higher standards of living and can provide better for each child. Meanwhile, on the global scale, contraceptives are helping the human population gradually level off; our number will probably stabilize by the end of the century. Certain contraceptives, such as condoms, also curb the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.



Natural and herbal contraception has been used for millennia. Condoms came into use in the 18th century, while the earliest oral contraceptive — "the pill" — was invented in the late 1930s by a chemist named Russell Marker.
 

The Internet

The InternetIt really needs no introduction: The global system of interconnected computer networks known as the Internet is used by billions of people worldwide. Countless people helped develop it, but the person most often credited with its invention is the computer scientist Lawrence Roberts. In the 1960s, a team of computer scientists working for the U.S. Defense Department's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency) built a communications network to connect the computers in the agency, called ARPANET. It used a method of data transmission called "packet switching" which Roberts, a member of the team, developed based on prior work of other computer scientists. ARPANET was the predecessor of the Internet.