Specail News

Breathing Earth

The recently launched Breathing Earth.net shows in 'real-time' people being born, dying and the amount of carbon being emitted using the most up-to-date data available. You can also find facts about each country by hovering over them.

Smallest Horse In The World

Standing just 17 inches tall, she is never going to be a champion show-jumper.In fact, the tiny mare is so small she would struggle to leap over a bucket. But such things are of little concern for feisty Thumbelina who has just been officially recognized as the world's smallest horse. The five-year-old received the title from the Guinness Book of Records after her astonished owners realized she was never going to grow any bigger. She was born on a farm in America to a couple that specializes in breeding miniature horses. These popular show horses usually weigh about 250lb and reach a height of 34 inches when they are fully grown. At birth she weighed 8lb - the weight of many newborn babies - and eventually she grew to a mere 60lb. Because her legs are proportionally smaller than her body and her head, she has to wear orthopedic fittings to straighten them a lot of the time. She expects to live up to the age of 17 instead of 35 years of normal horse. The tiny mare has become sometime of a celebrity in her hometown in America.

October 7, 2005 has marks the 30th anniversary of the one of the hottest consumer electronic products in the world today the digital camera. In 1975, the world’s first digital photograph was taken at a Kodak lab in Rochester, NY, USA, in an event that preceded the Compact Disc, the Personal Computer and the Internet. In 1974 Steven Sasson, an engineer at Kodak’s Applied Electronics Research Center, was tasked with devising an electronic handheld still camera. The following year his first working prototype weighing 8.5 pounds, powered by 16 AA batteries and recording images on a cassette took the first ever-digital still camera photograph. That’s Steve, the world’s first digital camera and the world’s first ever-digital photograph on the picture above.

Thief Burn On Cross

A suspected thief screams as villagers set fire to his legs after stripping him and tying him to a cross in Pelileo Grande, Ecuador, 75 miles south of Quito. Mario Quishpe had been caught stealing and locals took summary justice. A priest, along with other villagers, extinguished the flames and he was taken to hospital where his burns were treated.

Huge Billboard (click the pic to see big)

They say everything is big in Texas, but when compared to Dubai, the Longhorn state is a midget. Courtesy of the emirate, we have seen the world's biggest theme park, shopping malls and even indoor artificial ski fields. Now comes the Middle East's largest billboard ad. Weighing in at a whopping 400 meters long and standing 20 meters high at its highest point, the billboard is promoting one of the cities development projects named 'The Lagoons’. Using the more than 2,880 hours of manpower, the billboard is positioned in a marketing traffic gold mine on the infamous Sheikh Zayed Road.