Iran

Iran is one of the world’s oldest continuous civilizations, with settlements dating back to 4,000 BC.

The Achaemenid Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC stretched from the Balkans in the west, to the Indus Valley in the east, making it the largest empire to exist based on percentage of world population. It contained 44% of the global population in 480 BC.

The empire collapsed in 330 BC following the conquests of Alexander the Great.

Historically, Iran has been referred to as Persia by the West, mainly due to the writings of Greek historians who called Iran Persis, meaning "land of the Persians." In 1935, Reza Shāh Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, requested the international community to refer to the country by its native name, "Iran". This was done to show that Iran belongs to all the non-Persian Iranians as well as to Persian Iranians.

The name Iran means land of the Aryans. It is used in the ancient book of the Zoroastrians, the Avesta. The "Aryan Race" was a term that Hitler used to describe his "Superior" or "perfect" race, but it originally meant Iranians.

After Iran's first democratic government nationalized the country's oil industry in 1951, ending years of British control over Iran's oil supply, the US Central Intelligence Agency orchestrated a coup d'etat at the suggestion of the British foreign office. The coup brought down Iran's prime minister and reinstated the pro-Western Shah.

In 1979, the Islamic Revolution of Iran overthrew the Shah and established an Islamic theocracy under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The flag of Iran is a tricolor comprising equal horizontal bands of green, white and red. The tricolor flag was introduced in 1906, but after the Islamic Revolution the Arabic words 'Allahu akbar' ('God is great'), written in the Kufic script of the Qur'an and repeated 22 times, were added to the red and green strips where they border the white central strip. The new "holy" flag was adopted on July 29, 1980.

On February 28, 2026, Israel and the United States launched a joint military strike on targets inside Iran. Israel codenamed the operation Roaring Lion, while the United States Department of Defense referred to its involvement as Operation Epic Fury.

The coordinated assault targeted senior officials, military commanders and strategic facilities. Among those killed was Iran’s second Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, marking one of the most consequential targeted assassinations of a sitting head of state in modern Middle Eastern history.

November 4th is national "Death to America" day in Iran, and it's an official national holiday.

Tehran is the capital of Iran and home to 12 million people. Tehran means "warm slope."

Iran has the highest rate of nose surgery in the world per capita, since the mandatory hijab tend to highlight the female face.

There is a rain forest in northern Iran, which stretches from the east in the Khorasan province to the west in the Ardebil province, covering the other provinces of Gilan, Mazandaran, and Golestan.

Iran is the only country that has both a Caspian Sea and an Indian Ocean coastline.

Nearly half of Iran has an arid desert climate. It receives less than 4 inches of rainfall per year.

The natural gas reserves of Iran are about 1,046 trillion cubic feet, about 15.8% of world's total reserves. It is the world's second largest reserves after Russia.

Iran has one of the largest rates of "brain drain" in the world. Up to 180,000 specialists and academic elite leave the country every year.

Iran is the only country in the world where it is legal to sell your kidneys — the government regulates the market.

Iran has the highest rate of nose surgery in the world per capita, since the mandatory hijab tend to highlight the female face.

iPod

Apple Inc unveiled its iPod portable player on October 23, 2001. The first iPod cost $399 when introduced. It had 5 GB of storage - worth about 1,000 songs - and only connected with Apple Mac computers.

When engineers working on the very first iPod completed the prototype, they showed it to Apple CEO Steve Jobs for his approval. He dropped the iPod in an aquarium and used the air bubbles to prove there was empty space and it could be made smaller.

1st generation iPod.  Rjcflyer@aol.com at English Wikipedia

The first iPod's price and Mac-only compatibility caused sales to be relatively slow until 2004.

The iPod Mini was the first version to come in different colors - a total of five.

The fifth generation iPod Nano was the first iPod to have a built-in camera.

The iPod line as of 2014; from left to right: iPod Shuffle, iPod Nano, iPod Touch

Apple stopped selling the iPod Classic in 2014 and the Shuffle and Nano three years later.  The sixth-generation 160GB iPod Classic was the last Apple product to use the original 30-pin dock connector and the distinctive Click Wheel.

