Infrared

Infrared was discovered by William Herschel an astronomer in the early 19th century. He used a prism to refract light from the sun and detected the infrared, beyond the red part of the spectrum, through an increase in the temperature. The name infrared means "below red" (from the Latin word 'infra' which means 'below').

Games

The first game to be ever published by Electronic Arts was the 1983 Hard Hat Mack for the Apple 2. The game which was later ported to the Commodore 64 and IBM PC was similar to Nintendo's Donkey Kong game, but with more game play variety and faster action.

Pioneer Corp

Pioneer Corp was founded in 1938 by Nozomu Matsumoto in Tokyo as Fukuin Shokai Seisakusho; a radio and speaker repair shop. The shop soon gained popularity because of Nozomu's innovations in speaker manufacture and was later renamed to Pioneer in 1961.

Biological Evolution

The idea of biological evolution has existed since ancient times, notably among Greek philosophers such Epicurus and Anaximander. However, the modern theory was not established until the 18th and 19th centuries, by scientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Charles Darwin. Most notably, 1959 publication of Darwin's 'On the origin of species by means of natural selection.'

Hewlett-Packard

HP is acknowledged by many as the producer of the world's first personal computer, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, in 1968. HP called it a desktop calculator because, according to the company itself, "it didn't look like an IBM." The device which came complete with cathode ray tube readout, magnetic card storage, and printer was priced at around $5000.

Matsushita

Matsushita produces electronic products under a variety of names, including; 'Panasonic' for home appliances, electronics, A/V equipment, microchips, etc; 'National' for home appliances for the Japanese market; Technics for audio equipment; and 'Ramsa' for professional audio equipment. The company is also the controlling entity for Japan Victor Company or JVC since 1953.

Earthworms

There are over 2,200 known species of earthworms worldwide. Earthworms have five hearts and can survive being cut into half as they can regenerate the missing half. Their sizes range from two centimeters to over almost ten feet depending on the species.

Google

Google is one of the few companies known for its sense of humour. If you land yourself on its 'preferences' page and click on the 'Interface Languages' dropdown, you'll also see a listing for four languages that aren't real. These include Pig Latin, Elmer Fudd (Looney Toons), Klingon (Star Trek) and Bork! Bork! Bork! which imitates a Swedish Chef on the Muppets Show.

Mammoth

Mammoth- an extinct species of elephant, which bore long tusks and was mostly covered in long hair, lived from 1.6 million years to around 10,000 years ago. The word mammoth is derived from the Russian 'mamont', which may have its origins in the Tatar word 'mamma' meaning 'earth', alluding to the long-held belief that mammoths lived underground and made burrows.

Ansari X Prize

The $10 million Ansari X Prize was a prize for the first non-government organisation to launch a reusable manned spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. It was modelled after early 20th-century aviation prizes, and aimed to spur development of low-cost spaceflight. The prize was won on October 4, 2004 by the Tier One project using the experimental SpaceShipOne.

Space Shuttle Enterprise

The Space Shuttle Enterprise was the first Space Shuttle built for NASA. It was consturcted without engines or a functional heat shield and was therefore not capable of space operations; its purpose was to perform test flights in the atmosphere. The shuttle was named Enterprise in 1976, following a letter-writing campaign by the burgeoning fan base of the TV series Star Trek.

Berry...

The ability to read e-mail on the BlackBerry has made them infamously addictive, earning them the nickname "CrackBerry". Smaller blue-coloured models of the BlackBerry are coloquially nicknamed "BlueBerrys". RIM however uses the names for subatomic particles as code names for its various models- names used include Electron, Proton, Baryon and Quark.

WMAP

The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) is a NASA satellite whose mission is to measure the temperature of the heat left over from the Big Bang. Using data provided by this satellite, scientists are now able to gauge the age of the universe which stands at 13.7 billion years. WMAP is named after Dr David Wilkinson, a pioneer in the study of cosmic radiation.

Fraunhofer

The Fraunhofer Institute is named after the German Physicist Joseph von Fraunhofer. He discovered how to make the world's finest optical glass and invented incredibly precise methods for measuring optical dispersion. Thanks to him in 1818, Germany overtook England as the centre of the optics industry.

Googol or Google?

A googol- a term coined in 1938 by nine year old Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner- is used to describe the large number, that is , the digit 1 followed by a hundred zeroes. The search engine Google was named after this number. The original founders were going for 'Googol' but ended up with 'Google' due to spelling mistake. Ultimately, this was good, because google.com was available and googol.com was not.

