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The order of the planets, starting closest to the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune.

The one place where a flag flies all day, never goes up or comes down, and does not get saluted, is the moon.

Earth is not round; it is slightly pear-shaped. The North Pole radius is 44mm longer than the South Pole radius.

A green diamond is the rarest diamond.

The ozone layer averages about 3 millimeters (1/8 inch) thick.

A diamond will break if you hit it with a hammer.

The crawler, the machine that takes the Space Shuttle to the launching pad moves at 3km/h (2 mph).

Summer on Uranus lasts for 21 years - but so does winter.

The Sahara desert expands at about 1km per month.

Oceanography, the study of oceans, is a mixture of biology, physics, geology and chemistry.

More than 70% of earth's dryland is affected by desertification.

The US has one of the highest fire death rates in the industrialised world, with more than 2 million fires reported each year.

The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth.

The largest iceberg ever recorded was 335km (208 miles) long and 97km (60 miles) wide.

Luke Howard used Latin words to categorize clouds in 1803.

Hurricanes, tornadoes and bigger bodies of water always go clockwise in the Southern Hemisphere and counterclockwise in the Northern Hemisphere. This directional spinning has to do with the rotation of the earth and is called the Coriolis force.

Winds that blow toward the equator curve west.

Organist William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus in 1781 with the first reflecting telescope that he built. He named it Georgium Sidium in honour of King George III of England but in 1850 it was renamed Uranus in accordance with the tradition of naming planets for Roman gods.

Planets, meaning wanderers, are named after Roman deities: Mercury, messenger of the gods; Venus, the god of love and beauty; Mars, the god of war; Jupiter, king of the gods; and Saturn, father of Jupiter and god of agriculture; Neptune, god of the sea.

During a total solar eclipse the temperature can drop by 6 degrees Celsius (about 20 degrees Fahrenheit).

The tallest waterfalls in the world are Angel Falls in Venezuela. At 979 m (3,212 ft), they are 19 times taller than the Niagara Falls, or 3 times taller than the Empire State Building.

Although the Angel Falls are much taller than the Niagara Falls, the latter are much wider, and they both pour about the same amount of water over their edges - about 2,8 billion litres (748 million gallons) per second.

There are 1040 islands around Britain, one of which is the smallest island in the world: Bishop's Rock.

All the planets in the solar system rotate anticlockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise.

Earth is the densest planet in the solar system and the only one not named after a god.

Earth orbits the sun at an average speed of 29.79 km/s (18.51 miles/sec), or about 107 000 km/h (about 67,000 miles/hour).

One year on earth is 365.26 days long. One day is 23 hours, 56 minutes, and 4 seconds long. The extra day in a leap year was introduced to compensate for the discrepancy in the Georgian calendar.

Plates carrying the continents migrate over the earth's surface a few centimetres (inches) per year, about the same speed that a fingernail grows.

On average, 13,000 earthquakes are located each year.

The magnetic north pole is near Ellef Ringes Island in northern Canada.

The magnetic south pole was discovered off the coast of Wilkes Land in Antarctica.

There is zero gravity at the centre of earth.

the deepest mine in the world is Western Deep Levels near Charletonville, South Africa. It is 4,2km (2.6 miles) deep.

The deepest point in the sea: the Mariana Trench off Guam in the Pacific Ocean; it is 10,9 km (6.77 miles) below sea level.

Earth is slowing down - in a few million years there won't be a leap year.

The tail of the Great Comet of 1843 was 330 million km long. (It will return in 2356.)

There are more than 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth.

About 500 small meteorites fall to earth every year but most fall in the sea and in unpopulated areas.

There is no record of a person being killed by a meteorite but animals are occasionally hit.

The Dead Sea is 365 m (1,200 ft) below sea level.

A storm officially becomes a hurricane when cyclone winds reach 119 km/h (74 mph).

by: Toh Poh

DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line. It is a service that makes the use of existing copper telephone wires for delivering data services at extremely fast speed rates. It does not hamper the existing telephone line. You can surf the Internet and talk on the phone, simultaneously.

DSL offers speeds that are around 5 to 25 times higher than a typical 56Kb dial-up connection. It is an always-on type of connection. This implies that websites would load quickly, downloads would be faster, buffering of videos would be fast and smooth and the domain of Online games would be illimitable.

Based on the types of service, DSL can be can be categorized in three divisions which are ASDL, IDSL and SDSL.

ADSL stands for Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line. It offers download speed of 1.5 Mbps and upload speed of 384 K. In order to acquire a ADSL connection, your location has to be within 3 miles of your local telephone office. Also, a DSL router is needed for this type of connection.

IDSL is a ISDN Digital Subscriber Line service which requires an ISDN router. It provides a connection speed of 144 K. in this type of connection distance is not a component to be considered.

SDSL means Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line. The speeds available under this type of DSL connection depends on the distance between your location and your local telephone office. The speed of downloads and uploads can go up to 1.1 Mbps.



Advantages of DSL


No installation of new wires is required. DSL uses the present telephone line to connect to the Internet. It provides extremely fast connection. Depending on the offer, you would not even have to pay for the DSL modem installation charges, since it is provided free by some of the companies on selection of the appropriate plan. The download rate is much higher in DSL connections. Many business organizations have gained the benefits of DSL. A DSL connection is very secure.



Disadvantages of DSL


The quality of your DSL connection depends on the distance between the DSL providers office and your location. Nearer you are, the better quality connection would you get. So, consumers located far from the local DSL office may face some trouble. DSL provide high speeds for downloading stuff but upload speeds are not that good.



DSL vs Cable Modems


The services provided through a cable modem can sometimes slow down or get hanged. It depends on the number of users accessing that particular service. But, in a DSL connection there is no such problem. The speed of DSL is consistent and high. This does not allow any kind of conjunction on the network. It provides more security than the cable modem connections. The popularity of DSL has risen to new heights which has resulted in disconnections and up gradations of the cable modem connections.

by: Karen Bennett

Nintendo has announced a new fitness game Wii Fit which is a full on exercise product set to give you more of a workout than Wii Sports, while still retaining all the fun of gaming. Wii Fit will help to keep you physically fit via a dedicated peripheral, a wireless balance board which comes with the game. There are over 40 different activities, including hula hooping, ski jumping and heading soccer balls.

The hula hooping consists of, as you’d expect, gyrating your hips with a virtual hoop onscreen and then as the game progresses, characters will throw more hoops for you to catch and rotate as many times as you can until the time runs out.

The skiing game gives you two chances to make the longest jump you can whilst keeping your balance when landing. Players can increase speed by leaning forward, the more you lean the faster you’ll go, and upon reaching the jump, you stand up straight ensuring your weight is evenly balanced for a good landing.

For the football game, you will need to balance on the board moving from side to side whilst balls are fired at you to hit back on to the field and avoiding other objects that are thrown at you at the same time.

Training falls into 4 categories: Aerobics, muscle conditioning, yoga and balance games. Players can assign their height to a profile to measure body mass index and Wii fitness age as well as monitor progress and record performance statistics.

The calorie busting fun could appeal to couch potato kids as well a non gamers, perhaps using the Nintendo Wii as a slimming tool which would be a move into the lifestyle category rather than gaming, covering the market from another angle.

Nintendo hasn't given a release date yet for Wii Fit, although its thought to hit the highstreet in early 2008.