On May 10, 2022, Apple discontinued the last of its iPod products, the iPod Touch, in effect ending the iPod product line as a whole.

An iPod has 256 billion transistors — that’s almost two and a half times more than the number of neurons in the human brain (100 billion).

Source Abc15.com

iPhone

On January 9, 2007, Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone—a touch screen mobile phone with an iPod, camera and Web-browsing capabilities—at the Macworld convention in San Francisco.

Jobs called the iPhone a "revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone."

During the first live iPhone presentation, Steve Jobs had to frequently switch phone to an identical one behind his desk because it would otherwise run out of RAM and crash.

Before Apple settled on an icon-based interface for the iPhone, the company toyed with an iPod-based interface—a touch screen with a wheel.

The original iPhone’s screen was supposed to be plastic. But Steve Jobs complained that he was getting scratches on his screen. So Corning made the screen glass.

When it went on sale in the United States on June 29, 2007 amidst huge hype, thousands of customers lined up at Apple stores across the country to be among the first to purchase an iPhone.

The 4GB phone retailed for $499 and the 8GB model debuted at $599.

In 2007, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said there was "no chance the iPhone is going to get any significant market share."

The first public call made from an iPhone was made by Steve Jobs. He called a Starbucks and ordered 4,000 lattes; then said "just kidding" and hung up.

Early iPhone users in the U.S. who did not specify a billing preference received extraordinarily detailed bills from AT&T, some spanning 50 to 100 pages. These bills itemized every data transfer, including background activities like email syncing, web browsing, and text messaging. One notable example is Justine Ezarik, known online as iJustine, who received a 300-page bill—so voluminous it was delivered in a box. 

This extensive billing was due to AT&T's default setting of detailed billing for iPhone users who didn't opt for a summary bill during activation. The detailed bills listed every data transaction, even those as small as 100-byte transfers, which were rounded up to the next kilobyte. In response to the public outcry, AT&T announced changes to its billing practices, including offering more concise paper bills and encouraging customers to switch to electronic billing to reduce paper waste.

During the middle of 2010, iPhone sales overtook those of the iPod.

The top and side of an iPhone 5S, By Calerusnak at English Wikipedia,

Apple recovered 2,204 pounds of gold from broken iPhones in 2015. That's worth about US$40 million.

The most expensive iPhone is a solid gold, diamond-studded model commissioned by an Australian tycoon at a cost of £1.92 million.

The RAM-memory of an iPhone is much more than what NASA's Apollo spaceships used to take the man to the Moon.

George Hotz, a 17-year-old hacker, was the first to unlock a first generation iPhone—he traded it for a Nissan 350z and three locked iPhones.

According to a 2023 survey conducted by Piper Sandler, 87% of teenagers in the United States own an iPhone. There are several reasons for the iPhone's popularity among teenagers. One reason is that iPhones are seen as being cool and stylish. Teenagers are also attracted to the iPhone's large app ecosystem and its easy-to-use interface.

Iowa

The first known European explorers to document Iowa were Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet who traveled the Mississippi River in 1673 documenting several Native American villages on the Iowa side. The area was claimed for France and remained a French territory until 1763.

Its name comes from the Ioway people, one of the Native American tribes that lived in Iowa.

After the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, Iowa was placed under United States control, but it was not until the construction of Fort Madison in 1808 that the U.S. established tenuous military control over the region.

On July 4, 1838, the U.S. Congress established the Territory of Iowa. President Martin Van Buren appointed Robert Lucas governor of the territory, which at the time had 22 counties and a population of 23,242.

On December 28, 1846, Iowa became the 29th state in the Union when President James K. Polk signed Iowa's admission bill into law. Its first settlers were mostly farmers.

The first Iowa State Fair was held on October 25-27, 1854 in Fairfield, Iowa. It was a small event with only 100 horses, 11 pigs, and a handful of grain and implement displays. Nearly 10,000 Iowans traveled by foot, horseback, and covered wagon to attend the fair.

The fair moved to its current location in Des Moines in 1886. Today, the Iowa State Fair is one of the largest and most popular state fairs in the United States. It attracts over a million visitors each year and features a wide variety of exhibits, competitions, and entertainment.

