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Valuable facts about Air

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  • The gas nitrogen makes up 78.08% of the air. Nitrogen is largely unreactive, but it sometimes reacts with oxygen to form oxides of nitrogen.
  • Nitrogen is continually recycled by the bacteria that consume plant and animal waste.
  • Oxygen makes up 20.94% of the air. Animals breathe in oxygen. Plants give it out as they take their energy from sunlight in photosynthesis.
  • Carbon dioxide makes up 0.03% of the air. Carbon dioxide is continually recycled as it is breathed out by animals and taken in by plants in photosynthesis.
  • The air contains other, inert (unreactive) gases: 0.93% is argon; 0.0018% is neon; 0.0005% is helium.
  • There are tiny traces of krypton and xenon which are also inert.
  • Ozone makes up 0.00006% of the air. It is created when sunlight breaks up oxygen.
  • Hydrogen makes up 0.00005% of the air. This gas is continually drifting off into space.
  • Up to 10 km above the ground, the air is always moist because it contains an invisible gas called water vapour.
  • There is enough water vapour in the air to flood the globe to a depth of 2.5 m.
  • Water vapour enters the air when it evaporates from oceans, rivers and lakes.
  • Water vapour leaves the air when it cools and condenses (turns to drops of water) to form clouds. Most clouds eventually turn to rain, and so the water falls back to the ground. This is called precipitation.
  • Like a sponge, the air soaks up evaporating water until it is saturated (full).
  • It can only take in more water if it warms up and expands.
  • If saturated air cools, it contracts and squeezes out the water vapour, forcing it to condense into drops of water.
  • The point at which this happens is called the dew point.
  • Humidity is the amount of water in the air.
  • Absolute humidity is the weight of water in grams in a particular volume of air.
  • Relative humidity, which is written as a percentage, is the amount of water in the air compared to the amount of water the air could hold when saturated.
  • Air is a mixture of gases containing nitrogen (78%), oxygen (21%), and water vapour, dust particles and other gases (1 %).
  • Air occupies space. It also has weight.
  • One-fifth of the air is oxygen. Oxygen is necessary for combustion and respiration.
  • Photosynthesis in plants is possible because of carbon dioxide in the air.
  • Nitrogen present in the air is necessary for the growth of plants.
  • The ozone layer protects us from the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun.
  • Burning of fuels and factory wastes are the main causes of air pollution. Cutting down of trees has also led to an increase in air pollution.
  • Planting trees, taking measures to reduce smoke and pollutants in factories, and using catalytic converters and unleaded petrol in automobiles, are some ways of reducing air pollution

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Surprising Facts About the Respiratory System

