At the 2008 Beijing Olympics in China, Usain Bolt (Jamaica) achieved world-beating times in the 100 m, 200 m and 4 x 100 m relay, becoming the first Olympian to do so in the history of the Games. Bolt won the 100 m in 9.69 seconds, the 200 m in 19.30 seconds and the relay in 37.10 seconds, the latter alongside team-mates Asafa Powell, Nesta Carter and Michael Frater.
While en route to Jupiter, NASA’s Galileo spacecraft performed a flyby of the asteroid Ida in 1993. On 17 February 1994 examination of the images from the flyby revealed Ida, which is 53.6 km along its longest axis, has its own natural satellite. Dactyl measures just 1.6 x 1.4 x 1.2 km in diameter and orbits Ida once every 20 hours.
The earliest recorded assassination attempt was against the Pharaoh of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt, Amenemhat I, around 2000BC.
The first atom bomb to be used aggressively in battle, was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan by the United States at 8:16 a.m. on 6 August 1945. It had an explosive power equivalent to that of around 15 kilotons of trinitrotoluene (C7H5O6N3), called TNT. Code-named Little Boy, it was 3.04 m (10 ft) long and weighed 4,082 kg (9,000 lb). It burst 565 m (1,850 ft) above the city centre.
Augmented Reality (AR) games combine real-world data with computer data, enabling players to interact with computergenerated characters on screen. The first console game to feature such technology was The Eye of Judgment for PS3. The game used the console’s PSEye camera to gather real-world images and read the coded information on small physical trading cards. This information allowed the game to bring the characters on the trading cards to life on the screen. Featured in Guinness World Records Gamer”s Edition 2010
On 6 July 2010, the Hachette Book Group announced that James Patterson (USA), creator of the Alex Cross and Women’s Murder Club series of novels, was the first author to exceed one million sales in electronic books, moving 1.14 million units of his books for devices like Kindle and the iPad. At the time of the announcement, there was no third-party monitor of e-book sales, so Hachette used its own figures and checked other prominent authors. The publisher didn’t find any others who had cracked
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The HiRiSE camera on NASA´s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took images of a 700 m tall steep slope near the north pole on 19 February 2008. Upon analysis it was found the orbiter had accidentally captured clouds of debris fanning from the base of the slope, where ice and dust had broken loose and fallen just seconds before.
Juan de la Cierva’s (Spain) model C.4 aircraft, commercially named an Autogiro, was the first successful gyroplane, or aircraft where lift is provided by rotating wings. It first flew at Getafe, Spain on 9 January 1923, after he had worked on the design for four years. Within days he flew a two-and-one-half-mile closed course and, by 1928, had crossed the English Channel.
Ivan André Trifonov (Austria) ballooned 14,934 m 49,000 ft over the geographic South Pole Antartica at an altitude of 4,571 m 15,000 ft with his two Spanish crew members on 8 Jan 2000 in a Cameron AX 60 – EC-HDB hot air balloon.
The earliest recorded ascent was by a model hot-air balloon invented by Father Bartolomeu de Gusmão (né‚ Lourenço) (1685-1724), which was flown indoors at the Casa da India, Terreiro do Paço, Portugal on 8 August 1709.