The State Fair has been held every year since except for the year 1898 due to the Spanish–American War and the World's Fair being held in nearby Omaha, Nebraska. The fair was also a World War II wartime casualty from 1942–1945.

Iowa had a population of just 600,000 when the Civil War started. 76,534 Iowan men fought for the Union; no other state had a higher percentage of its male population serve.

Herbert Hoover was the first US president born west of the Mississippi. He was born  in 1874 in West Branch, Iowa.

Some towns in Iowa sold their jails on the eve of Prohibition, as they were so certain crime was caused by alcohol.

In 1934, Oskaloosa, Iowa, became the first municipality in the United States to fingerprint all of its citizens.

On February 3, 1959  a small plane crashed in a cornfield 8 miles north of Clear Lake, Iowa, killing Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson with it. The phrase "The Day the Music Died" was first coined to describe the incident by Don McLean in his 1971 hit "American Pie."

The memorial marking the crash site, 2003

Iowa is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east and the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west; it is the only U.S. state whose eastern and western borders are formed entirely by rivers.

In Iowa, pigs outnumber people seven to one.

Iowa has a law that prevents new roads from being constructed diagonally. They want every road to be in a cardinal direction.

It is illegal to accept a gratuity or tip in Iowa.

Internet

HISTORY

J.C.R. Licklider, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researcher and professor, outlined his vision of a Galactic Network of computers that allowed users to gather data and access programs anywhere in the world in a series of papers. The first his seminal paper on Man-Computer Symbiosis written in 1960, foreshadowed interactive computing. The second, On-Line Man Computer Communication, was published two years later and took the Galactic Network idea further, promoting the concept of social interaction through the networking of computers.  Licklider's Galactic Network concept proved to be influential in early development of the ARPANET.

The first-ever computer-to-computer link was established by the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency" (DARPA) on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet at 10:30pm on October 29, 1969. UCLA student programmer Charley Kline sent the first message from one computer to another on that day.

Charley Kline sent 1st message from one computer to another, recorded here Wikipedia

The message was intended to be the word "login," but the ARPANET connection crashed in the middle, so the first message was just “lo."

The first thing ever sold on the internet was a bag of weed. In the early 1970s Stanford students used ARPANET accounts at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory to engage in a commercial transaction with their counterparts at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students used the network to quietly arrange the sale of an undetermined amount of marijuana.

Seven  years before America developed ARPANET Soviets were working on their version of internet called OGAS. The project was abandoned in 1970 because Soviet leaders feared it would undermine their control over the economy and country.

CompuServe launched the first consumer internet service on September 24, 1979. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates.

In 1983 the ARPANET officially changed its core networking protocols from NCP to TCP/IP, marking the beginning of the Internet.

The Internet's Domain Name System was created in 1985. The first domain ever registered was Symbolics.com on March 15, 1985.  It was registered by the Symbolics Computer Corporation in Massachusetts. The symbolics.com domain was purchased by XF.com in 2009.

France had a "proto-internet" called Minitel during the 1980s. A computer network open to anyone with a telephone half the population had access to it. It allowed for buying airplane tickets, shopping, 24-hr news, message boards and adult chat services. It was used to coordinate a national strike in 1986. Some believe it hindered the internet's adoption in France.

The Morris worm, the first internet-distributed computer worm to gain significant mainstream media attention, was launched from MIT in 1988.

While working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), near Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee released files describing his idea for the World Wide Web, a publicly available service on the Internet on August 6, 1991. This date also marked the debut of the Web as a publicly available service on the Internet, although new users could only access it after August 23rd.

WorldWideWeb, c. 1993

Back in 1992, the whole internet used to be on a floppy disk which Tim  Berners-Lee used to demo it to others. The disk is now lost.

The first recorded use of 'surfing' as a mode of using the internet is attributed to internet pioneer Mark McCahill, who used the phrase in February 1992.

The term was popularized a few months later by the upstate New York librarian Jean Armour Polly, aka “Net Mom."  Polly was the author of an article called "Surfing the INTERNET", published in the University of Minnesota Wilson Library Bulletin in June, 1992.

