All fog occurs when there are so numerous water droplets in the air that visibility is hampered. But you will find different kinds of fog, which form in various ways. On cold, clear, calm autumn and winter nights, the ground quickly radiates the heat it absorbed during the day back into the oxygen. As the [...]
Most of the time, moisture in the oxygen is invisible. However, it might type fog or mist that makes it difficult to see even a short way ahead.
The atmosphere contains water nearly all of the time. But most of this is within the form of drinking water vapour – that is, water which has completely [...]
The initial person to land on the Antarctic Peninsula was John Davis, the captain of a seal-hunting vessel that arrived at Hughes Bay in 1821. It was one more 77 years before the initial scientific expedition spent a winter on the frozen continent. In 1911, Roald Amundsen and Robert Scott both led small exploration teams [...]
Once the central part of a tropical supercontinent, Antarctica is now the world’s coldest continent – a polar desert almost completely covered with a permanent layer of ice.
In the winter, Antarctica’s interior is cloaked in constant darkness. Freezing winds rage at up to 320km/h and also the temperature has been known to drop as low [...]
Actually, the Great Leap Forward was much more a Great Lurch Backward. In the rush to boost production, agriculture was seriously disrupted as farmers had been diverted into futile backyard steel production or half-baked engineering schemes. The man-made chaos was compounded by three years of disastrous weather. Up to 20 million people died in the [...]
In 1953, when the CPR launched its very first Five Year Plan for improving agricultural and industrial output, some 10,000 Soviet scientists and technicians were sent to assist. But Mao was already having second thoughts about land reform. It had not achieved the hoped-for improve in production, and he feared that new class divisions would [...]
No Chinese emperor enjoyed more well-known adulation than Mao Zedong – and no group was much more devoted to him than the millions of youngsters known as the Red Guards. But their zeal tore the country apart and brought it to the brink of civil war.
In October 1949, Mao Zedong proclaimed the Chinese People’s Republic [...]
The Futurists ventured into art forms that seemed even less apt for people obsessed with motion. Boccioni experimented with sculpture, capturing the movement of striding figures as they cut via the air. The photographer Anton Giulio Bragaglia (1890- 1960) invented Futurist Photodynamism. Utilizing this technique, a gesture could be traced in one picture; previously, photographers [...]
In 1910, Marinetti recruited three men who could really paint – Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), Luigi Russolo (1885-1947) and Carlo Carra (1881-1966). He helped them to write two manifestos, to ‘the young artists of Italy’; the very first one explained the theories behind Futurism, the second suggested how to put them on canvas. Soon, other artists, [...]
The 20th century had arrived; and with a starburst of electric light, a rumble of heavy machinery and a roar from the crowd, so had the modern city. Artists cast cautious glances at this sometimes gleaming, usually grimy giant. Who would have the nerve to paint it?
The Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876- 1944) despised [...]
