Snail

A snail is a common name for a gastropod mollusc with a coiled shell.

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Close relatives of the snails are the slugs, which are basically snails without shells.

SNAILS IN HISTORY 

The Burgundy snail was hailed for helping end the Jugurthine War (111-105BC) when a mercenary hunting snails found himself on a hill from which he could secretly survey a fort. General Gaius Marius then attacked and captured it, leading to a Roman victory.

The Romans ate common garden snails as snacks and were responsible for introducing the molluscs to Britain.

Ancient Roman Fulvius Herpinus fed his snails wine and meat before consuming them himself.

The trade in snails for eating boomed in medieval times when monks used them as replacement meat dishes during Lent.

Charles Darwin recorded in his Descent Of Man some evidence of intelligence, communication and homing instinct amongst the snail species.

A "dead" Egyptian snail was put on display in the British Museum in March 1846. The snail spent nearly four years glued to a specimen card before scientists realized it was still alive.

ANATOMY 

Snails are invertebrates, which are animals with no backbones. The shell on the snail helps protect it, and also reduces the loss of water by evaporation.

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A snail's "foot" is a muscle which allows it to move slowly across the ground.

The biggest snail is the African giant snail. Their foot is up to 35 cm long.

The largest recorded specimen of African giant snail was owned by Christopher Hudson of Hove, East Sussex, UK, and was collected in Sierra Leone in June 1976. It measured 39.3 centimetres (15.5 in) from snout to tail when fully extended, with a shell length of 27.3 cm (10.7 in) in December 1978.

Garden Snails have thousands of teeth, which are mounted on their tongue (radula). They are classed as Gastropods meaning, "walking stomach."

Snails’ teeth are the strongest natural material on Earth, able to withstand pressures high enough to turn carbon into diamond.

Snails have blue blood due to the lack of iron. They use copper instead to transport oxygen.

A snail can grow back a new eye if it loses one.

A snail’s venom can act as a pain-killer 1000 times more powerful than Morphine - And it’s not addictive.

BEHAVIOR 

Most land snails are herbivorous. They eat vegetables and fruits, such as lettuce, carrots, cucumber and apples. Aquatic snails are usually omnivores or predatory carnivores.

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Snails use only two brain cells to make "complex decisions". One cell tells the snail if it's hungry, the other tells the snail if food is around.

Land snails are nocturnal animals and move to food and partners in the late evening or at night. Water snails do not distinguish different daytimes.

A snail can sleep for three years. Desert snails sense when the air is particularly dry, and will burrow underground as a result. They can hibernate there for three to four years until the climate becomes more suitable for them.

Snails, which are hermaphrodites, mate by first stabbing each other with a tiny spike called a love dart, which determines who is more likely to be the 'male' in the exchange (the better stabber). Scaled to human size, the dart would be a 15-inch (38.1 cms) knife.

Some hermaphrodite snails do not need another snail to reproduce, but can make more snails all by themselves.

Each snail produces about thirty eggs and places them underneath a stone for them to hatch.

MOVEMENT 

The snail's foot exudes slime, which eases its movement, leaving a trail.

Snails can crawl up walls and even upside down because of the slime produced by their bodies.

Giving Prozac to a snail renders it unable to stick to surfaces.

The fastest land snail is the Common garden snail (Helix aspera). It can reach speeds up to 0.047 kmh (0.029 mph).

On February 20, 1990, a garden snail named Verne completed a 31-cm (12.2-in) course at West Middle School in Plymouth, Michigan, USA, in a world record 2 min 13 sec at 0.233 cm/sec (0.09 in/sec).

A snail moving at its top speed of two inches a minute would finish a marathon in just over 18 months.

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It would take a snail nearly 4,575 years to circle the Earth.

SNAILS AS FOOD 

Approximately one billion snails are served in restaurants annually.

The French eat 25,000 tons of snails a year, equivalent to 700 million individual snails. Roman - or Burgundy- snails are among the most popular.

French cooked snails

After the snails are cooked, the French make a dish called Escargot. They usually boil them in salt water, and add a garlic sauce.

There are nearly 200 snail farms in France but they still import 85 per cent of the snails they eat.

