Daytime duties for the keepers included cleaning the lens, polishing the brass, stoking the steam-powered fog signal and making necessary repairs. At the end of each shift, the keeper trudged back up the wooden staircase. Sometimes the winds were so strong that he had to crawl on his hands and knees to keep from being knocked down. The highest wind speed recorded at Point Reyes was 133 m.p.h., and 60 m.p.h. winds are common.

The hard work, wind, fog and isolation at Point Reyes made this an undesirable post. Even so, one keeper stayed for about twenty-four years, a testament to his devotion and love of Point Reyes!

The male deer bot fly is reputed to develop flying speeds of several hundred miles per hour, but this is probably an exaggeration. A tabanid fly, related to horse flies, has been clocked at 90 miles per hour. Hawk moths have been timed at 33.5 miles per hour. A dragonfly of the species Anax parthenope has been clocked at almost 18 miles per hour. Honeybees fly at about 7 miles per hour, and have to beat their wings 190 times per second to do it.

Insects with the fastest wing beat frequency are the no-see-ums, or very tiny midges, which beat their hairy wings 1,046 times per second. Male mosquitoes beat their wings 450 to 600 times per second. Cabbageworm butterflies beat their wings nine times per second.

Persian orange

The Persian orange, grown widely in southern Europe after its introduction to Italy in the 11th century, was bitter. Sweet oranges brought to Europe in the 15th century from India by Portuguese traders, quickly displaced the bitter, and are now the most common  variety of orange cultivated. The sweet orange will grow to different  sizes and colours according to local conditions, most commonly with ten carpels, or segments, inside.

Some South East Indo-European tongues name orange after Portugal, which was formerly the main source of imports of sweet oranges. Examples are Bulgarian portokal, Greek portokali , Persian porteghal , and Romanian portocala. Also in South Italian dialects , orange is named portogallo or purtualle, literally "the Portuguese ones". Related names can also be found in other languages: Turkish Portakal, Arabic al-burtuqal, Amharic birtukan, and Georgian phortokhali.

Portuguese, Spanish, Arab, and Dutch sailors planted citrus trees along trade routes to prevent scurvy. On his second voyage in 1493, Christopher Columbus brought the seeds of oranges, lemons and citrons to Haiti and the Caribbean. They were introduced in Florida  in 1513 by Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon, and were introduced to Hawaii in 1792.

Navel orange

A single mutation in 1820 in an orchard of sweet oranges planted at a monastery in Brazil yielded the navel orange,  also known as the Washington, Riverside, or Bahie navel. The mutation  causes navel oranges to develop a second orange at the base of the  original fruit, opposite the stem. The second orange develops as a conjoined twin in a set of smaller segments embedded within the peel of the larger orange. From the outside, it looks similar to the human navel.

Because the mutation left the fruit seedless and, therefore,  sterile, the only means available to cultivate more of this new variety  is to graft cuttings onto other varieties of citrus tree. Two such  cuttings of the original tree were transplanted to Riverside, California in 1870, which eventually led to worldwide popularity.

Today, navel oranges continue to be produced via cutting and grafting. This does not allow for the usual selective breeding methodologies, and so not only do the navel oranges of today have  exactly the same genetic makeup as the original tree, and are therefore clones;  in a sense, all navel oranges can be considered to be the fruit of that  single over-a-century-old tree. This is similar to the common yellow  seedless banana, the Cavendish.

On rare occasions, however, further mutations can lead to new varieties.

Valencia orange

The Valencia or Murcia orange is one of the sweet oranges used for juice extraction. It is a  late-season fruit, and therefore a popular variety when the navel  oranges are out of season. For this reason, the orange was chosen to be  the official mascot of the 1982 FIFA World Cup, which was held in Spain. The mascot was called "Naranjito" , and wore the colours of the Spanish soccer team uniform.

Blood orange

The blood orange has streaks of red in the fruit, and the juice is often a dark burgundy  colour. The fruit has found a niche as an interesting ingredient  variation on traditional Seville marmalade, with its striking red  streaks and distinct flavour. The scarlet navel is a variety with the same dual-fruit mutation as the navel orange.

Hawker Siddeley, one of the largest and best-known companies in  British aviation, got its start through a bankruptcy. The failed firm,  Sopwith Aviation, had been very active during World War I and had built  the famous Sopwith Camel fighter plane. Orders from the government dried up following the end of  the war, in 1918, and Sopwith found itself struggling. Then the British  treasury presented a very large bill for excess profits during the war.  Unable to pay it, Sopwith responded by declaring that it was bankrupt.  Its assets were taken over by a group of investors led by the test  pilot Harry Hawker. His new firm, H. G. Hawker Engineering Company,  opened for business late in 1920.