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Syskool
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  • The nose has a 4 stage filtration system. By breathing into the mouth you go straight to stage 4. This easily results in sore throats, tonsillitis, and even ear infections.
  • The more you breathe (hyperventilation) the hungrier you will be and the more acidic the body will become.
  • Breathing through the mouth can, over time, create a shrinking of the jaw – hence resulting in crooked teeth (or a relapse after having your braces removed).
  • Inhaling through the nose, and exhaling through the mouth messes with the balance of CO2 in the body. This results in a loss of CO2. Holding the breath can increase CO2, which will help to rebalance the PH level.
  • We naturally change sides in our sleep approximately every 30 minutes, and this is mostly due to the balancing of the breath through each of the nostrils.
  • Getting up during the night to urinate is most likely due to breathing with the mouth open. Breathing through the mouth causes the bladder to shrink, making one feel as though they need to head to the bathroom pronto!
  • The right lung is slightly larger than the left.
  • Hairs in the nose help to clean the air we breathe as well as warming it.
  • The highest recorded “sneeze  speed” is 165 km per hour.
  • The surface area of the lungs is roughly the same size as a tennis court.
  • The capillaries in the lungs would extend 1,600 kilometres if placed end to end.
  • We lose half a litre of water a day through breathing. This is the water vapour we see when we breathe onto the glass.
  • A person at rest usually breathes between 12 and 15 times a minute.
  • The breathing rate is faster in children and women than in men.
  • The respiratory system contains a total of about 1500 miles (2400 km) of airways. The airways begin with the trachea (windpipe), which branches into two bronchi, one going to each lung. The bronchi then divide into thousands of tiny bronchioles within the lungs.
  • An adult lung contains 300 million to 500 million tiny air sacs, known as alveoli, at the ends of the bronchioles.
  • The lungs are able to float on water since they contain so many air sacs.
  • If all the alveoli in both lungs were flattened out, they would have a total area of about 160 square meters – about 80% of the size of a singles tennis court and about 80 times greater than the surface area of an average-sized adult’s skin.
  • The interior lining of an alveolus is covered by a thin layer of water, which enables oxygen to move through the wall of the alveolus and into the bloodstream efficiently.
  • Water molecules on the lining of an alveolus are attracted to each other, creating a force known as surface tension. When the alveoli become smaller during exhalation, the surface tension increases. This could cause the alveoli to collapse and prevent them from expanding again.
  • The lining of alveoli produces a substance called a surfactant. The surfactant reduces the surface tension of water, preventing the alveoli from collapsing.
  • The surface of an alveolus is covered with capillaries. Capillaries are narrow blood vessels with a thin wall that is just one cell thick. If all the capillaries in the lungs were placed end to end they would have a length of about 1600 km.
  •  Like the wall of capillaries, the wall of an alveolus is also just one cell layer thick. This allows for quick absorption of oxygen from the alveoli into the capillaries and the quick release of carbon dioxide from the capillaries into the alveoli.
  • A red blood cell contains about 250 million hemoglobin molecules, which carry oxygen through the blood. Each hemoglobin molecule can carry four oxygen molecules. There are 4 million to 6 million red blood cells in each microliter (cubic millimeter) of blood.
  • Some people can hold their breath for more than 20 minutes.
  • 13th century: Anatomist and physiologist Ibn Al-Nafis advances his theory that the blood must have passed through the pulmonary artery, through the lungs, and back into the heart to be pumped around the body. This is believed by many to be the first scientific description of pulmonary circulation.
  • 1986: Cooper performs the first successful double lung transplant.
  •   Hiccups are caused by various things and occur due to sudden movements in a diaphragm. This is a product of spasms and eating too fast is another cause.
  •  ”Laughter is the best medicine”, may have some truth. It helps to boost the immune system.
  •  When any irritant, like dust particle or pollen, comes in contact with mucus membranes in the nose. The body triggers that foreign substance by sneezing.
  • Guinness World Records lists that Charles Osborne of Anthon, Iowa as a record holder for hiccuping. For 68 years, he hiccuped.

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What is Osmosis?

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Syskool
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osmosis
osmosis

The term osmosis describes the movement of a solvent through a semi-permeable membrane from a less concentrated solution to a more concentrated one. Water is sometimes called “the perfect solvent,” and living tissue is the best example of a semi-permeable membrane.

Osmosis has a number of life-preserving functions: it assists plants in receiving water, it helps in the preservation of fruit and meat, and is even used in kidney dialysis. In addition, osmosis can be reversed to remove salt and other impurities from water.

Plants depend on osmosis to move water from their roots to their leaves. The further toward the edge or the top of the plant, the greater the solute concentration, which creates a difference in osmotic pressure. This is known as osmotic potential, which draws water upward. Osmosis protects leaves against losing water through evaporation.

Osmosis is vital to life because of its function in maintaining equilibrium inside and outside of a cell.  However, conditions on a cell can sometimes cause problems.  If there is a high concentration, salt outside a plant, all the water from inside plant cells will diffuse outside of the plant and cause the plant cells to shrink in a process called plasmolysis.  An example of plasmolysis is the wilting of flowers after they are kept out of water for a time.  Because the water content in the plant goes down, the cells constrict through plasmolysis and the whole plant grows limp, as the cells aren’t as tightly packed in the plant and thus can’t support the weight of the leaves.

Read Also: Flowering Plants

When there is a water shortage, however, other cells transmit signals to the guard cells that cause them to release their potassium. This decreases their osmotic potential, and water passes out of the guard cells to the thirsty cells around them. At the same time, the resultant shrinkage in the guard cells closes the stomata, decreasing the rate at which water transpires through them and preventing the plant from wilting.

To survive, every living cell must constantly take in the chemicals it needs and let out the ones it does not need through its thin membrane (casing). Cells do this in several ways, including osmosis, diffusion, and active transport.

Read Also: GM Seeds: A Solution to Food Security

Osmosis Facts

  • Diffusion is when the substances that are dissolved in water or mixed in air move to even the balance.
  • Osmosis happens when the molecules of a dissolved substance are too big to slip through the cell membrane – only the water is able to move.
  • Osmosis is vital to many body processes, including the workings of the kidney and the nerves. Urine gets its water from the kidneys by osmosis.
  • In diffusion, a substance such as oxygen moves in and out of cells, while the air or water it is mixed in mainly stays put.
  • Diffusion is vital to body processes such as cellular respiration when cells take in oxygen and push out waste carbon dioxide.
  • Active transport is the way a cell uses protein-based ‘pumps’ or ‘gates’ in its membrane to draw in and hold substances that might otherwise diffuse out.
  • Active transport uses energy and is how cells draw in most of their food such as glucose.
  • When the membrane has a volume of pure water on both sides, water molecules pass in and out in each direction at exactly the same rate; there is no net flow of water through the membrane.
  • Osmosis can be explained using the concept of thermodynamic free energy: the less concentrated solution contains more free energy, so its solvent molecules will tend to diffuse to a place of lower free energy in order to equalize free energy.

