Why 1 means "one", and 2 means "two" ?

The numbers we all use (1, 2, 3, 4, etc.) are known as "arabic" numbers to distinguish them from the " Roman Numerals" (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, etc). Actually the arabs popularized these numbers but they were originally used by the early phonecian traders to count and keep track of their trading accounts.
Have you ever thought why ........ 1 means "one", and 2 means "two"? The roman numerals are easy to understand but what was the logic behind the Phoenician numbers?It's all about angles!
It's the number of angles. If one writes the numbers down (see below) on a piece of paper in their older forms, one quickly sees why. I have marked the angles with "o"s.
No 1 has one angle. No 2 has two angles. No 3 has three angles. etc. and "O" has no angles

Star with comet's tail

Astronomers have captured the first image of a comet-like tail behind a star. The star, Mira, is named for the Latin word meaning "wonderful." The tail is 20,000 times the distance between Pluto and our sun. Mira is hurtling through space at 291,000 miles per hour.

From NASA:
"I was shocked when I first saw this completely unexpected, humongous tail trailing behind a well-known star," says Christopher Martin of the California Institute of Technology. "It was amazing how Mira's tail echoed on vast, interstellar scales the familiar phenomena of a jet's contrail or a speedboat's turbulent wake." Martin is the principal investigator for the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (telescope), and lead author of a Nature paper appearing today to announce the discovery. Astronomers say Mira's tail offers a unique opportunity to study how stars like our sun die and ultimately seed new solar systems. Mira is an older star called a red giant that is losing massive amounts of surface material. As Mira hurtles along, its tail sheds carbon, oxygen and other important elements needed for new stars, planets and possibly even life to form. This tail material, visible now for the first time, has been released over the past 30,000 years. "This is an utterly new phenomenon to us, and we are still in the process of understanding the physics involved," says co-author Mark Seibert of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington in Pasadena. "We hope to be able to read Mira's tail like a ticker tape to learn about the star's life."

Mini-telescope eye implant

When implanted in the eye, mini-telescopes like this one could help aging individuals with macular degeneration, a disorder of the retina affecting more than 1.75 million people in the United States alone. The implant was a huge help for two thirds of more than 200 patients who participated in a recent clinical trial. The developers of the technology, VisionCare Ophthalmic Technologies, hope that FDA approval for the mini-scope is imminent. From Scientific American:
The implantable mini-scope... works with the eye's cornea like a telephoto system, rendering an enlarged retinal image designed to reduce the area of diminished vision. Once implanted, the device protrudes 0.1 to 0.5 millimeter beyond the surface of the pupil but does not touch the corneal endothelium, a layer of cells lining the back of the cornea. This is not an easy fix, however, and surgeons are developing special techniques to properly and swiftly implant the device without damaging the eye. The device is a compound telescope system that consists of a glass cylinder that is 4.4 millimeters in length and 3.6 millimeters in diameter and houses wide-angle micro-optics.

Never lose your wristwatch again

Programmable Subcutaneous Visible Implant
Just what I want…surgery to implant a watch in my arm. Joy!
Notice how the draftsman goofed? Shouldn’t the display on the clock be upside down (or the thumb on the other side of the hand) so the wearer could read it right side up? Of course, at least this way you can see what time it is before the inventor backhands you across the face for mocking his invention.

Global Warming

Global warming is the increase in the average temperature of the Earth's near-surface air and oceans in recent decades and its projected continuation.
Global average air temperature near the Earth's surface rose 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the twentieth century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes, "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations," which leads to warming of the surface and lower atmosphere by increasing the greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes have probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950, but a small cooling effect since 1950. These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science, including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries. The American Association of Petroleum Geologists is the only scientific society that officially rejects these conclusions. A few individual scientists disagree with some of the main conclusions of the IPCC. Climate models referenced by the IPCC project that global surface temperatures are likely to increase by 1.1 to 6.4 °C (2.0 to 11.5 °F) between 1990 and 2100. The range of values results from the use of differing scenarios of future greenhouse gas emissions as well as models with differing climate sensitivity. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming and sea level rise are expected to continue for more than a millennium even if greenhouse gas levels are stabilized. This reflects the large heat capacity of the oceans.
An increase in global temperatures is expected to cause other changes, including sea level rise, increased intensity of extreme weather events, and changes in the amount and pattern of precipitation. Other effects include changes in agricultural yields, glacier retreat, species extinctions and increases in the ranges of disease vectors.
Remaining scientific uncertainties include the exact degree of climate change expected in the future, and how changes will vary from region to region around the globe. There is ongoing political and public debate on a world scale regarding what, if any, action should be taken to reduce or reverse future warming or to adapt to its expected consequences. Most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol, aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Making Rain

Click on the pic to enlarge