Hawker found work initially by building motorcycles and motorcars  and by rebuilding used aircraft. However, company officials wanted to  return to being full-time planebuilders. The Royal Air Force was  placing orders for small numbers of new aircraft from a variety of  British companies, which gave Hawker Engineering its opportunity. A  brilliant chief designer, Sydney Camm, helped as well.

Under his leadership, Hawker scored a substantial success with a single-engine bomber, the Hart. Camm introduced a steel framework for light weight. The finished aircraft had an empty weight of only  2,530 pounds (1,148 kilograms), which gave it great speed. When the  first Harts entered service in 1930, they had a top speed of 184 miles  per hour (296 kilometers per hour), which was 30 miles per hour (48  kilometers per hour) faster than biplane fighters that tried to  intercept.

The Hart remained in production through much of the 1930s, and gave  rise to 17 variants. Because of its high speed, it was adapted for use  as a fighter. Another version, fitted with pontoons, flew with aircraft  carriers of the Royal Navy. More than 3,000 Harts were built, making  this the most produced British airplane in the years before World War  II.

Few other companies approached this success. Indeed, after 1930, the  Great Depression placed many planebuilders under considerable financial  stress. Officials of the British government responded by encouraging  aviation leaders to reorganize their industry into fewer but stronger  companies. Thomas Sopwith, chairman of Hawker, took the initiative by  drawing on profits from sales of Harts as he raised capital of £2  million, some $10 million. He then bought up other firms: Gloster  Aircraft, Armstrong Siddeley Motors, Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft, Air  Service Training, and A. V. Roe. In 1935 he reorganized these holdings  as the Hawker Siddeley Aircraft Company. These mergers placed those  firms on a good financial footing, at a time when war was only a few  years away.

Also during 1935, the rising threat of war with Germany led the  Under-Secretary of State for Air, Sir Philip Sassoon, to announce a  sharp increase in the purchase of warplanes. This change in policy took  place at a time when aircraft design was changing dramatically. The  best aircraft of the day, including the Hart, still were biplanes.  However, by the mid-1930s the all-metal monoplane was in the forefront. Such aircraft were heavier than biplanes, but excellent streamlining made them considerably faster. At Hawker, Sydney Camm soon was ready  with a new fighter: the Hurricane. It first flew in November 1935. In  April 1936, the directors of Hawker placed it into production even  before receiving a formal government order. It entered service in 1938  and showed a top speed of 325 miles per hour (523 kilometers per hour),  nearly twice that of the Hart.

Then in April 1940, the dictator of Germany, Adolf Hitler, unleashed  a powerful army that already had overrun Poland in less than a month.  The Netherlands now fell in only five days. France surrendered in June.  With complete victory in view, Hitler then ordered his generals to  prepare to invade England. Only one military command stood in their  way: the Royal Air Force.

The ensuing Battle of Britain succeeded in defending that nation, as  Hitler called off his invasion. The Hawker Hurricane emerged as the  outstanding fighter of this conflict. Hurricanes in service outnumbered  all other British fighters combined, shooting down 55 percent of all  enemy aircraft destroyed. The historian Francis Mason writes that the  Hurricane showed superior "ability to withstand battle damage, ease of  repair, better ability to operate from poor quality [airfields] and  comparative ease of flight training. It also proved much simpler to fly  at night."

The end of World War II led quickly to the Cold War, a prolonged  confrontation with the Soviet Union. Jet engines now were the key to  fighter design, and Sydney Camm took advantage of their power by  developing the Hawker Hunter fighter-bomber. During an early flight in  1953, its test pilot set a world speed record of 728 miles per hour  (1,172 kilometers per hour). Amid steady improvement, the Hunter was  crafted in 12 versions, with some 2,000 of these aircraft being built  by 1960. Faster fighters by then were available, but a Hunter could be  refueled and rearmed in as little as five minutes. It found a  particular role in attacking ground targets, for which it did not  require supersonic speed. It became popular in the export market, with hundreds of Hunters remaining in service into the 1980s.

Even so, it was clear by the mid-1950s that modern aircraft were too  costly for Britain to pursue on its own. Nor was there need for them;  American warplanes were the world's best and could easily be purchased.  In 1957 the British minister of defense, Duncan Sandys, issued a White  Paper, a formal document that announced a new policy: Great Britain  would build no new fighter aircraft for its Royal Air Force. The  industry was free to build airliners, sell fighters overseas, and  collaborate with the United States and with France. Even so, this  policy brought a sharp cutback in the prospects for Britain's  planebuilders.

They responded with a new wave of mergers. The engine-builders  Armstrong Siddeley and Bristol Aero-Engines combined in 1959 to form  Bristol Siddeley. Hawker Siddeley took over the big firm of De  Havilland Aircraft in 1960. Vickers, English Electric, and Bristol  Aircraft united to create British Aircraft Corporation, also in 1960. Rolls Royce, the nation's leading engine builder, merged with Bristol Siddeley in 1966.

