My Science School

          All societies seek equality. The idea that all human beings are equal is based on the concept of social justice. For peaceful and prosperous coexistence within and among societies and nations, the principle of social justice is an important element. February 20 is celebrated as the World Day of Social Justice.

          The core of social justice is in promoting human dignity. People face inequality in many ways. Economic inequality, gender inequality, racial and caste inequality and inequality in terms of opportunity are some of the ways society is divided. The principles of social justice promote equality on all counts and advocate removing barriers that split society in terms of age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, culture, nationality and disability.

          The UN has constituted an international body called the International Labour Organization for ensuring employment, social protection, social dialogue, and fundamental principles and rights at work. Taking care of the interests of the migrants ranging up to 258 million across the world is another task of the UN.

          Equality is an ideal state and often an impossible dream; however, if states do not strive incessantly towards it, societies will fall apart and disintegrate.

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          Long before the Internet or television was popular, the radio ruled the world! People at home eagerly waited in front of radios for their favourite programme and young people in streets were seen with their ears glued to the machine listening to music! Even today, the radio is considered the mass medium reaching the widest audience in the world. In honour of the radio, we hold February 13 as the World Radio Day.

          Radio is considered a powerful communication tool at a very low cost. The main advantage of the radio is that it is suitable for communities in remote areas. It is also an affordable medium for vulnerable people such as the illiterate, the disabled, women, youth and the poor. It also offers a platform to intervene in the public debate, irrespective of people’s educational level. Radio has a strong and specific role in emergency communication and in disaster relief too.

          An amazing quality of radio is that it has managed to adapt to the changes and challenges of the 21st century. A ubiquitous medium, radio finds a place in homes, workplaces and automobiles.

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          Most societies in the world are patriarchal, meaning that men hold all the power, and women are excluded from the power structure. Traditionally, women have played second fiddle to men in various socio-political and cultural scenarios. While men were the rulers of the land, holders of important jobs and breadwinners for the family, women were mostly confined to the four walls of the home, taking care of children and doing household chores. Many attempts and interventions have been made for bringing about equality between both sexes in the society. February 11 is dedicated to gender equality and celebrated as the International Day for Women and Girls in Science.

           Science is one area where men have been dominating for long. A study conducted in 14 countries indicates that the probability of female students of graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree or Doctor’s degree in science-related field is 18 per cent, 8 per cent and 2 per cent respectively. The study also indicates that in the case of men it is 37 per cent, 18 per cent and 6 per cent. Nations today believe that gender neutrality in science is essential for the achievement of internationally agreed development goals, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The United Nations declared the International Day solely with the view of ensuring gender equality and empowerment of women and girls in science and technology.

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          Cancer is probably the most dreaded disease in the world today. Statistics claim that about one in six deaths among humans is caused by cancer and that there is hardly any family untouched by the lethal fangs of this deadly disease.

          World Cancer Day, celebrated on February 4, intends to reassure the world that cancer is no longer a death warrant. There is a concerted effort world over to contain the illness, to improve the chances of survival and to enhance quality of life of people living with cancer.

          There is much more the world can do than it is doing now. Dr. Etienne Krug, WHO Director for the Department for Management of Non-communicable Diseases, thinks that nations across the globe should act upon the causes of the disease and prevent them from occurring in the first place.

          Countries should strengthen their health system responses and ensure earlier diagnosis and better access to affordable treatment by qualified personnel, thereby saving millions of lives. One of the best ways of prevention is early detection of the disease.

          The year 2018 was an important year for cancer control as the UN encouraged nations to implement the blueprint of prevention and control of cancer at the Third High-level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Prevention and Control of Non-communicable Diseases.

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          The world would have been a happier place if certain events had not happened in history. Between 1941 and 1945, when nations were engaged in World War II, Nazi Germany systematically murdered six million Jews in Europe. One of the most heinous genocides in human history, the Holocaust is a sad testimony to the depths of Man’s cruelty and brutality could reach! The world commemorates January 27 as the International Day of Remembrance in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.

           The United Nations devised an outreach programme called the United Nations Outreach Programme to tell the world about the need to prevent other instances of such cruelty. The initiative was designed to encourage developing educational curricula on the subject of the Holocaust to mobilize the civil society for education. Many programmes were launched to recall the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to warn people of the dangers of hatred, bigotry, racism and prejudice.