In 1928 a Mrs Donoghue was drinking a ginger beer in the Wellmeadow café in Paisley, Scotland. She found the decomposed remains of a snail in her drink. Mrs Donaghue took the company to court, and won the case, This laid the foundation of the modern law of negligence, establishing general principles of the duty of care.

UNUSUAL SNAILS 

There are more than 43,000 known species of snails all over the world.

The channeled basket snail can use its muscular foot to catapult itself through the air.

The slipper-shelled snail starts life as a male and gradually turns female as it grows up.

The scaly-foot gastropod is a species of deep-sea snail that lives in hydrothermal vents 1.5 miles (2.4 kms) underwater with crushing pressures and temperatures up to 750 degrees Fahrenheit (399 celsius). It is the only known living animal that uses iron sulfides in its skeleton.

The scaly-foot gastropod does not require consumption of food as it lives on the energy the bacteria in its gland produces.

The cone snail, which looks like a cute little snail, is the most venomous animal on earth. Its venom is a mix of hundreds of toxins delivered through a harpoon-like tooth is capable of even piercing a wetsuit. There is no antivenom.

The geography cone

The Bermuda Land Snail was thought to have gone extinct in the 1970s. In 2014, many were rediscovered in a Hamilton city alleyway. The snails had colonized the alley early on and the surrounding city shielded them from the threats that wiped out the rest of the species.

Sources Daily Mail, Ezinarticles

Smoking

HISTORY OF SMOKING

Tobacco and hallucinogenic drugs have been smoked in the Americas since at least 5000 BC. The smoking of euphorants probably had its origins in the incense-burning ceremonies of shamans but was later adopted for pleasure, or as a social tool.

Cannabis smoking was common in the Middle East before the arrival of tobacco, and was early on a common social activity that centered around the type of water pipe called a hookah.

Aztec women are handed flowers and smoking tubes before eating at a banquet, Florentine Codex, 1500

Rodrigo de Jerez, a crewman of Columbus, was the first known European smoker. He was thrown in jail for it as exhaling smoke was seen as satanic.

In 1557, European doctors recommended smoking to combat bad breath and cancer.

Tobacco was introduced as snuff to France in 1560 by the diplomat and scholar Jean Nicot, from whose name the word “nicotine” derives.

Urban VII was chosen to succeed Sixtus V as pope on September 15, 1590. His death from malaria 13 days later made his the shortest papal reign in history. His very short time as pope nevertheless gave rise to the world's first known public smoking ban when he threatened to excommunicate anyone who "took tobacco in the porchway of or inside a church, whether it be by chewing it, smoking it with a pipe, or sniffing it in powdered form through the nose."

In 17th-century Turkey ruler Murad IV ordered that anyone caught smoking be executed on the spot and their bodies be left where they were as a deterrent to others.

A Persian girl smoking by Muhammad Qasim. Isfahan, 17th century

In 1665 pipe-smoking was compulsory among pupils at Eton College in England as a defense against the plague.

The term “smoking” wasn’t established until the late eighteenth century. Before then, it was often referred to as “Dry Drunkenness."

The practice of smoking opium became common in Europe in the 19th century. Widespread medical use of unprocessed opium continued until late in the century when it gave way to morphine, which could be injected at a precisely controlled dosage.

An illustration of an opium den on the cover of Le Petit Journal, July 5, 1903

By the end of the 19th century, doctors began to suspect that smoking cigarettes caused lung cancer, despite the fact that there were only 140 published cases of the then rare disease in 1900.

On January 21, 1908, New York City's Board of Aldermen passed the Sullivan Ordinance, a controversial law that prohibited women from smoking in public places. It didn't outlaw smoking for women altogether, but made it illegal for owners or managers of public places like restaurants, hotels, and theaters to allow women to smoke on their premises. Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. vetoed the ordinance just two weeks after its passage, citing public opposition and concerns about its enforceability.

Torches of Freedom was a 1920's campaign to get more women to smoke. Tobacco companies targeted feminists, portraying it as emancipating, and even hosted seminars to teach women how to smoke "correctly."

Winston Churchill is said to have been the only person whom Field Marshal Montgomery would allow to smoke in his presence.

The Nazis were the first ever people in modern history to start an anti-smoking and tobacco movement.

