Browsing: Lifestyle

A Brief History On March 13, 2012, the parents of 46 children riding on a Swiss coach (long distance bus, similar to our Greyhound and Trailways or Charter types in the US) found out the hard way that kids are not always safe when riding on a bus.  Near the town of Sierre, Switzerland, a coach carrying 46 school children and 4 of their teachers (and 2 crew members) swerved while driving in the Sierre Tunnel, hitting a curb and then veering head on into a concrete wall.  Among those killed were 22 of the students and all 4 teachers. …

A Brief History On March 12, 2020, people all over the globe are wondering about the true origins and the true implications of the “coronavirus” that (as we are told) originated in Wuhan, China.  Drastic measures being taken, including shutting down schools and colleges, draconian quarantines of cruise ships, cancellation public presidential campaign events, ending spectators at school athletic contests and the use of the National Guard to enforce a quarantine of New Rochelle, New York are all the types of measures we would expect in some sort of apocalyptic scenario, such as the Black Plague or the fictional “Captain…

A Brief History On March 9, 2020, we take a look at some of today’s technology that is not celebrated the way some previous inventions have been.  Virtually everyone knows that Edison invented the light bulb and Bell invented the telephone, but we ask, who knows the inventor of the touch screen?  Who invented the computer chip?  Who came up with GPS?  Today we take a few selected modern devices and tell you a little about how they came about.  What would you add to this list?  (Note: Not being scientists ourselves, some of the technology in this article is…

A Brief History On March 8, 2014, a Boeing 777 jet airliner flying from Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia to Beijing, China, disappeared from radar screens and has not been seen or heard from since, despite incredibly large and extensive search efforts.  A total of 227 passengers and 12 crew members vanished from the face of the Earth and grieving relatives want to know why. Digging Deeper While it is true that airplanes have “disappeared” often enough over the course of aviation history, with some highly noted cases such as that of Amelia Earhart (1937) and of course the infamous “Bermuda…

A Brief History On February 23, 1954, the first mass inoculation of children against the Polio virus took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  The developer of the vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk, was hailed as hero and the scourge of Polio was basically eradicated from the United States.  No longer would “iron lungs” be common, and parents did not have to live the nightmare of their children dying or becoming crippled by Polio.  As with other vaccines, the Salk vaccine saved untold millions of lives and prevented untold amounts of misery, and yet in recent years vaccines have been under fire from…