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Intresting facts about Bill Gates

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Syskool
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  • At the age of 13, while studying at private Lakeside School, Gates discovered his interest in software and started writing his own computer programmes.
  • Bill Gates aimed to become a millionaire by the age of 30. However, he became a billionaire at 31.
  • Bill Gates pays overUS$1 million per year in property taxes for his house.
  • At a spending rate of $1 million a day, it would take Bill Gates 218 years to spend all his money.
  • If you change all of Bill Gate’s money to US$1 notes, you can make a road from earth to the moon, 14 times back and forth. But you have to make that road non-stop for 1,400 years, and use a total of 713 BOEING 747 planes to transport all the money.
  • If Bill Gates was a country, he would be the 37th richest country on earth.
  • Bill Gates’ full name is William Henry Gates III.
  • The first computer program that Bill Gates wrote was a tic-tac-toe game. The game was played in a 2 player format where the computer was the opponent.
  •  At 17, Gates sold his first computer program, a timetable system for his high school for which he pocketed a $4,200.
  • Bill Gates never graduated from college, instead founding Microsoft with his friend Paul Allen in 1975. He was just 20 years old when he founded Microsoft.
  • Bill Gates earns nearly 250 US Dollars every second. That’s about 20 million dollars a day and 7.2 Billion dollars a year! Bill Gates can pay off the entire United States debt in less than 10 years.
  • Committed in giving back most of his fortune through charity work, Gates has reportedly reserved only about $10 million for each of his children.
  • Thirty-two years after dropping out of Harvard University in 2007, Gates returned to his school to receive an honorary degree, thus vindicating a promise he had made to his father to one day get his degree.
  •  On December 9, 2010, Gates, investor Warren Buffett, and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook’s CEO) signed the
    “Gates-Buffet Giving Pledge”, in which they promised to donate to charity at least half of their wealth.
  • After stepping down as Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer in January 2000, Gates remained as chairman and created the position of chief software architect for himself.
  •  Xanadu 2.0, Gates family mansion, boasts a 17-by-60-foot swimming pool with underground music system and a floor painted in a fossil motif.
  •  During Bill Gates’ wedding, to insure his and his wife’s privacy for the day of their wedding, Bill rented every single hotel room at the hotel they were staying and chartered every helicopter close by on the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

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Indian Defence Awards

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Syskool
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Indian Defence Awards

For the Purpose of Classification, India honours Indian Defence Awards can be divided into two categories.

  1. Gallantry Awards
  2. Non – gallantry Awards

The Gallantry awards are again divisible into two categories:

  • Those for gallantry in the face of the enemy.
  • Those for gallantry other than in the face of the enemy

The first category of the gallantry awards comprises :
1. Param Vir Chakra
2. Maha Vir Chakra
3. Vir Chakra
4. Sena, Nao Sena and Vayu Sena Medal
5. Mention in Dispatches
6. Chiefs of Staff Commendation Card

Read Also: Param Vir Chakra Winners

The second category of the gallantry awards comprise the following :
1. Ashoka Chakra
2. Kirti Chakra
3. Shaurya Chakra
These were originally named Ashoka Chakra Class I, Class II, Class III

Among non-gallantry awards, the following Indian Defence Awards are mentioned:

1. Bharat Ratna
2. Padma Vibhushan
3. Padma Bhushan
4. Param Vishisht Seva Medal
5. Padma Shri
6. Sarvottam Yudh Seva Medal
7. Uttam Yudh Seva Medal
8. Ati Vishisht Seva Medal
9. Yudh Seva Medal
10. Vishisht Seva Medal
11. 30 Years Long Seva Medal
12. 20 Years Long Service Medal
13. 9 Years Long Service Medal
14. Meritorious Service Medal
15. Long Service and Good Conduct Medal
16. General Service Medal – 1947
17. Samar Seva Medal
18. Sainya Seva Medal
19. Videsh Seva Medal
20. Commendation Card
21. Raksha Medal
22. Poorvi Star
23. Paschimi Star
24. Sangram Medal
25. Wound Medal
26. 25th Independence Anniversary Medal

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