The internet's first uploaded image of a band (see below) was of the joke group Les Horribles Cernettes (LHC), an all-girl group comprised of girlfriends and assistants of CERN employees . The initials of their name are the same as those of the Large Hadron Collider, which was later built at CERN. Their photo was uploaded on July 18, 1992. 

Wikipedia

Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva wrote a series of Perl scripts that periodically mirrored these pages and rewrote them into a standard format. This formed the basis for W3Catalog, the web's first primitive search engine, released on September 2, 1993. The search site lasted for about three years before more modernized search engines began appearing.

In 1993 CERN announced World Wide Web protocols would be free.

In December 1993 there were just 623 websites on the internet.

WXYC, the student radio station of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provided the world's first internet radio broadcast in 1994.

It took radio broadcasters 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, TV 13 years, and the Internet just four years.

Robert Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, predicted in 1995 that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" the next year, promising to eat his words if it did not.  In 1997, he put his article in a blender and drank it at the International World Wide Web Conference.

Also in 1995 Newsweek published an article berating the internet and calling visions about its future "baloney". It predicted that "no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works."

David Bowie's "Telling Lies" was released on his website in 1996, the first single by a major recording artist released exclusively on the Internet. Over 300,000 people downloaded the original Internet-only release.

In Britain, Tesco became the first supermarket in 1996 to offer Internet shopping and within a few years, housewives all over the world could buy groceries without ever leaving their homes.

The first person to stream their life on the internet was 19-year-old Jennifer Ringley aka Jennicam, who from 1996, broadcasted her life from her college dorm room 24/7. At its peak, she got 7 million hits per day, a significant proportion of the internet at the time.

On April 25, 1997, a significant disruption of the internet occurred due to a faulty router operated by MAI Network Services in Florida. The router mistakenly leaked a large amount of its routing table to the Internet, causing a routing black hole. The outage lasted for several hours and affected millions of users worldwide. It was one of the first major internet blackouts, and it served as a wake-up call for the internet community to develop better network protocols and address the issue of routing table leaks.

The first recorded use of the term 'silver surfer' for an over-50 browsing the internet was in 1997.

in 1997 Pope John Paul II nominated St. Isidore of Seville to be the patron saint of the Internet. She was a seventh-century theologian and encyclopedist who tried to record everything ever known.

The number of worldwide Internet users increased 566% between 2000 and 2012.

In 2010, Finland became the first country to make Internet access a legal right. A year later, the United Nations declared Internet access a human right, and disconnecting people from it is against international law.

For the first time, automated bot traffic officially surpassed human traffic on the global internet in 2024. 

According to the 2025 Imperva Bad Bot Report (which analyses data from the full year of 2024), bots accounted for 51% of all internet traffic, while human activity fell to 49%

100% of Iceland's population has the internet, the only country in the world.

FUN FACTS

Every minute 345 new internet virus threats are released — or almost six a second.

It is estimated that it would take 400 billion trees to print out the Internet.

It would take 136 billion sheets of A4 paper to print out the entire internet.

Internet speed is measured in Megabits, not Megabytes. Bytes hold 8 bits, thus making an internet speed of 100megabits/s actually only 12.5 megabytes/s.

There are sen primary keyholders of the Internet. Each keyholder is chosen for their geographical spread and Internet security background to ensure that no one country has more keyholders. Together, their keys create a master key, which in turn controls one of the central security measures at the core of the web. The keyholders are a last resort option in case something catastrophic happens to the world's Internet.

Indian billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani has invested over $30 Billion to improve India's mobile and internet infrastructures since 2011, when his daughter, who was back home from Yale for holiday and tried to submit her coursework, told him that "the internet in our house sucks".

The largest Internet café is ChamsCity Digital Mall in Abuja, Nigeria, offering 1,027 computer terminals.

One third of all internet traffic from the U.S. to Asia passes through a single skyscraper in Downtown Los Angeles, where 260 ISPs lease space for interconnected networks.

54.9% of the Internet is in English, 5.9% is in Russian, 5.7% is in German, 5% is in Japanese, and 4.6% is in Spanish.

Interest

The Bible and the Qur'an both have passages that denounce and in many cases downright prohibit collecting interest on loans. Buddhism also condemns charging interest on a loan.

