Picture Perfect – How to Take Great Photos
Instagram, flickr, tumblr, facebook, twitter. You can’t help but feel bombarded with different photo uploading websites.
We’re being showered with photos: fancy food delicately arranged on a plate; inanely grinning friends tagged in a variety of locations; sunsets from all over the world.
What makes a photo a good photo? This guide will help turn your everyday snaps into something a bit more special.
How Did the Penguin Get its Name?
These days, we all know what a penguin looks like. Even if you haven’t seen a real, live penguin, I’m sure you have seen pictures, perhaps watched them in a film. It seems strange to think that people in Europe had no idea they existed for so many centuries! Perhaps you have wondered about that part of history.
Who Invented the First Electric Battery?
When we talk about electric batteries, we often talk about voltage. But did you know that this word is named after the person who invented the first electric battery? First, let’s take a look at what a volt is, and then we’ll find out more about the guy who gave the ‘volt’ its name.
What is a Volt?
A volt is defined as a unit of electric potential and electromotive force, and voltage refers to the number of those units. That sounds a lot more complicated than it is! If you think of the water in a tap being like the electricity running through a wire, the voltage means the amount of pressure. This video is quite long but explains it very well.
Why are Volts Called Volts?
Alessandro Volta
The term actually comes from a name. It was coined in honour of Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who is recognised as the inventor of the first electric battery. During the 1790s, Volta worked on the theories of electricity of the day.
Volta disagreed with the theory proposed by fellow Italian scientist Galvani that electricity was generated by animal tissue. Instead of experimenting on frogs or other animals, Volta did experiment after experiment with metals.
His persistence paid off, and in 1800, he invented the world’s first battery, known as the ‘voltaic pile’.
The Voltaic Pile
This voltaic pile was simple but ingenious. It consisted of a pile of zinc and silver discs. But alternating between them was a piece of cardboard, or a piece of cloth, that had been soaked in saltwater.
There was a wire that connected the zinc disc on the bottom to the silver disc on the top, and this wire was capable of producing sparks.
What else Did Volta Invent?
The invention of the first electric battery brought Volta the most fame and recognition, but he also made other discoveries. He invented the electrophorus, a device that could transfer an electrical charge to other objects, as well as an electrical condensor, and the voltaic cell.
He is also known for having discovered and isolated methane gas. After his death, the volt and voltage were named in his memory.
What about Galvani?
Luigi Galvani
Yet there is one more twist to the tale. Volta’s longstanding colleague Galvani of the animal electricity theory also left his name in our language. When we say ‘galvanise’ or ‘galvanism’, that is where it comes from.
Despite their differing theories, there was no rivalry between the two scientists. They were both more concerned with the pursuit of knowledge than with whose theory would prove to be right, and it was Volta who first coined the word ‘galvanismo’ in Italian.
Featured Image by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash
Do Earwigs Really Live in Our Ears?
There has long been a myth that earwigs use human ears either to lay their eggs or to live in and feed off our ear wax, or other similar things. It sounds pretty gruesome, doesn’t it? After all, who would actually like the idea of an insect living inside their ear? But do earwigs really live in our ears?
Fortunately for us, it is not true. Despite their name, earwigs don’t actually live in our ears and neither do they use them to lay eggs. They much prefer their normal habitat of nests under rocks and logs or in flowerbeds. So where does the earwig get its name?
Old English Origins
Yet the name itself suggests that this has been a myth for a long time, so let’s examine the name. It can easily be split into two parts: ear and wig. These two parts both come from Old English; which is what we call the language as it was spoken when it was first written down, right up to the tenth century. So this would include the period of Kind Alfred the Great; he of the burning cakes.
In Old English, the words were eare and wicga. The first part, which you can recognise quite easily, meant ‘ear’. But the second part, wicga, meant ‘insect, beetle, worm’. The interesting thing is that it came from a root that did not have anything to do with insects at all, but instead meant ‘wiggle’.
Think about how even today we say ‘wiggly worm’; or think about how you would describe the movement of a caterpillar. You can see how this word came to be associated with insects. So if we put the two parts of our word together again, we have ‘ear-insect’. It seems that our very early linguistic forebears did indeed believe that earwigs lived in the ear.
Blame it on the Romans
But where did this myth that they dwell in our ears come from? It is not unique to English; in German it is known as Ohrwurm, or ‘earworm’, and it is the same in Welsh with pryf clustiog; while in French it is perce-oreille, or ‘ear-piercer’.
To find the origins of the myth, we have to go back in time all the way to the days of the Romans. In around 77 CE, Roman naval commander and writer Pliny the Elder published his work Historia Naturalis, or Natural History.
In it he writes about a great deal of the natural world, including insects. It is here that the myth may have begun, as he writes about earwigs getting into the ear. Perhaps he saw one that had happened to go into the ear by chance, much as a fly or a spider might, and jumped to the wrong conclusions.
The Pincer Insect
Other languages have taken the name from the apearance of the insect; in Italian it is known as forbicina, and in Spanish it is tijereta, while Greek has ψαλίδα [psalida] All three of these translate as ‘little scissors’, deriving from the pincers that the earwig uses to catch its prey.