History of Gold

A child finds a shiny rock in a creek, thousands of years ago, and the human race is introduced to gold for the first time.Gold was first discovered as shining, yellow nuggets. "Gold is where you find it," so the saying goes, and gold was first discovered in its natural state, in streams all over the world. No doubt it was the first metal known to early hominids.

Gold became a part of every human culture. Its brilliance, natural beauty, and luster, and its great malleability and resistance to tarnish made it enjoyable to work and play with.

Because gold is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, its discovery occurred to many different groups in many different locales. And nearly everyone who found it was impressed with it, and so was the developing culture in which they lived.

History of Earth

Sometimes science deals with incredibly large numbers, sometimes with great distances still other times with infinitely small particles. In science we must expand our conception of reality all the time. One of the very difficult concepts is the understanding of time. Everyone is conscious of the changes in the physical and biological world; they give us an awareness of time. The daily rhythm, the seasons, physical changes throughout a human lifetime are familiar concepts of time to us. Time is measured by change, but where change occurs over millions of years our own perception of time is on unfamiliar territory. To understand the rhythm of change of our planet and the effects it has on life on Earth we have to expand our perception of time. The geological processes that shape the surface of our planet, move the tectonic plates, build mountains and erode them again work over millions of years. These forces provide the ever changing conditions for life, which adapted to those changes. But those changes did not go undetected. Our understanding of Earth has expanded tremendously in the past 100 years, and new technologies have provided further insight into Earth's dynamic and history.

Earth itself acts like a clock, rotating on its axis once every 24 hours. To read Earth's time it is necessary to look at the changes that have been recorded. To identify changes that occurred due to the geological processes of our planet we can look at rocks. They are key to both the past and the nature of processes. Life has managed to leave records of time and the changes it went through time as well. Fossils are the remains of ancient organisms. Some looked very similar to life forms that are still living today. Fossils can be bones, teeth, shells, impressions of plants and even imprints of animal tracks. Fossils within a rock are a type of organic clock that tick by systematic radioactive decay of certain chemical elements, which permit us to measure with remarkable accuracy the number of years that have passed since the minerals in a rock crystallized. Fossils are recorded in rocks much like your footprints are recorded on a beach. As you walk along the beach, if the sand is fine enough and soft enough, you will make footprints. If the wind and waves do not destroy your footprints, they may record your existence well after your passing.

History of Burger

The origin of hamburger is a bit hazy and unclear. This is because there is no proper documentation to give us an idea about how the fast food came into being. Still, many people have claimed that the hamburger 'patty' was first noticed in the medieval times. Tartars (a band of Mongolian and Turkish warriors) used to place pieces of beef under their saddles. Under the weight of the rider and the saddle, the pieces used to turn tender enough to be eaten raw. Thus was born the initial beef ‘patty’.

A food item resembling the present-day burger, to some an extent, reached America around the 19^th century. The dish, called Hamburg style beef, was brought to Hamburg (Germany) from Russia in the 14^th century and when the German immigrants arrived in America, they brought it along with them. With time, the raw, chopped piece of beef evolved into the ‘patty sandwiched in a bun’. Thus, it can be said that America had a major role in giving the world the hamburger, as we know of it today.

History of Golden Ratio

Golden Ratio is a term (with an astounding number of aliases) used to describe aesthetically pleasing proportioning within a piece. (There is, in fact, a mathematical formula with which one can calculate Golden Ratio. Please see the links at right for information on such, from those who are less right-brained than your Guide.)

All math aside, some unknown genius figured out (millennium ago) that, in a work of art or architecture, if one maintained a ratio of small elements to larger elements that was the same as the ratio of larger elements to the whole, the end result was extraordinarily pleasing to the eye. This ratio is a common theme in sacred geometry world-wide.

History of Pi

Pi has been known for almost 4000 years—but even if we calculated the number of seconds in those 4000 years and calculated pi to that number of places, we would still only be approximating its actual value. Here’s a brief history of finding pi:
The ancient Babylonians calculated the area of a circle by taking 3 times the square of its radius, which gave a value of pi = 3. One Babylonian tablet (ca. 1900–1680 BC) indicates a value of 3.125 for pi, which is a closer approximation.
Rhind Papyrus (ca.1650 BC), there is evidence that the Egyptians calculated the area of a circle by a formula that gave the approximate value of 3.1605 for pi.
The ancient cultures mentioned above found their approximations by measurement. The first calculation of pi was done by Archimedes of Syracuse (287–212 BC), one of the greatest mathematicians of the ancient world. Archimedes approximated the area of a circle by using the Pythagorean Theorem to find the areas of two regular polygons: the polygon inscribed within the circle and the polygon within which the circle was circumscribed. Since the actual area of the circle lies between the areas of the inscribed and circumscribed polygons, the areas of the polygons gave upper and lower bounds for the area of the circle. Archimedes knew that he had not found the value of pi but only an approximation within those limits. In this way, Archimedes showed that pi is between 3 1/7 and 3 10/71.

History of Photography

First, the name. We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel , who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. (*1) The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing.
Before mentioning the stages that led to the development of photography, there is one amazing, quite uncanny prediction made by a man called de la Roche (1729- 1774) in a work called Giphantie. In this imaginary tale, it was possible to capture images from nature, on a canvas which had been coated with a sticky substance. This surface, so the tale goes, would not only provide a mirror image on the sticky canvas, but would remain on it. After it had been dried in the dark the image would remain permanent. The author would not have known how prophetic this tale would be, only a few decades after his death.
There are two distinct scientific processes that combine to make photography possible. It is somewhat surprising that photography was not invented earlier than the 1830s, because these processes had been known for quite some time. It was not until the two distinct scientific processes had been put together that photography came into being.
The first of these processes was optical. The Camera Obscura (dark room) had been in existence for at least four hundred years. There is a drawing, dated 1519, of a Camera Obscura by Leonardo da Vinci; about this same period its use as an aid to drawing was being advocated.
The second process was chemical. For hundreds of years before photography was invented, people had been aware, for example, that some colours are bleached in the sun, but they had made little distinction between heat, air and light.

History of Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg, 23, founded Facebook while studying psychology at Harvard University. A keen computer programmer, Mr Zuckerberg had already developed a number of social-networking websites for fellow students, including Course match, which allowed users to view people taking their degree, and Face mash, where you could rate people's attractiveness.

In February 2004 Mr Zuckerberg launched "The facebook", as it was originally known; the name taken from the sheets of paper distributed to freshmen, profiling students and staff. Within 24 hours, 1,200 Harvard students had signed up, and after one month, over half of the undergraduate population had a profile.