The First Council of Nicaea, in 325 AD, forbade clergy from engaging in usury, which was defined as lending on interest above 1 percent per month.

The Catholic Church in medieval Europe regarded the charging of interest at any rate as sinful.

The Pilgrim Fathers borrowed £4,000, to be repaid at the rather hefty rate of 43% .from a London company of investors for their voyage to  New England. They spent the next 23 years repaying their loan.

At the beginning of 1974, interest rates in Britain were precisely equivalent to those which the bankrupt Philip II of Spain had to pay after the loss of the Armada.

In November 2013 the European Central Bank cuts its bank rate to 0.25%, an historic low point.

Insulin

Canadian physiologist Frederick Banting was inspired to research the treatment of diabetes while preparing a class lecture on the pancreas, when he read a paper about the relationship between the pancreas and diabetes. He knew it was an accepted fact that diabetes was caused by a disorder of the pancreas that kept the body from making use of sugar, so Banting decided that if he tied off the pancreatic duct he could isolate the hormone causing the disorder.

In the spring of 1921, Banting traveled to Toronto to explain his idea to J.J.R. Macleod, who was Professor of Physiology at the University of Toronto, and asked Macleod if he could use his lab space to test it out.  Macleod agreed and lent him Charles Best, a research student at the university.

After several months of experiments on laboratory dogs, Banting and Best prepared a solution containing the hormone insulin which they injected into the veins of a diabetic dog, and within a few hours the dog was walking again. Soon they were able to purify these extracts sufficiently to inject and treat diabetic patients.

Frederick Banting joined by Charles Best in office, 1924

At Toronto's General Hospital, 14-year-old diabetic Leonard Thompson became on January 11, 1922 the first person to be treated with the insulin drug, using a fetal calf pancreas extract. However, the ox extract was so impure, Thompson suffered a severe allergic reaction, and further injections were canceled. Biochemist James Collip, who was helping Banting and Best, worked day and night to improve the extract. A second dose was injected twelve days later, which was completely successful in completely eliminating the glycosuria sign of diabetes.

Frederick Banting, Charles Best, and James Collip agreed to receive $1 each in exchange for giving their patent rights for Insulin to the Board of Governors of the University of Toronto in 1923. The university then gave pharmaceuticals the rights to manufacture Insulin without royalties and to improve the formula in order to make the drug better and accessible to as many diabetics as possible at the lowest cost possible.

In 1923 Banting was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine with his mentor John MacLeod, the Professor of Physiology at Toronto University. Banting, annoyed that Best was not mentioned, shared half of his prize with Best.

Banting, who received the Nobel Prize at age 32, remains the youngest Nobel laureate in the area of Physiology/Medicine.

Insulin

The word “Insulin” comes from the Latin for island, as it is produced by clusters of cells in the pancreas known as the Islets of Langerhans.

When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941 the Japanese occupation of China was tightened, and soon all the pharmacies in Shanghai were closed. Eva Saxl, a woman with type 1 diabetes, found herself with no legal access to insulin. She synthesised her own insulin in a basement saving not only her own life but the lives of over 200 people in the Shanghai Ghetto who would have died when legal insulin became unavailable.

The crystal structure of insulin in the solid state was determined by Dorothy Hodgkin; she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964.

Before the advent of biotechnology, the organisms used for insulin were the pigs and cows destined for our dinner plates—specifically, their pancreas glands, a waste product of the meatpacking industry.  In 1978 Genentech produce biosynthetic human insulin in Escherichia coli bacteria using recombinant DNA techniques.

Cone snail venom contains weaponized insulin. The insulin forms part of a poison mixture evocatively known as “nirvana cabal”. It allows the snail to disable entire schools of swimming fish by sending them into 2hypoglycaemic shock", a condition brought on by plummeting blood sugar levels.

Male platypus venom contains a hormone that promotes insulin release, called GLP-1; it's found in humans but degrades quickly. Platypuses make a long-lasting form of it, paving the way to new diabetes treatment; the platypus GLP-1 can be made in the lab so no platypuses will be needed for it.

Insulin is the sixth most expensive liquid in the world at $9,400 per gallon with prices expected to rise in the future.