Category Kids Queries

It’s a familiar photo snapped by sightseers in the Italian city of Pisa: The subject stands in the foreground pretending to prop up a curiously crooked eight-story tower in the background. The Tower of Pisa’s extreme lean has been around a lot longer than the art of silly tourist photography. The tower, meant to function as a bell tower, started to sway soon after construction on it started more than 800 years ago. Its foundation was set on soil too soft to support its weight. The tower began to lean as soon as its builders completed the second floor in 1178. Construction continued off and on for the next 192 years, but attempts to straighten the tower only made it worse. By the time the tower was completed in 1370, its lean had increased to 1.6 degrees. Its slow topple continued over the centuries, until it eventually reached 5.5 degrees.

It’s stable for now, thanks to some modern architectural mojo. Engineers have shored up the foundation, installed counter-weights and cables, and removed soil from the non-leaning side – fixes that reduced the lean by about 1.5 degrees. The tower is still 13 feet (4m) off its center, but stable, meaning the Leaning Tower of Pisa won’t become the Tumbled Tower of Pisa for at least 300 years.

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Life was no fairy tale in fifth-century Italy. When waves of invaders threatened the countryside and cities in the northeastern part of the country, the locals are needed a safe place to lie low. A marshy lagoon between the mouths of two rivers made a good refuge from the barbarians. The Roman refugees spread their settlement across the lagoon’s 118 islands, connecting them with wooden bridges and commuting in the canals between them. In the centuries since, Venice developed into a thriving city faces a new threat – rising sea levels due to climate change.

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Covered in thin copper plates, the Statue of Liberty (a gift from France) was originally a dull brown when it arrived in New York Harbor in 1885. But unlike most things, the statue actually got prettier with age. Over the next 30 years, she slowly took on the greenish tinge you see today. The salty air from the harbor reacted with the copper to create a thin layer of salt called a patina. Lady Liberty’s green sheen is a good thing: The patina actually protects the statue from rusting.

A natural weathering process — called oxidation — took place when air and water reacted with the copper plates.

Over time, the weathering of the copper created a thin layer of copper carbonate called a patina. Although some people were worried that the changing color of the statue meant it was decaying, the patina actually protects the copper underneath from further corrosion.

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Since it opened in 1937, this architectural wonder spanning San Francisco Bay in California, U.S.A., has always been “International Orange,” a color chosen because it’s easy to spot by passing ships and blends nicely with the land on both sides of the bridge. The name “Golden Gate” was never meant to describe the famous suspension bridge’s color. It’s the name of the strait that marks the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean. To make the span even easier to spot by passing ships, the U.S. Navy wanted the Golden Gate Bridge painted like a bumblebee, with black and yellow stripes.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. was the fearless explorer who expanded the boundaries of civil rights in 1950s in America. When Rosa Parks, an African-American woman, was arrested in 1955 for not giving up her bus seat to a white passenger in Montgomery, Alabama, U.S.A., Martin Luther King, Jr. – a pastor – began his crusade to end discrimination against African Americans. King relied on peaceful demonstrations and marches, the most famous of which was his 250,000-strong March on Washington in 1963, where he delivered one of the most famous speeches in history. A year later, the U.S. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed discrimination and racial segregation in schools and at the workplace.

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Sir Isaac Newton was the fearless explorer who expanded the boundaries of the universe in 1687 in England. One of the history’s most influential minds, this English scientist, mathematician, and philosopher literally wrote the book on physics. His three laws of motion explain how every object in the universe affects the movement of every other object. He helped invent the mathematical study of calculus (now you know who to thank when you take that tricky course). But Newton is most famous for sitting in a garden and spotting an apple falling from a tree – an observation that inspired his law that explains how all objects in the universe attract each other with a force relative to their size and distance from each other. In other words, gravity.

Picture Credit : Google