In the 1940s there was a large increase in lung cancers and evidence began to be found that this was linked with the huge increase of smokers at the beginning of the decade. It was suspected that tobacco smoke and tar contained cancer causing chemicals and in the early 1950s an extensive study carried out by English epidemiologist Richard Doll statistically established that cigarette smoking is linked with lung cancer and that tobacco smoke, like tar, contains the cancer causing chemical benzene.

A few years later, in 1954 the British Doctors Study, a study of some 40 thousand doctors, confirmed the link, based on which the government issued advice that smoking and lung cancer rates were related (See below).

On January 11, 1964 the Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Luther Terry, M.D., published the landmark report Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States stating that smoking may be hazardous to health. This sparked national and worldwide anti-smoking efforts.

Even before the surgeon general issued his report on the dangers of tobacco, Mad Magazine went on an anti-smoking crusade ridiculing big tobacco companies, ad agencies, and even smokers. Also before it became law, Mad Magazine's offices were smoke free and none of their content featured smoking.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company Director of Research wrote in a private internal memo dated February 2, 1973 that the warning labels on cigarettes helped boost sales with young adults who love taking risks and believe they are "immortal."

In 1975 the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to US geneticist and virologist Howard Temin for his research on cancer. During his acceptance speech in Sweden, he called out some present -- including a Queen and other royalty -- for smoking. He insisted that the ashtray on the laureates' table be removed.

The resort town of Aspen, Colorado, became the first city in the US to restrict smoking in restaurants in 1985.

The U.S. ban on inflight smoking began with domestic flights of two hours or less in April 1988. It was extended to domestic flights of six hours or less in February 1990. There was an exemption for pilots out of safety concerns of them going through nicotine withdrawal.

U.S. consulting firm Arthur D. Little International Inc. studied the impact of smoking on Czech public finances at multinational cigarette company Philip Morris's request in 2000. They concluded that smoking was highly beneficial to the country's economy, as more people would die earlier, hence allowing the government to save millions on health-care, pension and public-housing.

Motorcycle world champion, Barry Sheene, enjoyed smoking so much that he had a hole drilled through the chin-bar on his full-face helmet allowing him to smoke right up to the start of a race. He died aged 52 on March 10, 2003 from cancer of the oesophagus and stomach.

In 2004 The Republic of Ireland became the first country in the world to ban smoking in all work places, including bars and restaurants.

Three years later, in 2007, smoking in England was banned in all public indoor spaces.

When France increased the price of cigarettes by 66% between 2000-2008, the smoking rate among French executives and professionals declined. However, the smoking rate among manual laborers remained about the same and among the unemployed, it increased.

FUN SMOKING FACTS

Nicorette was actually created to help smoking seaman get through their time stuck on submarines.

About one billion of the world’s 7.6 billion people (14 per cent) are smokers.

The Chinese are the world’s biggest smokers. The average Chinese adult has 11 cigarettes a day.

2% of Indonesians will be smoking by age 4.

Four of the six ‘Marlboro Men’ have died of smoking-related diseases.

People in Japan carry portable ashtrays to keep streets clean.

Pantone 448 C, the "world's ugliest color" according to research, is used by many European countries on their tobacco products to dissuade people from smoking.

No Smoking Day is held on the second Wednesday in March each year. in the UK Appropriately enough, the first was on Ash Wednesday in 1984.

Today it is estimated that around 80% of lung cancers result from smoking and the chance of contracting lung cancer increases both the longer and the times the person smokes. However if someone stops smoking then these chances steadily decrease as the damage to their lungs is repaired.

Smoking is often the cause of other cancers such as cancers of the larynx, mouth and urinary bladder. Indeed in the United States cigarette smoking is thought to be responsible for nearly half the cancer cases considered to be environmentally caused and for almost one third of the cancer deaths overall of men.

Smoking can negatively affect bone healing after a fracture. Studies have shown that smokers have a higher risk of delayed and/or non-union bone healing, which means the bone takes longer to heal or may not heal properly at all.

One study published in the Journal of Orthopaedic Trauma found that smokers had a 2.2 times higher risk of delayed and/or non-union bone healing after a fracture compared to non-smokers. This is because smoking can affect the blood flow and oxygen supply to the bone, which are essential for the healing process.

