Sunday, 22 December 2013

The Seven Summits.

The Seven Summits, a well- known mountaineering objective, are the highest peaks on each of the seven continents.

Mount Everest, Asia : 29,035 feet (8850 meters)
Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, streches along the border of Nepal and Tibet/China in southern Asia. Mount Everest is also called 'chomolangma' meaning 'goddes Mother of Snows'.


Aconcagua - South America: 22,829 feet (6962 meters)
Aconcagua lies within Aconcagua provincial park in the province of Mendoza in the republic of Argentina. Aconcagua is the highest point in the Andes, the world's longest mountain range. Aconcagua is also not a volcano.

Denali/Mount Mckinley - North America : 20,320 feet (6194 meters)

Denali is the highest mountain in North America, the United States, and Alaska. It's the third most prominent mountain in the world. Because of it's northern latitude of 63 degrees, Denali has lower barometric pressure than other high mountains in the world, affecting the acclimatization of climbers. The state of Alaska changed the name of Mount Mckinley to Denali in 1975.

Kilimanjaro - Africa : 19,340 feet (5895 meters)
Kilimanjaro is a giant strato volcano that began forming a million years ago when lava spilled from the Rift Valley Zone. The mountain was built by succesive lava flows. Kilimanjaro has 2.2 square kilometers of glacial ice and is losing quickly due to global warming. It's also considered the tallest free standing mountain in the world.


Mount Elbrus -  Europe: 18,510 feet ( 5642 meters)
Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in Russia is also the highest mountain in the Caucasus Range in Southern Russia near the border with Georgia.
Mount Elbrus is perpertually snow -covered with an icecap and 22 glaciers. Three major rivers Baksan, Malka, and Kuban arise from the glaciers. It's the tenth most prominent mountain in the world.


Mount Vinson - Antarctica: 16,067 feet ( 4897 meters) 
Mount Vinson, in the Vinson Massif, is the highest mountain in the Sentinel Range. Mount Vinson was the last discovered,last named, and last climbed of the seven summits. It's also the most remote,most expensive and the coldest of the seven summits.

Mount Kosciuszko - Australia: 7,310 feet (2228 meters)
Mount Kosciuszko is the highest point of the Great Dividing Range, a long mountain range that runs along the entire eastern part of Australia from Queensland to Victoria. It is the coldest and snowiest part of Australia,which is mostly an arid continent. Snow covers the mountain from june through october. The area also has Australia only ski areas.

Monday, 11 November 2013

Success IS the Journey: Dream-Maker

Success IS the Journey: Dream-Maker: I just now remembered something – I’m sorry, I should have told you this long ago … there was a young Hebrew slave whom we told our dre...

7 Great Deserts in The World

Sahara Desert, North Africa

The Sahara is the World's largest desert. At over 9,000,000 square kilometers ( 3;500,000 sq mi ) , it covers most of Northern Africa, making it almost as large as the United states or the continent of Europe . The desert stretches from the red sea, including parts of the Mediterranean coasts, to the outskirts of the Atlantic Ocean.

Arabian Desert, peninsula

Arabian Desert or Eastern Desert has a massive length of 1,305 miles, and stretches all the way from Yemen to Iraq. The Arabian desert is sparsely populated ; most of its inhabitants are based around wells and springs. The name Arabian Desert is also commonly applied to the desert of the Arabian peninsula.

Chihuahuan Desert, Mexico

The Chihuahuan Desert is a desert that straddles the U.S -Mexico border in the central and northern portions of the Mexican plateau. It has an area of about 140,000 square miles. It is the third largest desert of the western Hemisphere and is second largest in North America, after the great basin desert.

Gobi Desert , Mongolia / N.E China

The Gobi Desert is a large desert region in Asia. It covers parts of northern and northwestern china, and of southern Mongolia  This desert is the fifth largest in the world. The Gobi is most notable in history as part of the great Mongol Empire, and as the location of several important cities along the silk road.

Great Basin Desert

The Great Basin is the largest Watershed of North America which does not drain to an ocean. Water within the Great Basin evaporates since outward flow is blocked. The Great Basin includes several metropolitan areas and shoshone Great Basin tribes. A wide variety of animals can be found in the Great Basin desert.

Kara-kum Desert, Uzbekistan/Turkmenistan

The Kara kum Desert, also spelled Gara-Gum is a desert in central Asia. It occupies about 70 percent  or 350,000km square , of the area of Turkmenistan. Covering much of present day Turkmenistan, the karakum Desert lies east of the Caspian sea, with the Arial sea to the north and the Amu Darya river and the Kyzyl kum desert to the north east.

