Readable, teachable news.
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Apple launched its new cell phone last week—the iPhone5.
Although the iPhone5 has some new features, it’s essentially the same phone with a longer screen (see the picture that accompanies this article).
The new phone is thinner, lighter and faster than its predecessors.
It’s less than 8 mm thick.
The screen is now a bit longer, at 4” (measured diagonally), or 10.2 cms. The iPhone4 screen is 3.5” (8.9 cms).
The new iPhone is also faster than the other iPhones.
Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, has died. He was 82 years old.
Armstrong was an American astronaut and the commander of the Apollo 11 spacecraft on its mission to put men on the moon.
Apollo 11 was launched on July 16, 1969, and began orbiting the moon three days later. On July 20, Armstrong and his co-pilot, astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin, took off from Apollo 11 in a small landing craft called Eagle. A third astronaut, Michael Collins, remained in the main ship, orbiting the moon until they returned.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world watched on TV as the Eagle landed on the moon. When Armstrong stepped out of the ship and onto the moon’s surface, he said, “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.”*
Armstrong and Aldrin explored the moon for more than two hours and collected about 50 pounds of moon rocks. They left behind a plaque which said: “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon. July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”
The Eagle remained on the moon for about 21 hours and then rejoined Apollo 11 for the return trip to Earth. Once the astronauts were back on Earth, they spent 16 days in quarantine to make sure they had not brought back any germs from space.
The 2012 summer Olympic Games takes place in London, England starting next month.
From July 27 to August 12, athletes from 203 countries around the world will converge on the city to compete in sports including swimming, cycling and diving.
Before the competitions begin, the Olympic torch is run in a cross-country relay through more than 1,000 cities in the United Kingdom.
The torch was flown to the UK on May 18 and the huge, cross-country relay began.
In the relay, runners hold the torch aloft as they run and when they get to a certain spot they light the next runner’s torch–and so on.
The last torchbearer will light the giant cauldron in the Olympic Stadium in London, to mark the start of the Olympic Games for 2012.
When Apple introduced the iPad tablet, it was unique.
It had a large flat glass viewing screen which you touched to move and open files, it was extremely light and thin, and it had a magnetic cover that not only protected it but it shut it down as well.
When new technology comes along–and proves to be popular and successful–it’s not long before other companies try to duplicate it. They try to improve on the other company’s product if they can.
That’s the case with Microsoft’s new tablet called Surface.
Governments from just a handful of countries have flown into space.
But never has a private company successfully sent a spacecraft into space.
Not only is it extremely expensive, but it’s incredibly risky. There are a million things that can go wrong.
Last month an American company called Space Exploration Technologies – better known as SpaceX – made history by sending its unmanned Dragon spacecraft into space.
Lots of companies use email to communicate with their employees.
Most companies create email “distribution lists.” A distribution list is a group email, that lets a company send a message to many employees at once, with just one email.
Aviva is an insurance company in the United Kingdom.
Recently, someone in the company sent an email to one of Aviva’s employees who was being let go, or fired. The email gave instructions to the employee about what they needed to do, now that he’d been fired.
However, the email was accidentally sent to everyone in the company.
Aviva has 1,300 employees around the world.
That means that 1,300 people who work at Aviva were all sent an email that implied they had been fired.
Everyone.
But it wasn’t true.
An old photograph may solve the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart, the famous pilot who disappeared on a round-the-world flight 75 years ago.
Earhart was the first woman to fly alone across North America and back, and the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic Ocean without stopping.
In 1937, she and a navigator, Fred Noonan, set out to fly around the world. They had travelled more than two-thirds of the way when their plane disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. Ships and airplanes searched the area, but they were unable to find any trace of the plane or its crew.
What happened to them has remained a mystery. One theory is that the plane ran out of fuel and was forced to land on a tiny island called Nikumaroro, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
An organization called The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR; pronounced “tiger”) has been searching for Earhart’s plane. The group has an old photograph of Nikumaroro that was taken about three months after the plane disappeared.
Recently, they used new technology to make the picture clearer. Now they believe that a dark shape in the picture, sticking up out of the water, may be part of Earhart’s plane.
A plastic garden gnome is travelling around the world to help demonstrate how the pull of gravity changes in different locations.
Gravity is the force that attracts a person or an object to the centre of the Earth. It keeps us on the ground, and it also determines how much we weigh.
Gravity may be slightly stronger or weaker depending on where you are, which means things weigh different amounts in different places on Earth.
The difference is so small – 0.5 per cent or less – that most people using ordinary scales wouldn’t even notice it.
For example, if you weigh 40 kilograms, the difference would be no more than 200 grams higher or lower, depending on where you were.
But even such a small difference would matter to scientists who need to be very accurate when measuring amounts of chemicals for an experiment or comparing weights of different objects.
A team of Russian scientists in Antarctica has found an ancient lake buried under more than three kilometres of ice.
The lake – Lake Vostok – has been sealed off from the rest of the world for at least 15 million years.
Scientists think the lake may contain tiny organisms, like bacteria, which are not found anywhere else on earth.
If the organisms exist in the lake, it would be because they have been able to adapt to living in the darkness, saltiness and extreme cold of the hidden lake. In that case, they would likely have developed special features that no other organisms on earth have.
Thomas Mulcair is the new leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada (NDP).
Mulcair was elected, after a gruelling 12 hours of voting, at the NDP’s convention on the weekend.
The NDP is the political party that is Canada’s “official opposition” to the country’s governing party, the Conservatives.
As leader of the federal NDP, Mulcair will also become the leader of the Official Opposition.
The NDP had to elect a new leader after their last leader, Jack Layton, passed away from cancer in August 2011.