Within 48 hours of quitting smoking, your senses of smell and taste begin to return to normal.

Source Daily Express

Will Smith

Willard Smith was born on September 25, 1968 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Caroline (Bright), a school board administrator, and Willard Carroll Smith, Sr. a refrigeration engineer.

Will Smith at the 2016 San Diego Comic-Con International. By Gage Skidmore

Prior to his role as Will Smith in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Will Smith enjoyed a successful career as a rapper under the pseudonym, "The Fresh Prince" as part of a duo with his friend Jeffrey "DJ Jazzy Jeff" Townes. Together, the duo had several platinum-selling albums and singles in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The pair met in 1985 when Townes, who was performing at a party a few doors down from Smith's home, needed a hype man, as his normal guy hadn't shown up. Smith, who was only 17 years old at this point, happily filled in. Their first single was "Girls Ain't Nothing Back Trouble."

Smith was admitted to a pre-engineering summer program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but did not attend college as DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince were starting to gain fame.

During a speech made by Will Smith, at the MTV Music Awards, he stated that he didn’t need to swear to sell his records. He explained he doesn't curse is his raps because when he was 12, his grandma found his profanity-laced notebook and got mad with him inspiring him to be a "clean" rapper.

He became an actor when he starred on the television show The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air as Will Smith, a teenager from Philadelphia sent to live with his rich relatives in Southern California.

Will Smith was about to declare bankruptcy until he was picked to star in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. He had to pay the IRS 70% of his salary over the first three seasons. 

Jazzy Jeff played the popular recurring character Jazz in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, whose trademark was to be physically kicked out of the house.

Will Smith would memorize the entire script then mumble other peoples' lines while they were being said during Season 1 of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

He has appeared in many movies including Independence Day, Men in Black, Wild Wild West, Ali, The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, and Suicide Squad.

His 1997 track "Men in Black" from the film of the sane name led the UK singles chart in the summer of 1997.

Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in The Matrix. Instead, he took the lead role in Wild Wild West.

In 1999 Smith topped the US singles chart with "Wild Wild West," the theme song of the film off the same name. Despite its pop success, the song was criticized for both sampling Stevie Wonder's song "I Wish" and for its incongruity with the western it serves as the theme song. The track won the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst "Original" Song of 1999.

Smith became the first Hip-Hop artist to be nominated for an Academy Award when got chosen for playing the title role in the movie Ali.

Will Smith is the only actor to have eight consecutive films gross over $100 million in the domestic box office and eleven consecutive films gross over $150 million internationally.

Smith at the Emmy Awards in 1993. By photo by Alan Light,

Will Smith trained so hard for I, Robot that he could bench 385 lb – or about 175kg.

He met wife actress Jada Pinkett when she auditioned for the role of his girlfriend on The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. (The role went to Nia Long.)

They married in 1997. Will Smith proposed to Jada while they were laying in bed. He rolled over and said "Wassup? You wanna marry me?"

They have had two children Jaden and Willow. At the age of 11, Jaden Smith starred in The Karate Kid taking the role made famous by Ralph Macchio in the original classic 1984 movie.

2009, in Oslo: Smith with wife Jada and children Jaden and Willow. By Harrywad

Willow Smith made her acting debut at the age of 6, starring alongside her father in 2007's I Am Legend. Her film credits also include voice-over work for the animated feature Madagascar 2.

Willow had a worldwide hit aged nine with "Whip My Hair."

In 2018, Jada Pinkett Smith was diagnosed with alopecia and later shaved her hair off due to the condition. During the 94th Academy Awards on March 27, 2022, Smith walked onstage and slapped presenter Chris Rock after the comedian joked about his wife Jada Pinkett Smith's shaved head with a reference to the movie G.I. Jane.

Will Smith can solve a Rubik's Cube puzzle in less than a minute. He also speaks fluent Spanish and is a keen fencer.

Will Smith took took part in the 2022 expedition in the Ecuadorian Amazon which helped discover the northern green anaconda.

Adam Smith

EARLY LIFE 

Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy, in the County of Fife, Scotland on June 16, 1723.

His father, also Adam Smith, was a Scottish Writer to the Signet (senior solicitor), advocate and prosecutor (Judge Advocate) who also served as comptroller of the Customs in Kirkcaldy.

