ABCD

46 Hrs. Birthday !

Washington: A German man has set a Guinness World record for the longest birthday ever after he managed to stretch his special day to 46 hours by crossing between different time zones. Sven Hagemeier kept his birthday going for almost two days by crossing between different time zones, on August 4, last year. Over the course of 46 hours, Sven flew from Auckland (New Zealand), to Brisbane (Australia) and then to Honolulu (Hawaii), achieving a record for the longest birthday ever. Sven’s elongated birthday celebrations beat the previous record set by Nargis Bhimji of Karachi, who celebrated her birthday for 35 hours 25 minutes by crossing time zones after flying from Karachi to Singapore and then to San Francisco back in June 1998.

Foetus in the womb for 60 years !

Washington: Doctors treating a 91-year-old woman in Chile with a suspected tumour got stunned after they discovered that she had been carrying foetus in her womb for more than 60 years, reports PTI. Estela Melendez said she had no idea she had ever fallen pregnant. Media in the town of La Boca discovered the foetus after spotting something on an X-ray which caused concern. The calcified remains, which pose no health risk, had been in her uterus for more than six decades. “The doctor said I had a tumour and that they needed to operate on me,” Melendez told media. Melendez was married for 74 years before her husband, Manuel Gonzalez, died in January aged 91. She said one of her few regrets was that they had been unable to have children, and that the couple “suffered tremendously”.

Mahatma Gandhi inspires Osama !

London : Osama bin Laden in a 1993 speech invoked apostle of peace Mahatma Gandhi as he asked his supporters to boycott American goods and seek inspiration from the Indian leader’s struggle against the British, according to audio tapes of the slain al-Qaeda chief.

After the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Osama Bin Laden was forced to flee the city of Kandahar, where he had been based since 1997. Several compounds were hastily vacated, including one opposite the Taliban foreign ministry inside which 1,500 cassettes were discovered. The cache soon passed many hands from an Afghan family to a cassette shop and then to a CNN cameraman, finally making its way to the Afghan Media Project at Williams College in Massachusetts, who asked Flagg Miller – an expert in Arabic literature and culture from the University of California, Davis – to unravel them, BBC reported.

More than a decade on, Miller has written a book about his findings, titled ‘The Audacious Ascetic’’, which explores this unique collection. The tapes date back to the late 1960s through to 2001 and feature more than 200 different speakers – Osama among them. He is first heard in a tape from 1987 – a recording of a battle between Afghan-Arab ‘mujahideen’ and Soviet Spetsnaz commandos.

An unexpected name to make an appearance in the tapes is Mahatma Gandhi, who is cited as an inspiration by Osama in a speech made in September 1993, the report says. This is also the first speech in the collection in which Osama calls on supporters to take action against the US by boycotting its goods.

“Consider the case of Great Britain, an empire so vast that some say the sun never set on it”, says Bin Laden. “Britain was forced to withdraw from one of its largest colonies when Gandhi the Hindu declared a boycott against their goods. We must do the same thing today with America”, he says.

Osama makes no mention of violence till 1996, according to the tapes. “That changes in 1996, days after he is exiled from Sudan”, Miller is quoted as saying. It is only in one of the final recordings found in the collection that there is any allusion to 9/11. It is found in a recording of the wedding of Osama’s bodyguard, Umar, which was taped a few months before the attacks on New York City and Washington DC.

“He talks explicitly about ‘a plan’ – he doesn’t reveal details – and how we are ‘about to hear news’ and he asks God to ‘grant our brothers success’”, says Miller. “I understand that to signify the 9/11 attacks (because) he is talking specifically about the United States at that juncture”, he says. Osama was killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan, on May 2, 2011, in a US Navy SEALS raid on his compound. 

In UK- Buy 3 hrs thought for a pence

London : A penny could in theory purchase 3 hours, 7 minutes and 30 seconds of thought based on basic calculations, according to a new UK study that examined the energy and cost required to run a human brain, reports PTI.

The study at the University of Leicester tested the popular idiom ‘A penny for your thoughts’ by working out how much of a person’s thought could theoretically be purchased with a single penny.

The study suggests that a penny could, in theory, purchase 3 hours, 7 minutes and 30 seconds of thought according to Natural Sciences student OsarenkhoeUwuigbe from the University of Leicester’s Centre for Interdisciplinary Science. Uwuigbe first investigated how much power is needed to produce thought.

For simplicity, the study examined the power necessary for the brain – which consumes roughly 20 per cent of the body’s energy – to run as being the power necessary for the production of thought. Given that the average power consumption of a typical adult is approximately 100 watts, the student calculated that the power necessary to run a human brain and produce thought is roughly 20 per cent of this – or 20 watts.

To apply monetary value to thought, the price per kilowatt hour (kWh) charged by UK energy companies was calculated, settling on 16 pence per kWh, which is within the range of prices typically charged by UK energy companies.

Assuming that it requires 20 W or 1/50 kW to produce thought, charging 16p per kWh means that one penny can purchase 1/16th of a kWh.