In 804, Bad Aibling was mentioned for the first time. After the second World War Bad Aibling has evolved to a major centre for intelligence organizations and secret services. In 2004 the US American Bad Aibling Echelon station closed after decades of operation. In 2016, ten people were killed in a train crash.
In the town live about 18,000 people. It is 498 meters above sea level and covers an area of 41.55 km².
Gaya
Gaya is a town in the Indian state of Bihar. Gaya is a very old city. It is one of the seven holy cities of the Hindus,
It is in South Bihar.
Patna
Patna is the capital city of the Indian state of Bihar. About 1.7 million people live in Patna (census 2001). It is a very old city and has a history of at least 2,500 years. It was famous for its educational institutes, which during those days, attracted scholars from all over the world. Gautama Buddha who started Buddhism had also visited this city. Despite being a Hindu majority city Patna also has many Muslims and many Masjids. People in Patna speak Hindi, Bhojpuri, Maithli and Urdu. When founded Patna's old name was "Pataligrama", and later into "Pataliputra" which was the capital of Magadha Empire, before changing in to the current "Patna".
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (born Lichfield, Staffordshire, England 18 September 1709; died London 13 December 1784) was a famous writer. After publishing a famous dictionary, he was given a doctorate, which is why he is often called "Dr Johnson". He wrote some of his own stories, but more often he wrote criticisms about what other people had written. He said a lot of witty, amusing things, which are still remembered today. We know about some of the funny things he said because his friend James Boswell wrote a book about him.
Samuel Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire. His father had a bookshop, but he was very poor. Samuel went to school in Lichfield. When he was nineteen he went to the University of Oxford, but he was so poor that he had to leave without taking a degree. A few years later he married a woman 21 years older than he was. They went to live in London, where he tried to make a living by writing but for many years he was very poor.
It was not until 1762 that he became famous and the government gave him a pension of three hundred pounds a year. He started a club (called "The Club") which included a lot of famous people like the painter Joshua Reynolds and the writer Oliver Goldsmith (see picture). Johnson was now so famous that he was given an honorary doctorate (the title of "Doctor") from Trinity College, Dublin in 1765, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford in 1775.
Boswell and Johnson spent some time in Edinburgh and they travelled a lot to the Scottish islands. Johnson died in 1784 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
Johnson spent several years writing his Dictionary of the English language. It was a big job. While he was writing it he could not be earning money, so he needed a patron (someone who would sponsor him by giving him money, and in return the dictionary would be dedicated to him). An important man called Lord Chesterfield said to Johnson that he would be his patron. But he never gave him any money, and Johnson never heard anything more from him, until the dictionary was ready. Then Lord Chesterfield wrote to Johnson saying that he hoped he would dedicate the dictionary to him. The letter that Johnson wrote back to Lord Chesterfield is very famous. It is very sarcastic (funny in an unkind way). Johnson said to him that it would have been nice to have had help when he was needing it. He said, sarcastically, that a patron was someone who stands on the river bank watching a man drowning and then, when then the drowning man is saved, asks him whether he can help. The letter made Lord Chesterfield look very silly.
There were very few dictionaries in Johnson's day, so it was a lot of work for him. Nowadays, a dictionary is made by a team of people. Dictionaries, like encyclopedias, should just give facts. But Johnson sometimes explained words in his dictionary in a way that showed his opinions (what he thought about things).
Examples:
Although it shows his personal likes and dislikes, the dictionary still deserves to be famous. Johnson defined 43,000 words. It was the first time a dictionary had been published that gave examples of how the words had been used by well-known writers.
Nozomi (Shinkansen)
Nozomi trains are the fastest Shinkansen "bullet" trains in Japan. They can reach Osaka from Tokyo in two and a half hours. The trains are called "bullet" trains because they travel so fast, like a bullet from a gun. These trains have speeds of up to .
The second fastest Shinkansen trains is the Hikari train. The third fastest Shinkansen train is the Kodama train. In the Japanese language, "Nozomi" means hope, "Hikari" means light and "Kodama" means "echo."
"Shinkansen" means "New Trunk Line" in Japanese because it was built with all new bridges, tunnels through mountains and under water, and special tracks for high speed trains so it could go directly (straight) from city to city. Before the Shinkansen, trains in Japan were slower because they were old and had to go around many mountains, or share the track with cars on road crossings.
Moravia
Moravia (Czech and Slovak: "Morava;" German":" "Mähren") is a historical region in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. It takes its name from the Morava River which flows from the north to the south of the land.
Together with Bohemia in the West and Silesia in the North, Moravia made historical-political region called Czech Lands. Today, Moravia, Bohemia and small part of Silesia make up the current Czech Republic.
Important cities today are Brno, Olomouc, Ostrava and Zlín.
Advanced Photo System
The Advanced Photo System was a technology for photographic film and cameras. People started using it in the year 1996.
This is what it did:
The system also had problems:
The system never became popular, and was stopped in 2004. Since then, most cameras have switched to digital (electronic) systems anyway.
One famous type of camera that used this system was the Canon IXUS, which then later changed and became a digital one.
Coral reef
A coral reef is a large underwater structure made of dead and living corals (press to see more). In most healthy reefs, stony corals are predominant. They are built from colonial polyps from the phylum Cnidaria which secrete an exoskeleton of calcium carbonate. The reefs are formed in tropical marine areas (30 degrees north and south of the equator) and between the tropics. The reef acts as the home of many tropical fish and other animals. Coral reefs systems are a major tourism attraction because of their beauty and color of the corals and their many associated animals.
People look at them while snorkeling and diving. One example of a coral reef is in Malaysia at Pulau Tioman, off the State of Pahang and also one of the most famous - the Great Barrier Reef
Most present-day coral reefs were formed after the last ice age when melting ice caused the sea level to rise and flood the continental shelves. This means they are less than 10,000 years old. As coral reef communities were established on the shelves, they built reefs that grew upwards, keeping pace with the rise in sea level. Reefs that did not keep pace became "drowned reefs", covered by so much water that there was insufficient light for further survival.
Coral reefs are also found in the deep sea away from the continental shelves, around oceanic islands and as atolls. The vast majority of these ocean coral islands are volcanic in origin. The few exceptions have tectonic origins where plate movements have lifted the deep ocean floor on the surface.