Ole Einar Bjørndalen (Norway) is the first – and, to date, only – biathlete to win the sprint, pursuit, individual and relay events in a single Winter Games, when he competed in the 2002 Salt Lake City Games in Utah, USA. He was denied the big four in the 2005 biathlon World Cup when he finished unplaced in the individual 20 km race.
The earliest international beauty contest was staged by P. T. Barnum (with the public to be the judges) in the USA in June 1855.
The first bible published in North America was the so-called “Eliot Bible” which was printed in 1663 at Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But it was not a version of the King’s Speech…or King’s English–the King James Bible. Rather, it was written in the Algonquin Indian language. Harvard’s charter had called for educating Indians, and the Puritan founders of the school hoped that a bible translated into the indigenous language would serve to convert the native peoples to Christianity. An English-language bible was not printed
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The first bioluminescent mammals were a series of glowing mice created in 1995 by Stanford University researcher Christopher Contag and co-workers, extracting genes responsible for bioluminescence from various glowing bacteria and inserting them into Salmonella bacteria, which causes severe food poisoning. These now-glowing Salmonella bacteria, having adopted the bioluminescence genes as their own and reproducing with these genes retained from generation to generation, were then fed to some mice, and Contag and his team were able to watch directly how the Salmonella infection took hold
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The first female to be fitted with a bionic arm is Claudia Mitchell of Ellicott City, Maryland, USA, who had lost her left arm at the shoulder following a motorcycle accident. Her bionic arm was designed by medics and engineers of the the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, USA, and allows Ms Mitchell to control parts of the limb by thought. Ms Mitchell revealed her arm at a press conference in Chicago, USA on 14 September 2006.
The world’s first bioluminescent primate was a rhesus monkey Macaca mulatta called ANDi (whose name is the abbreviation for inserted DNA written backwards), created in 2000 by a team of researchers led by Gerald Schatten and Anthony W.S. Chan at the Oregon Regional Primate Research Center at Oregon Health Sciences University. They inserted a glowing gene obtained from bioluminescent jellyfishes into 222 monkey eggs, of which 126 grew into embryos in laboratory dishes. Forty of these were then transferred to 20 surrogate mothers (two embryos
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River Phoenix (USA, 23 August 1970 – 31 October 1993) received an American Academy Award nomination (at the 1989 ceremony) for Best Actor at the age of 17 for his role in Sidney Lumet’s (USA) Running on Empty (USA, 1988); his brother Joaquin (USA, b. 28 October 1974) received his nomination (at the 2006 ceremony) for Walk the Line (USA, 2005). Neither brother went on to win the coveted statue.
The concept of a portable telephone first appeared in 1947 at Lucent Technologies’ Bell Labs, New Jersey, USA. The first actual portable telephone handset was invented by Martin Cooper (USA), of Motorola, who made the first call on 3 April 1973 to his rival, Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Labs. The first commercial mobile phone network was launched in Japan in 1979.
Wiley Post (USA) made the first solo flight around the world from the 15 to 22 July 1933 in a Lockheed Vega called Winnie Mae. He covered 25,089 km (15,596 miles), starting and ending in New York, USA.
Steve Fossett (USA) flew around the world non-stop and without refuelling in 67 hr 1 min from 1 to 3 March 2005 in the Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer, starting and finishing at Salina, Kansas, USA. The aircraft, built by Scaled Composites, was powered by a single turbofan jet engine and carried nearly 5 tonnes (11,000 lb of fuel).