          A number of activities, including special events, film screenings, discussion papers from leading academics, information materials, partnerships with intergovernmental organizations and many other initiatives were undertaken to encourage awareness about fascism, and the concentration of power in individuals.

Because it buys about everything we need to survive: food, homes, gas for our cars, electricity, heat, water, and cookies-and-cream milk shakes. People invest money in stocks, bank savings plans, property, and their education to eventually make more money.

The importance of money becomes very clear when a person has no money, Money for a poor person is everything, it becomes very important for him to earn so that he can fulfill his basic needs. However, recently everyone has become consumption oriented. We want to buy anything that is new on the market and catches our interest and we are falling prey to the attractive packaging and advertisements of a product. Thus we buy things that we have little need for which in turn makes us want more money. Money enables us to afford a better quality of life; more money means bigger and better houses and cars, better quality products, better entertainment etc. Another advantage is less stress in paying bills and other household expenses. Money may also allow a person to pursue his dreams, for example a person who wants to attain higher education may not be able to without money. 

 

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Here’s the 4,000-year-old formula in four grisly steps:

Step 1: A priest poked a special hook up the dearly departed’s nose to yank out the brains (which were considered useless).

Step 2: The liver, stomach, intestines, and lungs were all removed, cleaned, preserved, and sealed in special “canopic jars” carved to look like the gods who guard these organs. The heart – considered crucial equipment for the perilous journey through the underworld – was kept in place.

Step 3: Priests packed the body inside and out with a special salt to sop up the moisture. After the body dried for 40 days, it was stuffed with rags and plants so it didn’t look like a deflated balloon.

Step 4: Priests rubbed the corpse’s skin with oils and resins to soften it. Layers of linen, treated with the same oils, were wrapped around the mummy, giving it the famous bandaged look seen in movies. Finally, the priests tucked amulets into the wrappings and uttered spells to activate their protective powers.

 

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King Tutankhamun, aka King Tut, wasn’t the first boy king to rule ancient Egypt, but he is the most famous, thanks to the discovery of his tomb and its trove of treasures in 1922. The most valuable artifact was Tut’s mummy, nested inside the many coffins and boxlike shrines to protect his spirit for eternity. Unfortunately, Egyptologists a century ago weren’t as gentle with mummies as they are today. They cut Tut into pieces to pry his body from the sticky sacred oils that coated the inside of his coffin. Such rough handling inflicted injuries on the 3,300-year-old mummy that made it tough to tell what caused Tut’s demise.

Some suspected he was murdered. But modern technologies like 3-D scanning revealed that the all-powerful king was actually in poor health. He suffered from a bone disease that made walking a chore. Bouts of malaria left him shaky and weak. None of the tests pointed to foul play as the cause of Tut’s death. Instead, the likely culprit is a broken leg revealed by x-rays. Perhaps the frail pharaoh tumbled from one of the chariots found in his tomb. With his immune system already weakened by malaria, Tut could have easily died from an infection in the busted bone.

 

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Tomb walls in ancient Egypt were inscribed with spells to frighten away grave robbers. “To all who enter to make evil against this tomb,” read one inscription, “may the crocodile be against them on water and the snakes and scorpions be against them on land.” Indeed, tragedy tracked the discovery of King Tut’s grave by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922. When the sponsor of the Tut expedition, Lord Carnarvon, died less than a year after the tomb was opened, reporters pounced on the idea that he’d fallen victim to a mummy’s curse. It wasn’t crocs or scorpions that did in Lord Carnarvon, however. He died from an infected mosquito bite. Despite the threat of curses (along with confusing dead-end corridors and decoy treasure rooms), most royal tombs were raided and robbed in ancient times – sometimes by the very workers who built them and knew their layouts.

 

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Archaeologists combing Egypt have excavated an entire zoo’s worth of preserved animals: cats, dogs, donkeys, lions, rams, and shrews. Ancient Egyptians made these mummies for many reasons. Beloved pets were embalmed and entombed with their owners so that they might reunite in the afterlife. Sometimes, only the meat was mummified, to serve as an eternal jerky snack. Crocodiles, ibises, and other animals linked to specific gods were mummified by the millions. Although some mummies ended up in museums, the majority of human and animal mummies were burned as torches, used as fertilizer, or even ground up for medicine!

