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4281/ The publication of the
first volume of the Viennese geologist Eduard Suess's five
volume treatise Das Antilz der Erde ('The Face of the Earth',
1885-1909) marked a new way of looking at the formation of
mountains. He proposed that there had once been a supercontinent
in the southern hemisphere, now broken up into todays continents.
4282/ The shape of the Earth's
orbit stretches from circular to more eliptical and back again,
with a periodicity of about 100,000 years.
4283/ The average distance from
the Earth to the Sun is 150 million milometres. However, for
the most elliptical orbit the distance varies between limits
of 140 million and 160 million kilometres every year.
4284/ The pole position of the
Earth makes a complete loop every 26,000 years.
4285/ The angle between Earth's
equatorial and orbital planes varies by a few degrees every
40,000 years.
4286/ Around 70 per cent of the
Sun is hydrogen.
4287/ It wasn't until 1893 that
the Italian zoologist Giovanni Batista Grassi identified the
leptocephalus - a tiny leaf shaped transparent fish as the
oceanic larval stage of the eel.
4288/ Commercial production of
nylon started in 1939.
4289/ Production of nylon for
stockkings was short-lived at first. Because during the second
world war all nylon production was commandeered for making
parachutes.
4290/ Karl von Frish's great
discovery was the dance language of of honeybees. Bees communicate
the direction of, distance to and quality of food supplies.
They do so by a special 'waggle dance', which von Frisch decoded
by careful observation and experiments in which he varied
the location of a food source.
4291/ The insecticide DDT was
discovered in 1939 by the Swiss chemist Paul Muller while
working for the J.R Geigy company.
4292/ Echolocation is not universal
in bats: with a few exceptions only those of the insect-eating
order Michrochiroptera have a well-developed system.
4293/ In 1940 it was not even
known that bacteria had genes.
4294/ Karl von Frisch investigated
the sense of smell and taste in honeybees, and in 1949 proved
they can navigate using the Sun as a reference point even
when it is obscured by cloud, thanks to their use of the pattern
of light polarization in the sky.
4295/ It has been known since
the work of Jan Ingenhousz in 1779 that sunlit green plants
absorb carbon dioxide.
4296/ The first working transistor
was demonstrated on Christmas Eve 1947. It was built by William
Shockley, Walter Brattain and John Bardeen.
4297/ The physicist Richard Feynman
once said that the theory of quantum electrodynamics matched
experiment as closely as if one predicted the distance from
New York to Los Angeles and was off by the thickness of a
human hair.
4298/ In 1948, Claude Shannon
published his mathematical theory of communication, which
we now call information theory.
4299/ The real breakthrough in
combatting transplant rejection came in 1970 with the introduction
of the powerful immunosuppressor cyclosporine.
4300/ In May 1960 the US food
and Drug administration licensed norethynodrel as an oral
contraceptive under the name of Enovid. By 1965 the sexual
revolution was well underway, and more than 6.5 million American
women were 'on the pill'.
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