Adam's mother was Margaret Douglas, daughter of the landed Robert Douglas of Strathendry.

Adam's father died two months after he was born, leaving his mother a widow.

At around the age of 4, Adam was kidnapped by a band of gypsies, but he was quickly rescued by his uncle and returned to his mother. Smith's biographer, John Rae, commented wryly that he feared Smith would have made "a poor gypsy."

Adam attended the Burgh School of Kirkcaldy from 1729 to 1737, where he learned Latin, mathematics, history, and writing.

Adam Smith. The Muir portrait

He entered the University of Glasgow at the age of fourteen and studied moral philosophy under "the never-to-be-forgotten" (as Smith called him) Francis Hutcheson. It was at Glasgow that Adam developed his passion for liberty, reason and free speech.

In 1740, Adam won an exhibition to Balliol College of the University of Oxford, where he took the opportunity to teach himself several subjects by reading many books from the shelves of the large Bodleian Library.  He also translated several famous French books.

His time at Oxford was not a happy one. Adam found the teaching there to be intellectually stifling and he left the University in 1746, before his scholarship ended.

CAREER

 In 1751 Smith was appointed professor on logic at the University of Glasgow, transferring in 1752 to the chair of moral philosophy. His lectures covered the fields of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence, political economy, and "police and revenue." His forceful argumentative style of lecturing made him popular with students.

At the end of 1763, Smith resigned from his professorship after he obtained an offer from Charles Townshend to tutor his stepson, Henry Scott, the young Duke of Buccleuch.

He was paid £300 per year (plus expenses) along with a £300 per year pension; roughly twice his former income as a teacher. The two and half years Smith spent as tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch set him up financially.

Smith's tutoring job entailed touring Europe with Scott, which gave him the opportunity to meet other intellectual leaders of his day. The highlight was the meeting with leading French thinkers in Paris.

In 1766, the duke's younger brother died in Paris, and Smith's tour as a tutor ended shortly thereafter.
Smith returned home in 1766 to Kirkcaldy, where he concentrated on writing including his magnum opus Wealth of Nations.

In 1778, Smith was appointed to the well paid post of commissioner of customs in Scotland.

From 1787 to 1789 Smith occupied the honorary position of Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow.

WORKS

Smith published his first great work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759. The book explains how human morality depends on empathy between agent and spectator, or the individual and other members of society. For Smith, empathy was like "putting yourself in someone else's shoes". The work was well received.

Smith's Wealth of Nations was first published on March 9, 1776. The work, which took him ten years to write, heralded the birth of modern economics with its avocation of free trade (or Laissez Faire) rather than duties on imports.

The Wealth of Nations was an instant success, selling out its first edition in only six months.

Smith's writing style were often satirized by Tory writers in the moralizing tradition of William Hogarth and Jonathan Swift.

BELIEFS 

Adam Smith advocated the necessity of individual enterprise rather than the old fashioned mercantile system. He theorized economies are built on individual self-interest and the state shouldn't interfere. Countries should concentrate on making goods they were best at and import those other countries could make more cheaply. He was the greatest exponent of free enterprise economics until Friedman.

Smith wrote in Wealth of Nations that slavery was uneconomical because the plantation system was a wasteful use of land and slaves cost more to maintain than free laborers.

Adam Smith was a liberal minded Protestant, suspicious of evangelical Christianity. He wrote in Wealth of Nations. "Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition."

Smith famously asked, “What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clean conscience?”

APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER 

Smith was not a looker. He was described as someone who "had a large nose, bulging eyes, a protruding lower lip, a nervous twitch, and a speech impediment". He is said to have acknowledged his unattractive looks at one point, saying, "I am a beau in nothing but my books."

Portrait of Smith by John Kay, 1790

Smith devoted a considerable part of his income to numerous secret acts of charity.

Adam Smith was notoriously absent-minded. On one occasion falling into discourse with a certain Mr Damer during breakfast, Smith took a piece of bread and butter, and after rolling it round and round put in into the teapot and poured the water to brew it. Shortly after he poured out a cup, and on tasting it declared it was the worst tea he had ever met with.

