Wood: a valuable resource in New Zealand’s economy During the settlement of New Zealand by European immigrants, natural timbers played a major role. Wood was easily accessible and relatively cheap. A tradition of wooden housed arose, supported by the recognition that they were less likely to collapse suddenly during earthquakes, a not infrequent event in …
How do we find our way? A. Most modern navigation, such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), relies primarily on positions determined electronically by receivers collecting information from satellites. Yet if the satellite service’s digital maps become even slightly outdated, we can become lost. Then we have to rely on the ancient human skill of …
Toddlers Bond With Robot (A) Will the robot revolution begin in nursery school? Researchers introduced a state-of-the-art social robot into a classroom of 18- to 24-month-olds for five months as a way of studying human-robot interactions. The children not only came to accept the robot, but treated it as they would a human buddy – hugging …
Paul Nash {A} Paul Nash, the elder son of William Nash and his first wife, Caroline Jackson, was born in London on 11th May 1889. His father was a successful lawyer who became the Recorder of Abingdon. According to Ronald Blythe: “In 1901 the family returned to its native Buckinghamshire, where the garden of Wood Lane House …
Tool for ancient writing {A} With time, the record-keepers developed systematized symbols from their drawings. These symbols represented words and sentences but were easier and faster to draw and universally recognized for meaning. The discovery of clay made portable records possible (you can’t carry a cave wall around with you). Early merchants used clay tokens with …
The success of cellulose {A} Not too long ago many investors made the bet that renewable fuels from bio-mass would be the next big thing in energy. Converting corn, sugarcane, and soybeans into ethanol or diesel-type fuels lessens our nation’s dependence on oil imports while cutting carbon dioxide emissions. But already the nascent industry faces challenges. …
Life code: unlocked! {A} On an airport shuttle bus to the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics in Santa Barbara, Calif., Chris Wiggins took a colleague’s advice and opened a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. It had nothing to do with the talk on biopolymer physics he was invited to give. Rather the columns and rows of numbers that …
Exploring british village 2 {A} The Neolithic longhouse was a long, narrow timber dwelling built by the first farmers in Europe beginning at least as early as the period 5000 to 6000 BC. The origin of the name blackhouse is of some debate. It could be less than 150 years old and may have been synonymous with inferior. …
New ways of teaching history {A} In technology and the media-driven world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to get our students’ attention and keep them absorbed in classroom discussions. This generation, in particular, has brought a unique set of challenges to the educational table. Whereas youth are easily enraptured by high-definition television, computers, Pods, video games, and cell …
Light pollution {A} If humans were truly at home under the light of the moon and stars, we would go into darkness happily, the midnight world as visible to us as it is to the vast number of nocturnal species on this planet. Instead, we are diurnal creatures, with eyes adapted to living in the sun’s …
