In much of Asia food is usually eaten with chopsticks. Chopsticks are two long, thin, usually tapered, pieces of wood. Bamboo is the most common material, but they are also be made of various types of wood, as well as plastic, porcelain, animal bone, ivory, metal, coral, agate, and jade.
Royal families and aristocrats preferred silver ones, believing in the metal’s capacity to detect arsenic.
Today chopsticks can be made of coral, agate, jade, silk, plastic, horn, porcelain, animal bone, and stainless steel. Truly elegant chopsticks might be made of gold and embossed in silver with Chinese calligraphy.
Chopsticks may be totally smooth or carved or modeled ripples. Silver or gold paint can be used to give them a rough texture. In Thailand, wood is often elaborately carved into chopsticks. The ends of chopsticks can be rounded or squared, while the tips can be blunt or sharp.
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Most unusual churches all over the world.
This article is not about religion, it’s about architecture. Not just architecture, but unusual architecture, and to be more exact – unusual churches.
There are extraordinary, strange, odd, unusual churches around the world.

St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, Russia
Cathedral of Saint Basil the Blessed is a multi-tented church which stands on the Red Square in Moscow. This church looks really cool, because it has very unusual onion domes which look playful and colorful. The cathedral was built in 1555 -1561 by Ivan the Terrible to celebrate the capture of the Khanate of Kazan. A legend says that Ivan had the architect, Postnik Yakovlev, blinded to prevent him from building a more magnificent building for anyone else. In fact, Postnik Yakovlev built a number of churches after Saint Basil’s.
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BASE (Building, Antenna, Span, and Earth) jumping is the sport of using a parachute to jump from fixed objects. It is much more dangerous than skydiving from aircraft and is currently regarded as a fringe extreme sport.
There are isolated examples of BASE jumps dating from the early 1900s. Frederick Law jumped from the Statue of Liberty in 1912; Michael Pelkey and Brian Schubert jumped the cliff “El Capitan” in Yosemite Valley in 1966; and in 1976, Rick Sylvester jumped Canada’s Mt Asgard for the opening sequence of the James Bond movie “The Spy Who Loved Me”, giving the wider world its first look at BASE jumping.
The acronym “BASE” was coined by film-maker Carl Boenish, who in 1978 filmed the first jumps from El Capitan to be made using ram-air parachutes and freefall tracking technique. BASE jumping became more widely among parachutists. Boenish continued to publish films and informational magazines on BASE jumping until his 1984 death on a cliff jump in Norway.
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Everything in the world is made of atoms – people, animals, insects, flowers, stones, water, steel, smoke, air …
The word “atom” comes from the Greek word atomos, meaning “indivisible.” The ancient Greeks were the first to think of the atom as the basic unit of all matter.
Atoms are very small. Even with a microscope you cannot see a single atom. And atoms themselves are made up of even smaller parts.
Although an atom is so small, it has a lot of empty space in it. There is a heavy nucleus in the centre of an atom. It is made up of two kinds of particles called protons and neutrons. Around the nucleus revolve much smaller particles called electrons, which form the outer shell of an atom. Thus, in the tiny but mighty atom there is a heavy nucleus and an outer shell of smaller electrons, and in between there is only empty space.
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In the good old days, clothes were washed in a stream, by pounding the garments with rocks, stones and heavy sticks without any soap.
Fire added heat to the laundry mix, when clothes were washed in tubs with water heated over open fires and soap made at home from a combination of lye and ashes. Clothes were scrubbed on a corrugated board, wrung by hand, rinsed, then wrung again, and draped on lines or bushes to dry.
In 1797, a washboard was created. And already in 1851, American James King patented a washing machine with a rotating drum, which was very similar to the modern.
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Glass is a useful and unique material. It is one of the most widely used materials and can be formed into all kinds of shapes.
The main ingredient for glass is pure silica, or sand. It takes very high temperatures to make glass from sand. By adding certain chemicals to the silica, the process needs much less heat. Chemicals can also make the glass stronger or add colors to it.
Artists blow glass and create works of art. Glassblowers blow air through a tube into melted glass to create different shapes. Glassblowing was invented more than 2,000 years ago.
The oldest known glass is more than 4,000 years old. Ancient Egyptians made glass beads and jars in about 2500 BC. Many European churches were decorated with stained- glass windows.
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Today cheese is one of the most popular products.
A legend says how cheese was ‘discovered’. One day a man filled his saddlebag with milk and started his way across the desert. After several hours riding he stopped to have a drink but he found that the milk had separated into a pale watery liquid and solid white lumps. As the saddlebag was made from the stomach of a young animal, it contained rennin and the milk had been effectively separated with the help of the rennin, the hot sun and the galloping of the horse.
It is considered that cheese was first made in the Middle East. Thanks to monks, who were innovators and developers, we have many of the classic varieties of cheese.
Cheese was known to the ancient Sumerians four thousand years before the birth of Christ.
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