Kalahari Desert, Southern Africa

The Kalahari Desert is a large arid to semi-arid sandy area in southern  Africa extending 900,000 sq kilometers , covering much of Botswana and parts of Namibia and South Africa , as semi-desert, with huge tracts of excellent grazing after good rains. There are small amounts of rainfall in the kalahari desert and the summer temperature is very high. It usually receives 3-7.5  inches ( 76-190 mm) of rain per year.

Thursday, 24 October 2013

The Seven Seas

This list of the seven seas is believed by many to be the original seven seas as defined by the sailors of ancient and Medieval Europe. The majority of these seven seas are located around the Mediterranean sea, very close to home for these sailors. Heard of Simbad and the seven seas?

The Mediterranean Sea
This sea is attached to the Atlantic Ocean and many early civilizations developed around it, including Egypt, Greece, and Rome , and it has been called 'the cradle of civilization' because of this.

The Adriatic Sea 
This sea separates the Italian peninsula from the Balkan peninsula. It is part of the Mediterranean sea.

The Black Sea 
This sea is an inland sea between Europe and Asia. It is also connected to the Mediterranean sea.

The Red Sea
This sea is a narrow strip of water extending south from North east Egypt and it connects to the gulf of Aden and the Arabian sea. It is connected today to the Mediterranean sea via the Suez canal and is one of the most heavily traveled water ways in the world.

The Arabian Sea
This sea is the North western part of the Indian ocean between India and the Arabian peninsula (Saudi Arabia). Historically, it was a very important trade route between India and the west and the remains such today

The Persian Gulf
This sea is a part of the Indian Ocean, located between Iran and the Arabian peninsula. There has been dispute as to what its actual name is, so it is also sometimes known as the Arabian Gulf, The Gulf, or the Gulf of Iran, but none of those name are recognized internationally.

The Caspian Sea
This Sea is located on the Western edge of Asia and the Eastern edge of Europe and It's the largest lake on planet. It is called a sea because it contains salt water.

Sunday, 20 October 2013

Facts About Your Heart.

Here are seven great things you probably never knew about your heart.

Many people think the heart is on the left side of their chest, but the heart is actually located almost in the center of the chest, between the lungs. It's tipped slightly so that a part of it sticks out and taps against the left side of the chest , which is what makes it seem as though it is located there.

Give a tennis ball a good, hard squeeze you're using about the same amount of force your heart uses to pump blood out to the body. Even at rest, the muscles of the heart work hard - twice as hard as the leg muscles of a person sprinting.

The aorta, the largest artery in the body, is almost the diameter of a garden hose. Capillaries, on the other hand are so small that it takes ten of them to equal the thickness of a human hair.

The heart pumps about 1 million barrels of blood during an average lifetime- that's enough to fill more than 3 super tankers.

A woman's heart typically beats faster than a man's. The heart of an average man beats approximately 70 times a minute, whereas the woman has a heart rate of 78 beats per minute.

Because the heart has its own electrical impulse , it can continue to beat even when separated from the body , as long as it has an adequate supply of oxygen.

Friday, 18 October 2013

Seven Great Women Inventors

We are bombarded by so much impressive new technology that it's easy to forget that many of the simple items we use everyday were once considered breakthroughs. It's probably not suprising that women had a hand in creating many of these ubiquitous items. Although the times in which these ideas were conceived prevented many of the inventors from reaping full benefits of their genius,the tools and products we rely on today may not have been possible without their pioneering work.

MARGARET KNIGHT
Margaret Knight, remembered as 'the female Edison -received some 26 patents for such diverse items as a window frame and sash, machinery for cutting shoe soles, and improvement to internal combustion engines. Her most significant patent was for machinery that would automatically fold and glue paper bags to create square bottoms, an invention which dramatically changed shopping habits.

SARAH BREEDLOVE WALKER
Sarah Walker, the daughter of former slaves, was orphaned at seven and widowed by 20. Madame Walker is credited with inventing hair lotions, creams, and improved hair styling hot comb. But her greatest achievement may be the development of the walker system, which included a broad offering of cosmetics, licensed walker agents and walker schools, which offered meaningful employment and personal growth to thousands of walker agents, Sarah walker was the first American woman self made millionaire.

