In the 700s, Yemenis were among the first to join the new religion Islam. Since then, Yemenis have been staunch Muslims who were in the forefront of all Islam conquests. Men whose ancestors came from Yemen ruled Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) for centuries. The Ottoman Empire took control of North Yemen, and the British Empire took South Yemen, in the early 20th century. The two parts were united in 1990 and later fought civil wars. The latest one started in 2015. Some famous people including former President Ali Abdullah Saleh were killed, and thousands died of hunger.
Today, Yemen has over 20 million people. Most of them speak Arabic.
Yemen is in Western Asia. It is on the southern half of the Arabian Peninsula. A number of Red Sea islands, including the Hanish Islands, Kamaran, and Perim, as well as Socotra in the Arabian Sea, belong to Yemen. Many of the islands are volcanic. For example, Jabal al-Tair had a volcanic eruption in 2007 and before that in 1883. The highest point in Yemen is Jabal an Nabi Shu'ayb.
Yemen is one of the poorest and least developed countries in the Arab World. There is a 35% unemployment rate, which means only 35 out of every 100 people in the labor force don't have a job.
As a result of the 2011–2012 Yemeni uprising, the constitution of Yemen was rewritten. New elections were to be held in 2014. Some areas are controlled by armed militant groups. On 23 January 2015, the President, Prime Minister and Cabinet resigned. War continued, with Saudi Arabia and Iran supporting different sides.
As of February 2004, Yemen is divided into twenty governorates and one municipality called "Amanat Al-Asemah".
The governorates are divided into 333 districts. The districts are divided into 2,210 sub-districts, and then into 38,284 villages (as of 2001).
Yemen has about 24 million people according to June 2011 estimates. 46% of the people are under 15 years old. Yemenis are mainly of Arab origin. Arabic is the official language.
Religion in Yemen is mostly of two main Islamic religious groups; 53% of the Muslim population is Sunni and 45% is Shiite according to the UNHCR.
According to 2009 estimates, life expectancy in Yemen is 63.27 years.
Football is the most popular sport in Yemen. The Yemen national football team competes in the FIFA and the AFC leagues. The country also hosts many football clubs that compete in the national or international leagues.
Yemen's mountains have many opportunities for outdoor sports, such as rock climbing, hill climbing, skiing, and hiking. The coast of Yemen and Socotra island have opportunities for water sports, such as surfing, sailing, swimming, and scuba diving. Socotra island is one of the best surfing places in the world.
Yemen's biggest sports event was hosting the 2010 Gulf Cup of Nations.
Sensory system
The sensory system is the way animals find out about their nearby environment and their bodies. To do this they have special devices for collecting data called sense organs. The sense organs act as transducers: they turn energy from the outside or inside of the body into nerve signals. The signals are then very rapidly processed by the brain. The whole arrangement is the sensory system.
It is usual to say the sensory system has five senses:
Actually, there are other senses. For example, we have a sense of equilibrioception which checks our balance, and proprioception which is the sense of the relative position of one's own parts of the body and strength of effort being employed in movement. Fishes have a sense system which no land animal has. It is called the lateral line system. This senses movement and vibration in the water pressure and other functions. Some fish can sense patterns of electrical current in the water.
A huge amount of data comes in from the sensory system. About 11 million pieces of information "per second" is one estimation, of which ten million comes from our eyes. Of this huge number we only handle about 40 in our conscious mind. The rest is handled non-consciously.
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla (10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943), was a Serbian inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer and physicist. He is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. He was born in the village of Smiljan, in the part of former Austria-Hungary that is now Croatia. He later became an American citizen.
Tesla got his first job in Budapest in 1882, working at a telephone company. A few years later he moved to the United States. Even in his early life, he was inventing things. His best known invention was an electric motor that could run well on AC power. Tesla died of coronary thrombosis in a hotel room in Manhattan, New York City on 7 January 1943.
Tesla was born on 10th July 1856 in Smiljan, Austro-Hungarian Empire (modern-day Croatia), from serbian family. Tesla's father, Milutin Tesla, was a priest in the Serbian Orthodox Church. His mother, Georgina Djuka was also great at inventing useful household tools. Even she was a daughter of the Serbian Orthodox Church priest. Although very smart and with excellent memory, (she knew thousands of lines from "Gorski Vijenac" by Petar Petrovic Njegos) she had to take care of her siblings when her mother, Sofia Budisavljevic, died. Nikola Tesla's mother was a great influence on him. Both his parents were born in Lika, Croatia. He was the fourth child out of five. He had one older brother, Dane, who died when Tesla was 5, two older sisters, Angelina and Milka, and one younger sister, Marica.
Tesla, who loved science, was afraid that after his brother's accidental death he would have to continue the family tradition and become a priest. After he graduated from a prestigious High School in Karlovac, Croatia, he went back to Gospic during summer to see his family and almost died of cholera. He asked his father if he could go study engineering if by miracle he survived, and the father promised his dying son to send him to the best school in the whole world. Nikola's health improved quickly and his father sent him to study at the Technical College in Graz, Austria, in 1875.
Tesla had a job in telephony and electrical engineering before moving to the United States in 1884 to work for Thomas Edison. They quarrelled, and soon Tesla started working on his own with other people investing in his work. He set up laboratories and companies to develop a range of electrical devices. His patented AC electric motor (induction motor) and transformer were licensed by American industrialist George Westinghouse.
Westinghouse also hired Tesla for one year to help develop a power system using alternating current. The advantage that popularized alternating current is the use of transformers for long distance electric power transmission. Tesla is also known for his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs, Colorado which included inventions and ideas used in the invention of radio communication, for his X-ray experiments, and for his unsuccessful attempt at worldwide wireless transmission in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project.
Tesla's achievements made him very famous. So did his abilities as a showman, demonstrating his seemingly miraculous inventions. Although he made a great deal of money from his patents, he spent a lot on his experiments. He lived for most of his life in a series of hotels in New York City. The end of his patent income and eventual bankruptcy led him to live in much poorer circumstances. Tesla still continued to invite the press to parties he held on his birthday to announce new inventions he was working and make (sometimes unusual) statements. Because of his wonderful pronouncements without results or proof, Tesla gained a reputation in popular culture as the archetypal "mad scientist". He died in room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel on 7 January 1943.