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BACK ISSUES | NOVEMBER 2009 | CURRENT ISSUE
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NOVEMBER 2009
You’ve got mail
Did you know that of the 160 billion e-mails sent daily, 97% of them are spam? Spam generates 33 billion kilowatt-hours of energy every year, enough to power 2.4 million homes, producing 17 million tons of CO2. 9 out of every 1,000 computers are infected with spam. Spammers get 1 response to every 12 million e-mails they send (yet it still makes them a small profit). There are some 1 billion computers in use.
 World’s most popular fruit
The tomato is the world’s most popular fruit. And yes, just like the brinjal and the pumpkin, botanically speaking, it is a fruit, not a vegetable. More than 60 million tons of tomatoes are produced per year, 16 million tons more than the second most popular fruit, the banana. Apples are the third most popular (36 million tons), followed by oranges (34 million tons) and watermelons (22 million tons). |
 World’s largest flower
Rafflesia arnoldi, weighs 7 kg (15 pounds) and grows only on the Sumatran island of Indonesia. Its petals grow to 1.6 feet long and 1 inch thick. Of about 200,000 kinds of flowers in the world,the smallest is the duckweed, which can only be seen with a microscope. |
Why does water not calm the tongue after eating hot spicy food?
The spices in most of the hot foods that we eat are oily, and oil and water don’t mix. In this case, water just rolls over the oily spices. You can calm your aching tongue by eating bread which absorbs oily spices. A second solution is to drink milk. Milk contains a substance called ‘casein’ which binds to the spices and carries them away.
  
Nobel Prize in physics goes to ‘Masters of Light’ Charles K. Kao, who discovered how to transmit light through fiber optics, and the team of Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who designed the first digital imaging sensor, split the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics, announced by the Nobel Foundation on October 6, 2009. Thanks to Boyle and Smith, you are able to take photos of nearly any and everything without loading a single roll of film, and thanks to Kao, you’re able to transmit them around the world in seconds. |
 Indian-American wins 2009 Chemistry Nobel Prize
Indian-American Venkatraman Ramakrishnan won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his path-breaking work on ribosomes which may help in the development of new antibiotics. The 57-year-old senior scientist at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge (UK) who hails from Chidambaram (Tamil Nadu), shares the USD 1.4 million award with Thomas Steitz (US) and Ada Yonath (Israel). The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said three dimensional models developed by the scientists showed how different antibiotics bind to ribosomes (protein builders in cells). “These models are now used by scientists in order to develop new antibiotics, directly assisting the saving of lives and decreasing humanity’s suffering,” the academy said in its citation. |