MARY ANDERSON
During a trip to New York city Mary Anderson noticed that street car drivers had to open the windows of their cars when it rained in order to see, as a solution she invented as a swinging arm device with a rubber blade that was operated by the driver from within the vehicle via a lever. Her invention could clean snow, rain, or sleet from a windshield and it became standard equipment on all american cars by 1916. Mary Anderson patented the windshield wiper in 1905.

BETTE NESMITH
Bette Nesmith, an American typist and commercial artist, discovered something she couldn't live without: liquid paper. She used it secretly to correct mistakes she and co-workers made on the job, but eventually started her own company and began selling the products as 'liquid paper'. The company was sold to the Gillette corporation in 1979 for $47.5 million.

GERTRUDE B. ELION
Gertrude Elion, 1988 Nobel laureate in Medicine, and scientist emeritus with Burroughs Welcome company, is credited with the synthesis of two of the first successful drugs for leukemia, as well as imuron, an agent to prevent the rejection of kidney transplants, and zovirax, the first selective antiviral agent against herpes virus infections. Researchers who discovered AZT, a breakthrough treatment for AIDS , used Elion's protocols. Elion was included into the National Inventors Hall of fame in 1991, the first woman inductee.

STEPHANIE KWOLEK
Stephanie kwolek, one of dupont's leading chemists, discovered the 'miracle fiber' Kevlar, which has five times the strenght of steel by weight -uses for kevlar are seemingly endless, including ropes and cables for oil drilling rigs, boat sails, etc. Many Vietnam veterans and police officers are alive today because of protection provided by bullet-proof vests made from Kevlar. Kwolek was inducted into the National Inventors hall of fame in 1995.

JOSEPHINE COCHRAN
When Josephine Cochran ordered her servants aside and began washing her own dishes, she had a revelation : washing dishes was true drudgery. This realization is what led Cochran to invent the first practical dishwasher that used water pressure for cleaning. She succeeded in creating a working model, and patented it in 1886. The dishwasher included a larger model, and the model could clean 240 dishes in two minutes, as a result, it became popular with hotels and restaurants.

Monday, 30 September 2013

Seven Wonders of the Natural World

GRAND CANYON:
The Grand Canyon is a rocky gorge (ravine) in Arizona, USA. It was created by millions of years of wind and water erosion from Colorado River, which cut through layer after layer sediment. The rocks of the canyon walls range from 250 million years old at the top to over 2 billion years old at the bottom. Each layer of rock represents a distinct geological period of earth's past.

PARICUTIN VOLCANO
It erupted out of a cornfield on February 20, 1943, located just outside a city called Michoacan, about 200 miles of mexico city, Paricutin grew to 10,400 feet in just nine years, making it the fastest growing volcano ever recorded in history.

THE HARBOR AT RIO DE JANEIRO
On the east coast of Brazil lies a picturesque scene of towering mountains and beautiful beaches. Portuguese explores were the first Europeans to see the harbor, also known as Guanabara Bay, on January 1, 1502. They thought they had reached the mouth of an immense river and named it Rio de Janeiro which means River of January
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NORTHERN LIGHT
Northern lights, also called Aurora Borealis, are nature's fireworks. This spectacular light show takes place in the northern regions, but can be seen from many parts of the world. They occur when solar particles from the sun collide with gases in earth's atmosphere. The collision energy between the solar particle and the atmospheric gas is emitted as a photon (light particle). When there are many collisions, you have an aurora,- lights that seem to dance across the sky.

VICTORIA FALLS
On the African border of Zambia and Zimbabwe, the tranquil Zambezi river suddenly plummets 420 feet over a cliff to form the world's largest waterfall. David Livingstone, a Scottish missionary was the first white man to see the waterfall in 1855. Although he named it after the queen of England, native Africans continue to call it Mosi-ao-tunya which means the smoke that thunders, because the water makes thunderous spray clouds as it falls.

MT EVEREST
About 60 million years ago, India was a separate continent that rapidly moved northward and collided with Asia. The crash pushed up the northern rim of India to create the highest mountain range in the world known as the Himalayas (Mt Everest). It stands above the other mountains at 29,035 feet, making it the tallest on the planet.

GREAT BARRIER REEF
The world largest coral reef is located in the coral sea off the coast of Queensland in Australia. It stretches over 1,400 miles in length and can be seen from space. An estimated 1,500 species of fish and 350 types of coral live and grow on the Great barrier reef.