Soap has a very long history dating back to the Babylonian Empire.
Soap manufacturing technology description was found in Mesopotamia on clay tablets relating to approximately 2200 BCE. Egyptian papyrus of the second millennium BC suggests that the Egyptians used soap. It was widely used in ancient Rome. The Persian chemist Al-Razi wrote a manuscript with the recipes of the ancient world. This ancient manuscript was discovered in the 13th century.
In the Middle Ages in England and France bathe soap was a privilege only of the nobility.
The Spanish Queen Isabella of Castile recognized that she used soap only twice in her life: at birth and on the eve of the wedding.
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Rain is the liquid form of water that falls from the sky in drops. Rain fills lakes, ponds, rivers, and streams. It provides the freshwater needed by humans, animals, and plants. Rain is a part of Earth’s endless water cycle.
It may sound a paradox, but it is actually rain that keeps the earth dry. If the moisture was not taken out of the air and formed into clouds, it would condense on every solid surface. We would feel as if we were in a steam bath.
Rain falls almost everywhere on Earth. One of the world’s rainiest places is Mount Waialeale in Hawaii. It rains about 350 days a year there. One of the driest places on Earth is the Atacama Desert in Chile.
The Sahara desert in Africa is very dry. Rain never falls on some parts of it. It is true that clouds pass over those areas and actually drop rain but the rain never touches the ground. The heat of the desert air evaporates the moisture as it falls.
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Clouds are made of water—thousands of gallons of water, floating high in the air. It’s easier to believe this when you know that cloud water takes the form of tiny droplets. The droplets are so tiny that you couldn’t see one if it was separated from all the others. If all these water droplets in a cloud meet a mass of warm air they evaporate – and the cloud disappears! This is why clouds are constantly changing shape.
Sometimes the water droplets join together around tiny pieces of dust in the air. These drops get bigger and bigger as more droplets collect. When they become too heavy to float, they fall.
There are three main kinds of clouds. “Cumulus” refers to the small puffballs or great wooly-looking clouds that are flat on the bottom. “Stratus” are low clouds, usually streaky or without much shape. And “cirrus” are light feathery clouds, like the ones in the photo. Sometimes cirrus clouds are so high, where the air is very cold, that the whole cloud is made of ice.
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January was named after the Roman god Janus, the god of beginnings and of doors and gateways. Janus was represented as having two faces so that he might guard both entrances and exits. This has reinforced the mistaken belief that January was so named because it was the first month of the year. In fact, however, when the ten-month Roman calendar was reestablished about 700 B.C., January was added as the eleventh month and so named because it contained a feast day in honor of Janus. In 153 B.C. it began to be counted, as the first month and January quickly became a popular festival.
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In spring and summer when the sun shine most of the day a-large number of people have freckles. They are caused by the sunshine. It stirs a brownish pigment which normally lies in the deep layers of the skin and the pigment comes to the surface where it can be seen.
The skin is not just a thin jacket to cover the body. It is a complex organ with many functions. It has oil glands and sweat glands and very small roots from which hairs grow. It has blood vessels and nerves. Its thickness may be from one-sixth to one-fiftieth of an inch. The outer layer of the skin, called the epidermis, is thin tissue of cells constantly coming off. The cells grow in the lower layer called the dermis. In the dermis there is a brown pigment.
The sunshine brings a spot of the pigment from the dermis to the epidermis where it can be seen as a freckle.
Freckles disappear when old cells of the epidermis come off, and new cells which have grown in the dermis take their place.
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Throughout history, people have used various systems to organize the year into units such as days, weeks, and months. A calendar’s primary function is regulating and organizing human activities; the word derives from the Latin calendarium or calendra, “account book,” and kalendae or “calends,” the new moon and first day of the Roman month.
Unlike the day, the month, and the year, the week is not based on any astronomical event.
The modern calendar has 12 months of 30 or 31 days each (February has 28, sometimes 29). The calendar year has 365 days, which is about how long it takes the Earth to circle the Sun once. That makes it a solar calendar.
The oldest calendars were used to figure out when to plant, harvest, and store crops. These were often “lunar calendars,” based on the number of days it took the Moon to appear full and then dwindle away again.
Many calendars have religious origins.
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About 10,000 BC, man first started eating flat bread — a baked combination of flour and water. Ancient Egyptians were the first to have baked leavened bread. About 3,000 BC, they started fermenting a flour and water mixture by using wild yeast. Since wheat is the only grain with sufficient gluten content to make a raised or leavened loaf of bread, wheat quickly became favored over other grains grown at the time, such as oats, millet, rice, and barley.
In 150 BC, the first bakers’ guilds were formed in Rome. Wealthy Romans insisted on the more exclusive and expensive white bread. Roman bakeries produced a variety of breads and distributed free bread to the poor in times of need.
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