At Hawker, innovation continued. Ralph Hooper, a senior manager, developed a strong interest in a new Bristol engine, the Pegasus, with nozzles that could swivel in any direction.  Hooper saw that a fighter powered by such an engine could direct its  thrust downward to take off and land vertically, to hover, to stop in  midair, and to maneuver in flight with unprecedented agility. He built  an experimental airplane, the P.1127, which first flew in 1960. This  led to an operational fighter, the Harrier. It showed such promise that  the British government reversed its White Paper policy and purchased  Harriers for both the Royal Navy and Royal Air Force, with the first of  them entering service in 1968. The U.S. Marines acquired their own  Harriers. In addition, Hawker Siddeley formed a partnership with  America's firm of McDonnell Douglas. This brought development of an advanced Harrier that could carry heavier loads.

The Harrier went to war in 1982, when Argentina seized the  British-held Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic. Prime Minister  Margaret Thatcher sent a naval force that included these fighters. They  shot down 28 Argentine aircraft while losing none of their own in  aerial combat. The British won the battle and took back the islands.

By then the firm of Hawker Siddeley no longer existed as such. An  act of Parliament in 1977 had combined it with British Aircraft to form  a single enormous company, British Aerospace. But old Thomas  Sopwith—Sir Thomas, having been knighted in 1953—was still very much  alive. He had been chairman first of Hawker and then of Hawker Siddeley  since 1920. He died in 1989 at the age of 100 years, as the last  pioneer from the early days of British aviation.

By - Joseph Letzelter

Human cloning is the creation of a genetically identical copy of a human being , human cell, or human tissue.

Although the possibility of cloning human beings has been the  subject of speculation for much of the twentieth century, scientitists  and policy makers began to take the prospect seriously in the 1960s.  Nobel Prize winning geneticist Joshua Lederberg advocated for cloning and genetic engineering in a seminal article in the American Naturalist in 1966 and again, the following year, in the Washington Post. He sparked a debate with conservative bioethicist Leon Kass, who wrote at the time that "the programmed reproduction of man will, in fact, dehumanize him." Another Nobel Laureate, James Watson, publicized the potential and the perils of cloning in his Atlantic Monthly essay, "Moving Toward the Clonal Man", in 1971.

Human cloning also gained a foothold in popular culture, starting in the 1970s. Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, David Rorvik's In His Image: Toward Cloning of a Man, Woody Allen's film Sleeper and The Boys from Brazil all helped to make the public aware of the ethical issues surrounding human cloning.

Despite being a developing economy with its attendant problems, India has effectively developed space technology and has applied it successfully for its rapid development and today is offering a variety of space services globally. During the formative decade of 1960s, space research was conducted by India mainly with the help of sounding rockets. The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) was formed in 1969. Space research activities were provided additional fillip with the formation of the Space Commission and the Department of Space by the government of India in 1972. And, ISRO was brought under the Department of Space in the same year. In the history of the Indian space programme, 70s were the era of Experimentation during which experimental satellite programmes like Aryabhatta, Bhaskara, Rohini and Apple were conducted. The success of those programmes, led to era of operationalisation in 80s during which operational satellite programmes like INSAT and IRS came into being. Today, INSAT and IRS are the major programmes of ISRO.

For launching its spacecraft indigenously, India is having a robust launch vehicle programme, which has matured to the state of offering launch services to the outside world. Antrix, the commercial arm of the Department of Space, is marketing India’s space services globally. Fruitful co-operation with other space faring nations, international bodies and the developing world is one of the main characteristics of India's space programme.

The most significant milestone of the Indian Space Programme during the year 2005-2006 was the successful launch of PSLV-C6. On 5 May 2005, the ninth flight of Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C6) from Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC) SHAR, Sriharikota successfully placed two satellites - the 1560 kg CARTOSTAR-1 and 42 kg HAMSAT - into a predetermined polar Sun Synchronous Orbit (SSO). Coming after seven launch successes in a row, the success of PSLV-C6 further demonstrated the reliability of PSLV and its capability to place payloads weighing up to 1600 kg satellites into a 600 km high polar SSO.

The successful launch of INSAT-4A, the heaviest and most powerful satellite built by India so far; on 22 December 2005 was the other major event of the year 2005-06. INSAT-4A is capable of providing Direct-To-Home (DTH) television broadcasting services.

Besides, the setting up of the second cluster of nine Village Resource Centres (VRCs) was an important ongoing initiative of the Department of Space during the year. VRC concept integrates the capabilities of communications and earth observation satellites to provide a variety of information emanating from space systems and other IT tools to address the changing and critical needs of rural communities.