The pyramid blocks were hewn from quarries using stone and copper tools. The blocks were transported to the pyramid site from remote quarries using barges, and from local quarries using wooden sleds. The Egyptians did not use the wheel during the Pyramid Age, an invention that would have been of limited use on softer ground under heavy loads. The sleds were dragged manually, sometimes with the help of beasts of burden, over smoothed roads. Some of the existing pathways were equipped with transverse wooden beams to lend support to the sled. A lubricant may have been poured upon the road to reduce friction.

Egyptians successfully completed the most massive building projects in all of history. There is nothing magical or supernatural in the means by which they achieved their goals, as is commonly thought. By all indications, they retained their knowledge of construction throughout their history, but they were limited after the Fourth Dynasty not by the lack of technology but rather by the lack of the abundant resources that were previously available. More than two thousand years later, the Romans would move huge stones, some weighing nearly 1,000 tons, using similar techniques at Baalbek.https://dashboard.thelearningdesk.in/ielts-admin/admin/pages/course/

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven was born on or near December 16, 1770, in Bonn, Germany.  He is widely considered the greatest composer of all time.  Sometime between the birth of his two younger brothers, Beethoven’s father began teaching him music with an extraordinary rigour and brutality that affected him for the rest of his life.  On a near daily basis, Beethoven was flogged, locked in the cellar and deprived of sleep for extra hours of practice. He studied the violin and clavier with his father as well as taking additional lessons from organists around town.  Beethoven was a prodigiously talented musician from his earliest days and displayed flashes of creative imagination that would eventually reach farther than any composer's before or since.

In 1804, only a week after Napoleon proclaimed himself Emperor, Beethoven debuted his Symphony number 3 in Napoleon's honour.  It was his grandest and most original work to date – so unlike anything heard before that through weeks of rehearsal, the musicians could not figure out how to play it.  At the same time as he was composing these great and immortal works, Beethoven was struggling to come to terms with the shocking and terrible fact, one that he tried desperately to conceal.  He was going deaf. By the turn of the century, Beethoven struggled to make out the words spoken to him in conversation.

Despite his extraordinary output of beautiful music, Beethoven was frequently miserable throughout his adult life.  Beethoven died on March 26 1827 at the age of 56.

SPAM, as every user of mobile phones in China is aware to their intense annoyance, is a roaring trade in China. Its delivery-men drive through residential neighbourhoods in “text-messaging cars”, with illegal but easy-to-buy gadgetry they use to hijack links between mobile-phone users and nearby communications masts. They then target the numbers they harvest, blasting them with spam text messages before driving away. Mobile-phone users usually see only the wearisome results: another sprinkling of spam messages offering deals on flats, investment advice and dodgy receipts for tax purposes.

Chinese mobile-users get more spam text messages than their counterparts anywhere else in the world. They received more than 300 billion of them in 2013, or close to one a day for each person using a mobile phone. Users in bigger markets like {[Beijing and Shanghai receive two a day, or more than 700 annually, accounting for perhaps one-fifth to one-third of all texts. Americans, by comparison, received an estimated 4.5 billion junk messages in 2011, or fewer than 20 per mobile-user for the year—out of a total of more than two trillion text messages sent.][26]}

In electronics, even the most advanced computer is just a complex arrangement of simple, modular parts that control specific functions; the same integrated circuit might be found in an iPhone, or in an aircraft. Biologists are creating this same modularity in – wait for it – plants, by designing gene "circuits" that control specific plant characteristics – color, size, resistance to drought, you name it.

The relatively new, interdisciplinary field is synthetic biology – the design of genetic circuits, just like in electronics, that control different functions and can be easily placed in one organism or the next. Most of today's synthetic biologists work with simple microorganisms, like E. coli or yeast.

A CSU team led by June Medford, professor of biology, and Ashok Prasad, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering, is doing the same thing, but in the much more complex biological world of plants.

More than ten years ago, while taking the temperature of the universe, astronomers found something odd. They discovered that a patch of sky, spanning the width of 20 moons, was unusually cold.

The astronomers were measuring the thermal radiation that bathes the entire universe, a glowing relic of the big bang. To gaze at this cosmic microwave background, or CMB, is to glimpse the primordial universe, a time when it was less than 400,000 years old.

The CMB blankets the sky, and looks pretty much the same everywhere, existing at a feebly cold temperature of 2.725 kelvins- just a couple degrees warmer than absolute zero. But armed with the newly launched WMAP satellite, the astronomers had set out to probe temperature variations as tiny as one part in 100,000. Born from the quantum froth that was the universe a half-moment after the big bang, those random fluctuations help scientists understand what the cosmos is made of and how it all came to be.

And standing out amidst those fluctuations was a cold spot. Over the years, astronomers have come up with all sorts of ideas to explain it, ranging from instrumental error to parallel universes. But now, they're homing in on a prime suspect: an enormous cavern of emptiness called a cosmic super void, so big that it might be the largest structure in the universe.

According to theory, such a vast void, in which many a star or galaxy exists, can leave a frigid imprint on the CMB. The answer to the mystery, then, might simply be a whole lot of nothing. Yet puzzles remain, and the case is far from closed.

According to the Met Office, the UK had its warmest July day ever on July 1, when temperatures hit 36.7 C near London. There were record heat waves in many countries including Spain, while the African continent had the second-warmest July on record.

[37, another important factor is El Nino. This natural phenomenon, which appears as a large swathe of warm water in the Pacific every few years, is known to push up global temperatures.

In recent days there have been reports that this year's El Nino will be particularly intense. As a result, [38

The seas have also been soaking up a large amount of heat, the NOAA said, with record warming in large expanses of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the UK Met Office, said: "A strong El Nino is under way in the tropical Pacific and this, combined with the long-term global warming trend, means there is the potential to see some very warm months throughout this year - as the new figures for July appear to show.