DOLL FESTIVAL OF JAPAN

 Hina Matsuri 

   The Japanese Doll Festival, Hina Matsuri or Girl's Day, is held on March 3. Platforms covered with a red carpet are used to display a set of ornamental dolls representing the Emperor, Empress, attendants and musicians in traditional court dress of the Heian period. 

    Origin and custom: The custom of displaying dolls began during the Heian period. Formerly, people believed the dolls possessed the power to contain bad spirits. Hina Matsuri traces its origin to an ancient Japanese custom called hina-nagashi, in which straw hina dolls are set afloat on a boat and sent down a river to the sea, supposedly taking troubles or bad spirits with them. The Shimagamo Shrine (part of the Kamo Shrine complex in Kyoto) celebrates the Nagashibina by floating these dolls between the Takano and Kamo Rivers to pray for the safety of children. People have stopped doing this now because of fishermen catching dolls in their nets. They now send them out to sea, and when the spectators are gone they take the boats out of the water and bring them back to the temple and burn them.

   The customery drink for the festival is shirozake, a sake made from fermented rice. A coloured hina-arare, bite-sized crackers flavoured with sugar or soy sauce depending on the region, and hishimochi, a diamond-shaped coloured rice cake, are served. Chirashizushi (sushi rice flavoured with sugar, vinegar, topped with raw fish and a variety of ingredients) is often eaten. A salt-based soup called ushiojiru containing clams still in the shell is also served. Clam shells in food are deemed the symbol of a united and peaceful couple, because a pair of clam shells fits perfectly, and no pair but the original pair can do so.

   Families generally start to display the dolls around mid-February and take down the platforms immediately after the festival.  Superstition says that leaving the dolls out past March 4 will result in a late marriage for the daughter. 

MECHANISM BEHIND MACHINE

How does a pager work?

     A ringing cell phone can be a nuisance to others in some places like a theatre or at important meetings. 

       A pager is very useful then, because it alerts you that someone is trying to contact you by vibrating silently. 

How does a pager work? 

      If you want to page your friend, you must first dial the number of his paging service provider. You will then be connected to a computerized terminal which instructs you to key in your telephone number, and then press the 'star' key on your phone to complete the message. 

    The paging terminal routes the signal to a radio transmitter. If your friend's pager is switched on, and within the radio transmitter's range, it will recognize the coded signal sent by the radio transmitter. 

       The pager then converts the signal into data, and alerts your friend with a beep or vibration. Your number will be displayed on his pager, and he can then call you back whenever it is convenient to him.

AMAZING FACT

 Body language

Body language is the series of gestures and movements we make with our face, head, arms, hands and indeed our whole bodies, to signal thoughts and feelings. Head and facial gestures can say a lot about how we feel. How often do you raise your eyebrows when you are surprised, for instance, or nod your head when you say 'yes'? Our body language shows how we feel. People who are tired tend to hunch up and look smaller. People who are excited and happy make big and confident gestures.

Whole body gestures, meaning the way we stand or sit, can also communicate a lot. Confident people tend to show they are sure of themselves by standing up straight. A fine example of body language is when two dogs meet. You will see them take up a number of different poses at various times- ears and nose down, tail between their legs, ears pricked, teeth bared, or tail up and wagging. It is actions like these that allow dogs to tell each other when they want to fight, to run away, or to make friends.

IMPORTANCE OF TIME

Time Management

At the New Year, you are given a very precious gift: the gift of 365 days or 31,536,000 seconds, but this year 2024 being leap year, you have extra 1 day, 24 hours, 1440 minutes and 86,400 seconds. Gift of time is the greatest resource in your life. It is like a sum of money given to you at the beginning of the New Year, which you can put to a variety of good uses depending on how you value and visualise your life. 

As Marc Levy, a French writer, said, “If you want to know the value of one hour, ask the lovers waiting to meet. If you want to know the value of one minute, ask the person who just missed the train. If you want to know the value of one second, ask the person who just escaped death in a car accident. And if you want to know the value of one hundredth of a second, ask the athlete who won a silver medal in the Olympics.” 

The time given to you is like a kite in the sky. To take the kite to greater heights, the kite-flyer has to take charge of the thread and guide it according to the direction of the wind. 

Every person is given the same 24 hours every day. But we find that some people manage this time well and become successful, while others fret and sweat, feeling that they don’t have enough time. 

Time is the most valuable gift and the key is not spending it somehow, but investing it intelligently. 

Shiv Khera, in his famous book You Can Win, explains this through the story of two woodcutters who went to the forest to cut trees. The first one cut, day after day, lesser and lesser number of trees, while the second was successful in cutting the same number every day because he spent daily some time to sharpen his axe. Sharpening the axe is synonymous to investing your time to care for your body, mind, heart and soul so that you are prepared to face your future tasks. 

