Forbidden City

The Forbidden City was the Chinese imperial palace from the Ming Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty. It is located in the middle of Beijing, China, and now houses the Palace Museum.The palace complex exemplifies traditional Chinese palatial architecture,and has influenced cultural and architectural developments in East Asia and elsewhere. The Forbidden City was declared a World Heritage Site in 1987,and is listed by UNESCO as the largest collection of preserved ancient wooden structures in the world.

Lying at the center of Beijing, the Forbidden City, called Gu Gong in Chinese, was the imperial palace during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Now known as the Palace Museum, it is to the north of Tiananmen Square. Rectangular in shape, it is the world's largest palace complex and covers 74 hectares. Surrounded by a six meter deep moat and a ten meter high wall are 9,999 rooms. The wall has a gate on each side. Opposite the Tiananmen Gate, to the north is the Gate of Divine Might (Shenwumen), which faces Jingshan Park. The distance between these two gates is 960 meters, while the distance between the gates in the east and west walls is 750 meters. There are unique and delicately structured towers on each of the four corners of the curtain wall. These afford views over both the palace and the city outside.

The Forbidden City is divided into two parts. The southern section, or the Outer Court was where the emperor exercised his supreme power over the nation. The northern section, or the Inner Court was where he lived with his royal family. Until 1924 when the last emperor of China was driven from the Inner Court, fourteen emperors of the Ming dynasty and ten emperors of the Qing dynasty had reigned here. Having been the imperial palace for some five centuries, it houses numerous rare treasures and curiosities. Listed by UNESCO as a World Cultural Heritage Site in 1987, the Palace Museum is now one of the most popular tourist attractions world-wide.

Construction of the palace complex began in 1407, the 5th year of the Yongle reign of the third emperor of the Ming dynasty. It was completed fourteen years later in 1420. It was said that a million workers including one hundred thousand artisans were driven into the long-term hard labor. Stone needed was quarried from Fangshan, a suburb of Beijing. It was said a well was dug every fifty meters along the road in order to pour water onto the road in winter to slide huge stones on ice into the city. Huge amounts of timber and other materials were freighted from faraway provinces.

FACEBOOK

Facebook is a global social networking website that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. Users can add friends and send them messages, and update their personal profiles to notify friends about themselves. Additionally, users can join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region. The website's name stems from the colloquial name of books given at the start of the academic year by university administrations with the intention of helping students get to know each other better.Users can join and create up to 200 groups according to their interests or areas of expertise. It will appear in the search results of Facebook if the group is on public. Users can choose fan pages according to their interests to connect and interact with other strangers. Users can set their profiles on private so as to prevent acquaintances from contacting them. Users can also set their profiles on public.This allows close friends to send messages and add the user as a friend. It lets users update their personal profiles to notify their close friends about themselves. They can also join networks organized by city, workplace, school, and region to connect and interact with their close friends.Public profiles also allow any stranger or acquaintance to contact the user which results in lack of privacy. Public profiles can be blocked by any user but private profiles cannot.

The website is free to users and generates revenue from advertising including banner ads.Users can create profiles including photos and lists of personal interests, exchange private or public messages, and join groups of friends. By default, the viewing of detailed profile data is restricted to users from the same network and "reasonable community limitations".
The media often compare Facebook to MySpace, but one significant difference between the two websites is the level of customization.MySpace allows users to decorate their profiles using HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), while Facebook only allows plain text.One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums and photos.Facebook allows users to upload an unlimited number of photos, compared with other image hosting services such as Photobucket and Flickr, which apply limits to the number of photos that a user is allowed to upload. In the past, all users were limited to 60 photos per album. However, some users report that they are able to create albums with a new limit of 200 photos.Another feature of the Photos applications is the ability to "tag", or label users in a photo. For instance, if a photo contains a user's friend, then the user can tag the friend in the photo. This sends a notification to the friend that they have been tagged, and provides them a link to see the photo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Chopsticks

Chopsticks are small tapered sticks used in pairs of equal length as the traditional eating utensils of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Generally believed to have originated in ancient China, they can also be found in some areas of Tibet and Nepal that are close to Han Chinese populations. Chopsticks are most commonly made of bamboo or plastic, but are also made of metal, bone, ivory, and various types of wood. The pair of sticks is maneuvered in one hand, between the thumb and fingers, and used to pick up pieces of food.Many rules of etiquette govern the proper conduct of the use of chopsticks. Held between the thumb and fingers of one hand, chopsticks are used tong-like to pick up portions of food, which are prepared and brought to the table in small and convenient pieces. They are thought of as an extension of one's fingers. Chopsticks may also be used (except in Korea) as means for sweeping rice and other nominal morsels into the mouth directly from the bowl.