LAST YEARS AND DEATH 

Adam Smith never married. He spent his last years living with his mother and after she passed away his cousin Miss Jane Douglas at Panmure House, Cannongate, Edinburgh.

Portrait of Smith's mother, Margaret Douglas

Smith died in the northern wing of Panmure House on July 17, 1790 after a painful illness. On his death bed, Smith expressed disappointment that he had not achieved more. His last words were "I believe we must adjourn the meeting to some other place."

His body was buried in the Canongate Kirkyard.

The father of modern economics, Smith's thinking on mutual trading was influential on William Pitt and other prime ministers. By 1860 Great Britain was a free trade country.

Smile

Humans are the only animals that smile as an emotional response.

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In 1948, Mayor George Phillips made it illegal for citizens not to smile in the town of Pocatello, Idaho.

Muhammad Anwar el-Sadat was the third President of Egypt, serving from 1970 until his fatal shooting by fundamentalist army officers on October 6, 1981. Bill Foley's photograph "The Last Smile" shows Anwar Sadat only moments before his assassination.

Smile Mask Syndrome is a psychological disorder in which subjects develop depression and physical illness as a result of prolonged, unnatural smiling. First described in Japan in 1983, the condition is attributed to the great importance placed on smiling in the Japanese service industry.

Harvey Ball (July 10, 1921 – April 12, 2001), a commercial artist from Worcester, Massachusetts, was the man who created and popularized the two-dots-and-a-grin smiley logo.

World Smile Day was inaugurated in 1999 by Harvey Ball. It is held annually on the first Friday in October.

The catchphrase of World Smile Day is “Do an act of kindness. Help one person smile.”

Ball posing with a selection of Smiley merchandising Wikipedia

The world's oldest known smiley was on a 1635 Slovakian document, indicating the writer's happiness with the state of the Chamberlain of Trenčín's financial records.

An average woman smiles 62 times a day, the average man smiles only 8 times a day.

It takes 17 muscles to smile.

Humans are the only animals that smile as an emotional response.

Russians smile less than Americans due in part to a popular Russian proverb: “A smile without a reason is a sign of idiocy.”

One of the reasons Walmart failed to establish itself in Germany is that it required its checkout employees to smile at customers. This was however perceived by most Germans as unnerving, as Germans usually don't smile at strangers.

A full smile, including wrinkling around the eyes, is known as a “Duchenne smile” after 19th-century French neurologist Duchenne de Boulogne.

Doctors feel that Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile was caused by muscle wastage on her right side. Another theory is that she had no front teeth.

Mona Lisa

The words “smile” and “smiling” do not occur at all in the King James version of the Bible.

Stroke victims with partial facial paralysis can lose the ability to voluntarily smile on half their face, but can still fully smile when laughing at a joke.

Even artificially produced smiles have been shown to induce happiness. So saying "cheese" for a photograph really works.

A man who committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge had left a suicide note that read "I'm going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I won't jump." Sadly nobody did.

Source Daily Express

Smell

It's often been reported that the human nose can only distinguish between 10,000 scents but new research indicates that the human sense of smell is so impressive, the nose can discriminate over one trillion different odors.

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If you smell something, molecules from that object are sticking to the inside of your nose.

Research in 2014 put humans in 13th place in a list of animals with the most genes for smelling. The African elephant came top of the list followed by rats and opossums.

Bears have a third of their brains devoted to smelling, and sharks have two-thirds.

The area of the brain devoted to smell in dogs is 40 per cent larger than humans.

The term "Frito Feet" was coined to describe the scent of dog's feet.

Mazda had to recall 52,000 cars in the US in 2011 due to a species of spider loving the smell of gasoline so much it chose to build its web in the vehicles emission systems.

The Romans believed that the smell of freshly turned soil was so beneficial and wholesome for invalids that they put clods of earth into their beds to help revive their spirits.

The Great Stink was an event in central London in July and August 1858 where the smell of human excrement in the River Thames was so bad that it halted parliament.

A German landlord evicted a tenant in 1981 after they spread surströmming brine, the world's smelliest food, in the building's stairwell. When the landlord was taken to court, the court ruled in favor of the landlord after they demonstrated their case by opening a can inside the courtroom.