Besides your studies, work or daily life chores, invest your time in doing regular meditation, spending time with your family, reading good books, attending seminars or talks and doing physical exercises. This will bring long-term results in your life. Therefore, manage your time well by prioritising your tasks, and writing them down according to their importance. Stay away the non-essentials from your life. Concentrate on one task at a time. Develop the habit of good Time Management. Take care of your time, and time will take care of you! 

DISCOVER THE RELATIVELY EXCITING LIFE OF ONE OF HISTORY'S GREATEST SCIENTISTS

 Albert Einstein 

It all began with a boy imagining what it would be like to run alongside a beam of light. Albert Einstein, who was born in 1879, was 16 years old. Not long before this “thought experiment” he had run away from his boarding school in Germany, turning up on the doorstep of his parents’ house in Italy. Fortunately, Einstein’s parents realised how miserable he had been at boarding school and decided to send him to a Swiss school. However, to get into the new school, the young Einstein had to pass a set of exams – and he failed most of them. Luckily, he did well enough at maths and physics, so the school agreed to take him on the promise that he put in extra work in the other subjects. 

An unwilling pupil: Einstein continued playing with the idea of riding on a light beam during his four years at university. However, he found many of the lectures boring, and he often missed classes to work by himself. An annoyed university teacher took revenge by writing a bad report on Einstein when he graduated in 1900. This meant that for nearly two years afterwards he struggled to find a job. In 1902, a friend recommended the 23-year-old Einstein for a job at the Swiss patent office. This is where people register their inventions to stop others copying them. Einstein’s father died shortly afterwards, and for many years Einstein felt sad that his dad had died before Einstein had a chance to be successful in the scientific world.

A year of miracles: Einstein often had spare time at his job, and he used it to work on scientific problems that interested him. In 1905 this work started to pay off. This is sometimes described as Einstein’s “miracle year”, when he published four major breakthroughs. The first explained why electrons were emitted when light hits a material. As well as being a wave, Einstein found that light consists of particles called photons. This work changed physics forever and years later won Einstein the Nobel Prize for Physics (a famous award) in 1921. The second piece of work analysed Brownian motion. This is the never-ending jiggle of small particles in a liquid. Einstein’s research provided evidence that atoms really existed, before there was any other proof. For his third big idea, Einstein laid out why the speed of light remains constant. The fourth breakthrough was perhaps the most famous equation in all of science: E = mc² (energy equals mass times the speed of light squared). This describes how matter is converted into energy inside stars. 

Defying gravity: However, for Einstein there was always one thing missing in his theories, because they paid no attention to the most fundamental of all physical forces: gravity. For the next 10 years, Einstein studied gravity, and by 1915 he came up with his theory of general relativity. This explained how gravity affects space and time, and paved the way for a new way to understand the universe. The foundation of Einstein’s famous theory of relativity is that the speed of light remains constant at all times. Imagine a spaceship travelling at the speed of light shooting a laser at an enemy. You would think that the laser, which also travels at light speed, would take the boost from the spaceship firing it and travel at twice the speed of light. It should hit the enemy first, but it doesn’t. Spaceship and laser hit the enemy craft at the same moment. For the speed of light to remain constant, other things must change: time slows down as objects travel faster until, at the speed of light, time stops entirely. 

Just for laughs: When cameramen turned up to Einstein’s 72nd birthday party uninvited, he stuck his tongue out at them. 

THE STICKY SUBSTANCE THAT WE LIKE TO CHEW

 Chewing gum

Most of us love chewing gum. It’s fun! When we chew gum, we want to blow it as a big balloon. The balloon blows, the eyes are wide open: When is it going to pop?

While chewing gum, have you ever thought about questions like “How and when was chewing gum invented? Who chewed it first? What did the first gum taste like?” Let’s read the history of gum.

The invention of gum and the habit of chewing dates back to ancient times, around 6000 years ago! Archaeologists have found gum-like substances during excavations around Sweden and Finland. It is thought that people living in these regions in ancient times chewed the sticky substance they obtained from birch bark tar. They chewed the gum not for fun or relaxation as we do now, but to clean their teeth, cure bad breath and relieve their stomachs. Also, the colour of the gum was not white or colourful, but grey.

Ancient Greeks and Romans also discovered the white resin of the gum tree in their region. They called this sticky substance mastic. Scientists believe that people in this period also chewed gum for oral health. 

With its freshness and sweet smell, this chewing gum is still collected from trees and sold as mastic gums today. This precious tree where the chewing gum comes from grows on Chios Island and the Çeşme Peninsula in Turkey. 