Picking up the hot Cellana nigrolineata with chopsticksChopsticks are traditionally held in the right hand, even by some left-handed people. Although chopsticks may now be found in either hand, a few still consider left-handed chopstick use as improper etiquette. Some historians believe this rule of etiquette originated from a Chinese legend.[citation needed]

In chopstick-using cultures, food is generally made into small pieces; however, some chopstick designs have carved rings encircling the tips to aid in grasping larger pieces of food. Rice, which would be difficult to eat with chopsticks if prepared using Western methods, is usually prepared in East Asia with more water, which leads to "clumping" of the rice conducive to eating with chopsticks. The sticky characteristics of the rice also depend on the cultivar of rice; the cultivar used in East Asian countries is usually japonica, which is a more naturally clumping kind of rice than indica, the rice used in most Western and South Asian countries.

There are several styles of chopsticks that vary in respect to:

Length: Very long chopsticks, usually about 30 or 40 centimeters, tend to be used for cooking, especially for deep frying foods. In Japan they are called saibashi (菜箸). Shorter chopsticks are generally used as eating utensils but are also used for cooking.
Tapering: The end of the chopsticks for picking up food are tapered to a blunt or a pointed end. Blunt end chopsticks provide more surface area for holding food and for pushing rice into the mouth. Pointed chopsticks allow for easier manipulation of food and for picking out bones from cooked fish. Pointed ends are also helpful in spearing the food, if the proper technique cannot be mastered. Spearing is seen, however, as improper etiquette.
Material: Chopsticks are made from a variety of materials: bamboo, plastic, wood, bone, metal, jade, and ivory.

Human Hair Colour

Hair color is the pigmentation of hair follicles due to two types of melanin, eumelanin and pheomelanin. Generally, if more melanin is present, the color of the hair is darker; if less melanin is present, the hair is lighter. Levels of melanin can vary over time causing a person's hair color to change, and it is possible to have hair follicles of more than one color.
Particular hair colors can be associated with ethnic groups - however, due to migration and global travel, considerable variations have developed in the hair color of individuals within an ethnic group, creating a greatly increased diversity of hair color.Two types of pigment give hair its color: eumelanin and pheomelanin. Pheomelanin colors hair red. Eumelanin, which has two subtypes of black or brown, determines the darkness of the hair color. A low concentration of brown eumelanin results in blond hair, whereas a higher concentration of brown eumelanin will color the hair brown. High amounts of black eumelanin result in black hair, while low concentrations give gray hair. All humans have some pheomelanin in their hair.
Pheomelanin is more chemically stable than black eumelanin, but less chemically stable than brown eumelanin, so it breaks down more slowly when oxidized. This is why bleach gives darker hair a reddish tinge during the artificial coloring process. As the pheomelanin continues to break down, the hair will gradually become orange, then yellow, and finally white.
The genetics of hair colors are not yet firmly established. According to one theory, at least two gene pairs control human hair color.
One gene, (brown/blond) has a dominant brown allele and a recessive blond allele. A person with a brown allele will have brown hair; a person with no brown alleles will be blond. This explains why two brown-haired parents can produce a blond-haired child.
The other gene pair is a non-red/red pair, where the not-red allele (which suppresses production of pheomelanin) is dominant and the allele for red hair is recessive. A person with two copies of the red-haired allele will have red hair, but it will be either auburn or bright reddish orange depending on whether the first gene pair gives brown or blond hair, respectively.

BROWN HAIR

GREY HAIR

RED HAIR

BLONDE HAIR

BLACK HAIR

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_hair_color

Space Food

What is space food? A typical space menu is made up of a lot of the same items found in homes and restaurants here on Earth. It might include foods such as:

• Brownies
• Crispy rice cereal
• Beef stroganoff
• Chicken stew
• Scrambled eggs
• Pineapple
• Granola bars
• Macaroni and cheese
• chocolate pudding

The biggest differences between space food and regular food are in the packaging and design. Space food must be carefully contained so it doesn't float around in the low-gravity (microgravity) environment. Even something as simple as a few crumbs can become deadly in low gravity. Loose pieces of food can become lodged in shuttle vents or can waft into an astronaut's nose or mouth and pose a choking or breathing hazard. Liquids can float away as well, so drinks like coffee, orange juice, apple cider and tea are packaged as powders. Astronauts add water to the contained drinks to rehydrate them.

Does food taste the same when you're floating thousands of miles above the Earth's surface? Scientists say no. In the weightless environment, food aromas don't quite make it to the nose. Because smell is a big part of taste, astronauts miss out on a lot of the foods' flavors. Weightlessness also causes fluids to accumulate in the astronauts' upper body, giving them perpetual stuffy noses. If you've ever tried to eat when you had a cold, you know that congestion makes for very bland tasting food.

eating hamburgers

space food

http://science.howstuffworks.com/space-food.htm