Graca Machel was married to Samora Machel (1933-86), President of Mozambique from 1975 to 1986. President Machel was killed in a plane crash on 19 October 1986. On 18 July 1998 she married Nelson Mandela, President of South Africa, making her the first woman to be `First Lady’ of two different countries.
The first woman to orbit the Earth was Junior Lt Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova (b. 6 Mar 1937, USSR). She was launched in Vostok 6 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, Kazakhstan at 9:30a.m. GMT on 16 Jun 1963. Vostok 6 landed at 8:20a.m. on 19 June, after a flight of 2days 22hr 50min and 48 orbits (1,971,000km 1,225,000miles). It passed momentarily to within 5km 3 miles of Vostok 5. Like Gagarin, Tereshkova ejected, after 2days 22hr 40min and landed six minutes later. Tereshkova was born to a
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Spacewalks – first, woman The first woman to perform an EVA was Svetlana Savitskaya from Soyuz T12/Salyut 7 on 25 Jul 1984.
The Venus of Hohle Fels is the name given to a female figurine carved from a mammoth tusk and dated to ca 33,000 BC. It was discovered in the Hohle Fels (“Hollow Rock”) cave near Ulm in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, in September 2008 by Nicolas Conard and a team from the University of Tübingen, Germany, and is thought to be some form of fertility amulet. The carving is 6 cm (2.3 in) tall and is presumed to have been made by modern humans (Homo sapiens). Earlier
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The first fully 3D fighting game was SEGA’s Virtua Fighter, released in Japanese arcades in November 1993. The game employed polygon graphics to create its characters, as opposed to the animated sprites of 2D fighters. The game was also notable for its incorporation of a three-button layout (punch, kick and guard), when practically every other fighting game had four or six-button configurations. Featured in Guinness World Records Gamer”s Edition 2010
At a cost of $130 million (including marketing costs) Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within was the most expensive video game-inspired movie ever made. Released in 2001 by Columbia Pictures, it recouped just $32 million at the US box office, meaning it was also one of the least successful video game-inspired movies ever made. Lastly, the film was the first computer-generated animated movie with photorealistic characters. GWR Video Gamer’s Edition 2008, title: first computer-generated animated movie with photorealistic characters.
This is credited to the thriller Dragnet (1954) starring Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday, the role he had created in the NBC TV series, which had then been running for three years and was to continue until 1959. In 1969 the movie of the TV show was remade as a TV movie.
The first film to have a budget of US$100 million (the £64.1 million) was True Lies (US 1994), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis.
Dolby is a noise reduction system designed to eliminate hiss from recorded sound. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (UK 1971) used Doby noise on all pre-mixes and masters, though the release prints had a conventional optical soundtrack.
The first movie to use computer software to simulate the properties of water was Dreamworks’ Antz (USA, 1998). Prior to this, computer-generated fluid effects were drawn, frame by frame, using graphics programs. Realistic water effects require powerful, physics-based computer simulations – at the timeAntz was released, the only detailed studies of fluid dynamics were being carried out by scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, USA, researching the flow of particles after a nuclear strike.