People living in Africa made chewing gum from the sap of the acacia tree. The sap has an orange pink colour and a rubber-like structure. This substance, known as acacia gum or gum Arabic, was used both as chewing gum and as an adhesive. Egyptians used it to preserve their mummies. Some Italian painters used it to make paint and glue. In India, it was used to make medicine.

In Australia, gum was obtained from eucalyptus tree. It’s no surprise that koalas chew the tree’s leaves for so long! Lemurs and monkeys soften the sap in tree stems with their saliva in their mouths and then chew it.

In Southeast Asia, gum was obtained from the ginseng plant. Americans chewed the resin collected from spruce trees. In Mexico, people made a kind of chewing gum called “chicle” by drying the resin of the tree known as sapodilla.

Hundreds of years later, the production of chewing gum changed completely. In the late 1860s, Thomas Adams tried adding flavourings to natural rubber and could make a tasty chewing gum. It was then started to be produced in factories to be sold. That’s how packaged chewing gums entered people’s lives.

Natural chewing gum is still chewed to avoid bad breath and relieve the stomach as well as strengthen the jaw muscles. But most of the packaged, colourful and sweet chewing gums sold in markets contain sweeteners, flavour and colour additives. These substances are harmful for our health. For this reason, you should read the package of chewing gum before buying it and learn the ingredients it contains.

As the chewing gum gradually became more popular, other producers tried to find different formulae. In 1928, Walter Dimer achieved in making gum that could blow bubbles. By using natural rubber in the right amount, he made a chewing gum that was thin but strong enough not to break and soft enough to be chewed.

When you swallow chewing gum, don’t worry, it won’t stick to your stomach. It’ll break down in the stomach and is evacuated in the poop within a few days. Still, be careful not to swallow while chewing gum!

AN IMPORTANT PRODUCT OBTAINED FROM TREE

 Natural Rubber

Have you ever seen a milky liquid flowing from a plant?

Some of you might have seen a spurge or a dandelion with its flying seeds in spring… When a part of their stem is broken, a white fluid called latex come out. Besides these, many other plants secrete this fluid to heal their tissues.

The tree in the image is the rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis). Although its homeland is the Amazon rainforest in South America, today it is mostly grown in Southeast Asian countries such as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. The rubber tree produces plenty amounts of latex. This latex contains intensive amounts of a substance called rubber.

Rubber is used in the production of various goods, especially car tyres! How interesting, isn’t it? The fluid coming from the trunk of a tree is actually the raw material for car tyres. And this is not the only item. It is also used in erasers, surgical gloves, elastic bands, shoes, balloons and so on... Besides, rubber gains adhesive properties when heated and mixed with certain chemicals, that’s why adhesives are also produced from rubber.

What is the journey of natural rubber from the tree to the production of goods?

The first step in the production of natural rubber is to collect latex from the trees. Latex is collected in the morning. The trunk of the trees is cut with special knives so as to slice grooves. The fluid running down from the grooves is gathered in containers. Latex solidifies when left in the open air. To avoid this solidification, ammonia is added to the collected fluid.

Then, chemicals such as formic acid, acetic acid are added to this fluid. The rubber substance is left to become lumpy. The rubber come out of the fluid is passed through large rollers. After passing through the rollers, the rubber is removed from excess water, gets thinned and becomes ready to dry. 

The layers of rubber are hung on a rope like clothes, and are let dry. This process is done in farmer gardens, forests or factories. The layers dry in the open air in a few days. This process takes less time in factories. The rubber is dried in special places called smokehouses. As it dries, it changes in colour and gradually turns brown. Depending on its purpose of use, the rubber is transported to the factory where the relevant product is produced.

Rubber becomes sticky at high heat and brittles at low heat. That’s why, it is passed through special processes in factories. One of these processes is the method accidentally discovered by Charles Goodyear in 1839. In this method, rubber is cooked with sulphur. So, it becomes durable against bad conditions and has a flexible structure. If you think about car tyres, you can imagine this better....

Rubber was even used in BC. It was used in such different fields in such great amounts that resources became insufficient over the years. That’s why, artificial (synthetic) rubber started to be made. Synthetics became more durable and useful than natural ones in time. The rubber used today is 70% synthetic. 

Since it is a recyclable material, natural rubber is eco-friendly compared to synthetic rubber or plastic. But it has still negative impacts on the environment. 

There are rubber tree forests created only for natural rubber production. Since there is only one type of tree planted in these forests, biodiversity in that area declines. This factor poses a threat to tropical forests and the living beings there. Chemicals used to increase the yield pollute soil and water. Also, these trees need more water than the other plants in the area.

All raw materials we use have positive and negative sides. Considering all of these, we can say that the best way to protect nature is to consume less.