On April Fools Day 1965 the BBC aired an interview with the supposed inventor of "SmelloVision" who cut onions and brewed coffee to prove he could transmit scents through a television screen. Viewers called and confirmed that they had received the smells.

The chemical Thioacetone is the world's smelliest substance. It's so rank that, after a lab technician dropped a vial of it, it induced instant vomiting from people in buildings almost half a mile away.

The fresh, salty smell of beach air is actually the smell of rotting seaweed.

The smell that happens after a rain shower is actually three distinct scents: ozone caused by lightning ripping through oxygen and nitrogen in the atmosphere, spores produced by common ground bacteria, and oils produced by plants during dry spells.

The smell of freshly cut grass, though often pleasant, is actually a plant's way of letting out a cry for help.

Crested auklets - the first birds known to signal through scent - smell like fresh tangerines.

Violets can be smelled for only a few moments at a time because they get their scent from ionine which shuts the smell receptors off after simulating them. After a few breaths the scent pops up again but the brain registers it as a new stimulus. So everytime you smell a violet is a first time.

The Japanese word "kareishu" describes the smell of old people.

Domestic gas is scented with a 'rotten egg smell' so it's easier to detect. Gas itself is odorless.

NASA hires a chief sniffer to inspect the smell of every item before it enters space. The lack of ventilation means astronauts are stuck with the smells that are onboard with them.

Space has a distinct smell: astronauts have described the odor as a bouquet of hot metal, diesel fumes and barbecue. The aroma is mostly produced by dying stars.

When astronauts are outside the International Space Station, space-borne compounds adhere to their suits causing a distinctive scent when they return to the station. The smell is so unusual that NASA reached out to a top fragrance maker to re-create the odor for its training simulations.

Astronauts have also compared the smell of the moon to "spent gunpowder."

You can't usually smell your home or your own scent because of a survival instinct called 'olfactory adaptation.' The brain is always looking for new, unusual, or changing smells as a sign of possible danger and ignores familiar scents.

Source Daily Express

Smartphone

A smartphone is a mobile phone that works as a computer but is small enough to fit in a user's hand.

Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla first developed the idea for smartphone technology. He conceptualized the first integration of data signals with telephony in 1909.

IBM introduced in the mid 1990s a phone with a touchscreen display input that could send emails and run third party apps. The Simon Personal Communicator was made available to consumers on August 16, 1994.

IBM Simon and charging base (1994

Although the term "smartphone" was not coined until 1997, because of Simon's features and capabilities, it can be referred to as the first smartphone.

In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country. By the end of 2001, NTT DoCoMo had accumulated an estimated 40 million subscribers. They later lost their dominant position in the market in the face of the rise of 3G and new phones with advanced wireless network capabilities.

The first BlackBerry smartphone was released in 2002. It supported push e-mail, mobile telephone, text messaging, Internet faxing, Web browsing and other wireless information services.

At its peak in September 2013, there were 85 million BlackBerry subscribers worldwide. However, BlackBerry's high position in the smartphone market later declined due to the success of the Android and iOS platforms.

Blackberry smartphones By Kt38138 

Apple Inc. released the first generation iPhone on June 29, 2007. The iPhone revolutionized the smartphone industry and made Apple one of the world's most valuable publicly traded companies.

Global smartphone sales surpassed the sales figures for feature phones in early 2013.

In February 2013, China became the world's biggest user of smartphones, bumping the U.S. out of the No. 1 spot.

"Smartphone zombies" have been reported as a significant safety hazard likely to cause accidents. To manage these hazards, cities such as Chongqing and Antwerp introduced special lanes for smartphone users in 2014 and 2015.

Android is the most popular mobile operating system. According to Google, over 1.3 million Android smartphones are sold every day.

Globally, there were 3.6 billion active smartphones in use in June 2018 according to a Newzoo report. Samsung leads the pack in global smartphone market share with over 27 percent command versus second place Apple at 24 percent, Chinese manufacturers Oppo, Xiaomi, Huawei, and Vivo came in at #3, #4, #5, and #6, respectively.

The average person glances at their smartphone 150 times a day.

Today's average smartphone has more computing power than the first space shuttle ever produced.

The technology behind smartphones relies on up to 250,000 separate patents.