 

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To the people of ancient Egypt, death was only the beginning. Egyptians kings (called pharaohs) were thought to become gods when they passed away. Ordinary Egyptians believed they would spend eternity with their ancestors in a perfect version of Egypt. But gaining entry into the afterlife wasn’t as easy as tumbling off a pyramid. The Egyptians believed the spirits of their dearly departed wouldn’t have a happy afterlife without access to their former bodies, so priests perfected the process of mummification to keep corpses from rotting away.

Since their rediscovery, in the 19th century, we have learned a great deal about the ancient Egyptians and the reasons they left mummies behind. It is commonly said that the Egyptians mummified their dead to preserve the body for the afterlife, but this is an oversimplification of a very complicated process and a corresponding set of beliefs. The practice of embalming, anointing, wrapping and reciting spells for the dead reflects the sophisticated way in which the Egyptians viewed life, death, and the underworld.

 

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Before the invention of pulleys or iron tools, Egyptian work crews relied on strong muscles and even stronger ropes. The blocks were quarried on-site or shipped down the Nile River from across the kingdom. Gangs of workers loaded the blocks on wooden sledges and hauled them across sand moistened with water, which made the sledges slide more easily. The blocks were then hauled up long mud ramps at the rate of one block every two minutes. No one knows how laborers were able to get the 2.5-ton stone blocks from the quarries to the building site. Wheels wouldn't have been useful on the desert sand and gravel, so they most likely dragged the blocks with wooden sleds and ropes. Some think that workers used quarter-circle wooden sleds that fit around a rectangular block. They attached the sleds to the block, and a crew of about eight men rolled them along the ground, much like rolling a keg of beer. Others say the laborers used wooden rollers.

 

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No. They were built by Egyptian farmers drafted into a national labor force called the corvee, which handled the heavy lifting on pyramid construction sites. They were fed, clothed, and housed, and received medical care when they got hurt on the job. Ancient graffiti hints that these men and women took pride in building a “house of eternal life” for their god-king. And unlike slaves, corvee workers could go home when the work season ended. Still, pyramid building was hardly an easy gig. Archaeologists digging up a worker cemetery found bodies with busted bones and diseases related to a lifetime of heavy lifting.

 

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The pyramids were built to protect the body of the deceased pharaoh. These massive tombs were constructed to withstand the elements of time and were intended to last forever. Most Ancient Egyptians planned for their death and the pharaoh was no exception. His death was much more elaborate than the typical Ancient Egyptian and considered an important event; this process was tied to the rising and setting of the sun.

It was believed that while alive, the pharaoh represented Horus and upon his death he represented Osiris. During his state as Osiris, he would set the sun, while the new pharaoh, his son, in the image of Horus, would raise the sun. This process continued for hundreds of years and this is why it was important the pharaoh be protected eternally to avoid a cosmic disturbance.

The pharaoh also believed that his death was an extension to a journey towards eternal life. In order to become a “being” of the afterworld, it was important the pharaoh’s physical body be safeguarded and recognizable by his spirit, this in turn, lead to the process of mummification. The process itself consisted of being embalmed then wrapped in fine linen. Once the process of mummification was complete, the pharaoh was buried with his most prized possessions such as jewelry, funerary statues, and items that would aid him in his afterlife.

 

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It is located in Teotihuacan, Mexico. It was built around A.D. 100. It measures 234 feet (71 m). It was built as a temple for an Aztec god. The Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan is classified as the world’s third largest pyramid coming third to the two Egyptian pyramids of Giza. The low incline and squat structure of the Sun Temple means that the perimeter at the base of the Sun Pyramid is almost the same as the Great Pyramid of Egypt. The walk around the base takes a whole 15 minutes and covers 894 meters, while the Giza Pyramid has a perimeter of 920m. The main attraction of the Sun Temple is that visitors can climb the 248 steps to the top of the 75-meter pyramid. From the summit there are wonderful views over the Avenue of the Dead, which leads to the younger Pyramid of the Moon.

 

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