Alaska

Home of Polar Bears, gold, oil, Eskimos, and Sarah Palin.

• Outsiders first discovered Alaska in 1741 when danish explorer Vitus Jonassen Bering sighted it on a voyage from Siberia.

• In spring, the melting dome of an igloo is replaced with a covering of animal skins to form a between-season dwelling called a 'qarmaq'.

• Alaska has about 640,000 residents.

• The word 'igloo' comes from the inuit 'iglu', meaning 'house'.

• Russian whalers and fur traders on Kodiak Island established the first settlement in Alaska in 1784.

• In 1867 United States Secretary of State William H. Seward offered Russia $7,200,000, or two cents per acre, for Alaska. Remember Sewards Folly from Geography lessons? On October 18, 1867 Alaska officially became the property of the United States.

• Joe Juneau's 1880 discovery of gold ushered in the gold rush era.

• In 1943 Japan invaded the Aleutian Islands, which started the One Thousand Mile War.
  

• The Alaska Highway was originally built as a military supply road during World War II.

• Alaska officially became the 49th state on January 3, 1959.

• Alaska accounts for 25% of the oil produced in the United States.

• Alaska is the United State's largest state and is over twice the size of Texas (ouch). Measuring from north to south the state is approximately 1,400 miles long and measuring from east to west it is 2,700 miles wide. It covers 570,374 square miles.

• The state of Rhode Island could fit into Alaska 425 times.

• The Trans-Alaska Pipeline moves up to 88,000 barrels of oil per hour on its 800 mile journey to Valdez.

• Dog mushing is the official state sport.

Quotable

The person who knows how will always have a job,
but the person who knows why, will always be his boss.

Stair Climbing Wheel Chairs

Do you remember the nation's first stair-climbing wheelchair? It hit the market with a bang, but fell down on price.

Johnson & Johnson quietly sold the last iBOTs this spring, shuttering manufacturing of a wheelchair that doctors had greeted five years ago as potentially revolutionary, but which failed to sell more than a few hundred a year. Earlier this month, a veteran who lost his legs in Iraq received the last known available iBOT, donated after its initial owner died.

Some iBOT users are joining inventor Dean Kamen, known for his Segways, in lobbying Congress for reimbursement changes that they hope could revive the chairs. They cost $22,000, but Medicare only paid $6,000.

Human Beings

If we really are the masters of the universe, why is it that our species is the only one that is required to use toilet paper?

Long Term Memory

Scientists report successful tests of a new memory device that could allow terabytes (1,099,511,627,776 bytes) of data to be stored without corruption for a billion years or more. The team claimed that it is possible to build storage devices capable of carrying 1TB of information per square inch, making it more effective than current techniques. The data will also be almost incorruptible.

The device is an iron nano-particle that measures 1/50,000th of the width of a human hair, enclosed in a hollow carbon nano-tube. The iron can be shuttled back and forth within the tube as a way to store data. Conventional Flash memory usually fails after three to five years.

Solar Sun Glasses

Remember the blonde joke about the solar panel glasses? Well, this takes the joke to a whole new level. “Self-Energy Converting Sunglasses.” Lenses of the glasses have dye solar cells, collecting energy and making it able to power your small devices through the power jack at the back of the frame.

The dye solar cell is described by the designers as, “cheap organic dye used with nano technology and providing cheap but high energy efficiency.” The lens turns sunlight rays, into electrical energy to power portable devices.

Stomach Rumbling

As food, liquid and gas move through your digestive tract, your stomach muscles and intestines contract and cause rumbling noises, borborygmi is the scientific name. (The word borborygmus (singular form) is an onomatopoeia (words that imitate the sound that they describe.)

Everyone’s stomach makes noise during digestion, but if you have extra-loud rumbles, a teaspoon of olive oil or a cup of herbal tea with lemon may help ease them.

Speak to Me

IBM has developed a computer application called Watson that will play Jeopardy!, the popular TV trivia game show, against human contestants. Demonstrations of the system are expected this year, with a final televised matchup, hosted by Alex Trebek, sometime next year. Questions will be spoken aloud by Trebek, but fed into the machine in text format during the show.

The company has not yet published any research papers describing how its system will tackle Jeopardy!-style questions. IBM's end goal is a system that it can sell to its corporate customers who need to make large quantities of information more accessible.

Viagra Developer

Robert Furchgott, a Nobel prize-winning pharmacologist whose work with the gas nitric oxide helped develop the anti-impotency drug Viagra, has died at the age of 92. How interesting nitric oxide is a free radical and Viagra makes radicals free. Hmmm.