Bertrand Piccard (Switzerland) and Brian Jones (UK) completed the first ever non-stop around-the-world flight in a balloon on 20 March 1999, after piloting Breitling Orbiter 3 from Chateau d’Oex, Switzerland, to the ‘finishing line’ of 9.27ºW over Mauritania, North Africa. Regarded as one of the last great challenges in aviation, their circumnavigation was also the longest ever flight in a balloon, in terms of both duration (477 hr 47 min) and distance (40,814 km or 25,360 miles).
In Darfur, Sudan, the dramatic reduction in rainfall over the last fifty years and the southward advance of the Sahara desert have forced the Sudanese province’s northern Muslims and its southern Christian/Animists to arm themselves and begin competing for reduced land and water resources, in what is widely regarded as the world’s first climate change war. According to the United Nations, 300,000 people have died, and fighting in the region has displaced nearly three million people.
The first diver to execute a running takeoff in cliff-diving competition was Gary Hunt (UK), who launched into four front-piked 4 somersaults with 2.5 twists during the inaugural Red Bull Cliff Diving World Series event at Polignano a Mare, Italy, on 8 August 2010.
The earliest dated coin is a Samian silver tetradrachm struck in Zankle (now Messina), Sicily, dated year 1, viz 494 BC – shown as the letter ‘A’ on one side. The earliest Christian Era dated coin is: MCCXXXIIII (1234) Bishop of Roskilde coins, Denmark (six known).
The first cloned dog to survive birth is Snuppy, an Afghan hound puppy, created by Hwang Woo-Suk (South Korea) and his team of scientists at Seoul National University (SNU) in South Korea, after which the dog was named. Snuppy’s growth was stimulated when a donor egg cell fused with DNA from the ear of Tie (three-year-old male Afghan hound), before being transferred to a surrogate golden labrador female for 60 full days of pregnancy, before being born by caesarean on 25 April 2005. Snuppy celebrated
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In 2009, Alaskan human rights lawyer Robin Bronen coined the term “climigration” to describe forced migration of people resulting from climate-induced ecological changes in a community’s environment that severely impact infrastructure, such as health clinics and schools, as well as the livelihoods and wellbeing of the people residing in the community. Bronen used the term in a report on Alaskan indigenous communities who were having to relocate due to climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has estimated that there will be 150
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Supplied with the PlayStation 3 version of Time Crisis 4, the GunCon 3 is a hand-gun peripheral that features a unique twohanded control scheme. Mounted under the barrel is an extension that carries an analogue stick and two shoulder buttons for use by the player’s left hand. This enables the first-person shooter sections of the game, which require the player to move a character around the levels. Unlike the GunCon and GunCon 2 before it, the third version supports today’s almost obligatory LCD and plasma
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The Red Head Comedies (USA 1923), each a lampoon of an historical event by the Lee-Bradford Corporation.
The world’s earliest transmission of colour television occurred on 3 July 1928 when John Logie Baird (UK) showed red and blue scarves, a UK policeman’s helmet, a man poking his tongue out, the glowing end of a cigarette and a bunch of roses during a demonstration at his studios in Long Acre, London, UK. Nature magazine reported: `Delphiniums and carnations appeared in their natural colours and a basket of strawberries showed the red fruit very clearly.’ The low definition system was based on a Nipkow
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Often hailed as the ‘founding fathers of modern film’, the Lumiere Brothers, Louis and Auguste, can take credit for the first commercial exhibition of a projected motion picture to a paying public in 1895, in the world’s first movie theatre – the Salon Indien, at the Grand Cafe on Paris’ Boulevard des Capucines. The 20-minute program included ten short films with twenty showings a day.