Glenn Gould was born in Toronto, Canada in 1932 and was interested in music from an early age. From his first public performance at the age of ten, he went on to become one of the best known pianists of the twenty first century.

The Glenn Gould Foundation      Listen on Spotify: Goldberg Variations: Aria

       

The Stoics formed a school of philosophy in Athens in the early third century BC.  They held that high passions and strong emotions were the result of imperfect judgement, and they sought to free themselves of such feelings, achieving a dispassionate calm - hence the meaning of the word stoicism.

Pachinko is a popular Japanese gaming machine. Similar to pinball, the player fires a ball to the top of machine, where it moves through obstacles.  To win, it has to land in a specific pocket.

Play Pachinko Online 

 

Gene splicing involves isolating a specific part of the DNA and combining it with DNA from a different organism to create the required effect.

"Bogus!" was a catchphrase popularised by Keanu Reeves and Alex Winters in the early 1990s science fiction adventure movies "Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey" and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure".

    

In 1091, the Pechenegs moved to invade the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. Byzantine leader Alexios I Komnenos  formed an alliance with the Cuman tribe and successfully attacked the Pecheneg camp.

The Battle of Levounion destroyed the Pechenegs, those not killed being incorporated into the Byzantine Empire.

 Coelacanths were thought to be extinct until a live specimen was discovered in 1938, off the South African Coast.

They live in very deep water, and differ from other living fish in having fins mounted on fleshy lobes, which some biologists have interpreted as "proto-legs", making the coelacanth a possible "missing link" in the evolution of mammals.

They remain critically endangered, and are very hard to find.

 

 

The Red-necked crake is a large waterbird of the Rallidae family, also known as the Red-necked rail.

It is found in New Guinea, Australia, the Bismarck Archipelago and Eastern Indonesia.

Under Islamic law, certain punishments, known as Hudud, are fixed for crimes considered to be "claims of god". These include amputation of hands or feet for theft, and flogging for crimes of sexual intercourse.