East Asian calligraphy was a "high art" form before the Tang Dynasty. It continues to have a high status among the arts. It is practiced today by many people including school children.
Mad cow disease
Mad cow disease is the common name of "Bovine spongiform encephalopathy". It's a disease that affects a cow's nervous system and their physical state. It comes from the chemistry structure of prion protein. When cattle get this disease, they have holes forming in their brains. The brain becomes spongy and begins to waste away. The cattle become very violent and show signs of mental disorder and have trouble when they move. It has a long incubation period, about 4~5 years. Cattle that are 4~5 years old can get the disease very easily.
It was not a common disease, but in 1996 the Minister of Health and Welfare in England said that it could be contracted by humans. Mad cow disease has damaged the cattle industry. Some food was made from cattle that had the disease. In England, the nation that was worst affected, more than 179,000 cattle were infected and 4.4 million were killed in an attempt to get rid of the disease.
In 2012, Korean President Lee's negotiations about the import of beef from the USA made the public angry. Many people went to the square in front of city hall and protested. It caused a lot of trouble, and the approval rating of the president sharply decreased.
Only Indian (Desi Cow) cows were able to survive from the disease. Researchers are still trying to figure out why only the Desi Cows can resist succumbing to the disorder. Other countries have started importing Indian cow breeds to their countries.
Galen
Galen of Pergamum (AD 129 – 199/217) was a prominent Roman physician and philosopher from Pergamon, a Greek city in western Asia Minor. He was an important medical researcher during the time of the Roman Empire. His theories influenced Western medical science for over a thousand years.
He came up with the 'Theory of Opposites' based upon Hippocrates' Four Humours' theory, which helped develop medicine in the Roman and again in the Middle Ages to include more natural based medicine (rather that just religious medicine).
Some of his observations in his books were wrong, as he could only dissect animals (mostly pigs and apes) and compare them to humans, because he was not allowed to dissect human corpses. Later on in the Renaissance period people, such as Andreas Vesalius wrote books showing that some of what Galen said was wrong.
Galen was vital in the beginnings of natural medicine, and is often known as the 'Father of Anatomy'.
Ibn Battuta
Ibn Battuta (1304 – 1368 or 1369) was a Moroccan explorer. He is known for the account of his journeys called the "Rihla" ("Voyage"). He travelled for nearly 30 years and covered most of the Islamic world. He also explored West Africa, Southern and Eastern Europe, South Asia, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and China. This distance was more than Marco Polo travelled; about . Ibn Battuta was considered the greatest traveller of the medieval period.
Battuta also made maps that were used by cartographers.He also met Mohammad bin tughlaq and write a book called the travels of bin battutta
Ibn Battuta was born on February 24, 1304 in Tangier. His family consisted of judges and scholars of Islamic law. At age 21, Ibn Battuta started his long exploration when he went on the Hajj. This is a year-long pilgrimage that brings Muslims closer to God. Ibn Battuta first went across North Africa (Maghreb), to the great port Alexandria in 1326. Ibn spent 30 years visiting every Muslim country of his day. He recorded details about the social and political life he saw on his journeys. He gave information all about Muhammad Bin Tuglaq.
Ibn Battuta met a Syrian Arab Damascene girl who was a slave of a black African governor in Mali. Ibn Battuta engaged in a conversation with her in Arabic.
Christians became part of harems as slaves in the Balkans and Asia Minor when the Turks invaded. Muslim qadis owned Christian slave girls. Greek girls who were pretty were forced into prostitution after being enslaved to Turks who too al their earnings in the 14th century according to Ibn Battuta.
Kyshtym disaster
The Kyshtym disaster was a radiation contamination disaster on 29 September 1957, in Mayak, a nuclear plant in Russia (then a part of the Soviet Union). It measured as a Level 6 disaster on the International Nuclear Event Scale (the Chernobyl disaster and the Fukushima disaster are the only accidents listed as more serious than this one).
Mayak is the name for a number of nuclear facilities, which are about from Ekaterinburg, in Russia. The facilities were also known as "Chelyabinsk-65", or "Chelyabinsk-40". Mayak was built between 1945 and 1948. It was the first plant that could produce nuclear material in the Soviet Union. At times, up to 25.000 people worked at Mayak. They produced the plutonium fuel that was used for the first Soviet atomic bomb, amongst other things.
Between 1948 and 1987, a total of ten nuclear reactors were built. Until 1991, all but two were closed. The two remaining produce radioactive isotopes for health care and for research purposes.
During different accidents, a large amount of radioactivity was released into the environment. The biggest of these accidents happened in 1957, and is known as "Kyshtym Disaster" today. It happened in a plant near Kishtim (Кыштым). There were many accidents in this secret plant. The most serious of them happened on September 29, 1957. The cooling system of the plant failed to work. A (non-nuclear) explosion occurred. This explosion had the force of between 75 and 100 tons of TNT. It threw the lid of the container, which weighted 160 tons, into the air. The accident released about 20 MegaPCi (about 740 Petabecquerel) of radioactivity. At least 200 people died from radiation sickness. About 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes. More than 470,000 people were affected by the radiation, without knowing it.
During the next ten to eleven hours, the radioactive cloud moved towards the northeast, reaching between 300 and 350 kilometers from the accident. The fallout of the cloud resulted in a long-term contamination of an area of more than 800 square kilometers, mostly with caesium-137 and strontium-90. Today, the area is known as the East-Ural Radioactive Trace (EURT).
The existence of Mayak was a secret. Only very few people knew it was there. For this reason, the people living in the areas affected by the accident were not told about the accident. On 6 October, a week after the accident, the authorities started to evacuate about 10,000 people, but they did not tell about the reason for the evacuation. People grew hysterical with fear because unknown 'mysterious' diseases were breaking out. Victims were seen with skin 'sloughing off' their faces, hands and other exposed parts of their bodies." It was Zhores Medvedev who revealed the nature and extent of the disaster to the world.
Even though the Soviet government hid information about the figures, it is known that the direct exposure to radiation caused at least 200 cases of death from cancer.
To reduce the spread of radioactive contamination after the accident, contaminated soil was removed and kept in fenced enclosures that were called "graveyards of the earth".
In 1968, the Soviet government disguised the EURT area by creating the East-Ural Nature Reserve, which prohibited any unauthorised access to the affected area.
Rumours of a nuclear mishap somewhere near Chelyabinsk had long been circulating in the West. That there had been a serious nuclear accident west of the Urals was eventually inferred from research on the effects of radioactivity on plants, animals, and ecosystems, published by Professor Leo Tumerman, former head of the Biophysics Laboratory at the Institute of Molecular Biology in Moscow, and associates.