Digital Zoom

Digital Zoom is a fake zoom which creates a zooming effect by enlarging the pixels in the image on-the-fly. This type of zooming degrades the quality of the image, making it pixelated and unclear. On the other hand, optical zoom is achieved through lenses and, hence, is a lot more clearer and refined.

Ishihara colour test

Colour blindness can be detected by the Ishihara colour test which consists of a series of pictures of coloured spots. A figure is embedded in the picture as a number of spots with a slightly different colour that can be seen with a particular colour defect. It was named after its inventor Dr Shinobu Ishihara, a professor at Tokyo University.

Atari

Atari was founded in the US in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. The company was originally called Syzygy, an astronomical term. However, since a company with the same name already existed, they eventually changed it to Atari, a term from the game "Go" which means that a stone or a group of stones is in danger of being taken by one's opponent.

Mars

Although Mars is about half the size of Earth, with a diameter of 6,780 kms it has almost the same amount of land area. The planet, which the Greeks named after their God of War, Mars, has two moons. The larger moon has been named Phobos ("fear") while the smaller is called Deimos ("terror"), named for attributes personified in Greek mythology as sons of the god.

Blu-ray disc

A single-layer Blu-ray disc can fit up to 27GB; this is enough for about four hours of high definition video with audio. A dual-layer Blu-ray disc can fit up to 54GB, enough for eight hours of HD quality video. Recently, TDK unveiled a prototype four-layered, 100GB Blu-ray disc. Theoretically, a Blu-ray disc can go up to capacities of 200GB when it achieves eight-layers.

Japanese Citizen watch

Japanese Citizen watches are equipped with a lithium ion battery that is continously charged by any light source. The watch dial is actually a solar panel that collects light. The watch dial is actually a solar panel that collects light. A fully charged cell can run anywhere between 180 days to 4 years. If kept in the dark for too long, the watch will commence to run on exposure to light.

Archie

The very first engine for searching on the internet was called "Archie"(the name stands for 'archive' without the 'v'.) Created in 1990 by Alan Emtage- a student at McGill University in Montreal- the engine downloaded the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, thus creating a searchable database of filenames.

Sun

The Sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old and is above halfway through its evolution, is by far the largest object in the solar system. It contains more than 99.8% of the total mass of the Solar System(Jupiter contains most of the rest). The sun is personified in many mythologies: the Greeks called it Helios and the Romans called it Sol.

Internet & World Wide Web

The Internet and the World Wide Web are not synonymous: The Internet is a collection of interconnected computer networks, linked by copper wires, fibre-optic cables and satellites. While the Web is a collection of interconnected documents, linked by hyperlinks and URLs, and is accesible using the Internet.

Boxing Video Game

The first boxing video game was created for the Atari 2600, made by Activision. Since the graphical capabilities of the Atari was limited the developers decided to show the action from a top-down view, with one black and one white boxer punching each other on the nose. There was no block, so players had to rely on footwork and button mashing to win.

Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs first appeared on earth approximately 230 million years ago and lived on this planet for over 160 million years. Their extinction is usually attributed to the earth being hit by a giant asteroid. The term "Dinosauria" was coined by the English scientist Richard Owen in 1842 and is derived from the Greek words deinos ("terrible") and sauros ("lizard" or "reptile").

Torino Scale

The Torino Scale uses a measure ranging from 0 to 10.0 indicates an object has a negligibly small chance of collision with Earth or is too small to penetrate the Earth's atmosphere intact. A 10 indicates that a collision is certain, and the impacting object is large enough to precipitate a global disaster. There are no fractional values or decimal values used in the scale.

Mortal Kombat

Mortal Kombat is a popular series of fighting games created by Midway. It is especially noted for its digitised-film game spirits and its mix of bloody and brutal action; its graphic fatality killing moves led to the founding of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB).

Apple logo

The original Apple logo was designed by Steve Jobs and Ron Wayne and depicts Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree. However, this design was soon replaced in 1976 by the now famous rainbow apple with a "bite" taken out of it. The logo saw a transformation again in 1998 when it shed its multicolour image to become the single colour logo we see today.

Rayon

Count Hilaire de Chardonnet was a French chemist and industrialist who developed and manufactured the first manmade fibre, Rayon. He began to develop the fibre in 1878 and later obtained a patent for its production process that involved extruding a solution of cellulose nitrate through fine glass capillaries. In 1890, Chardonnet built the first commercial Rayon plant in France.