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IT sure was a weekend of upsets for the NRL favourites. Well, what can we say, there will always be a winner and a loser and the winner will only be declared at the blow of the final whistle.
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THE practice of drilling a hole into the skull to expose the dura mater surrounding the brain is an ancient surgical procedure dating back to prehistoric times. It is the oldest surgical procedure for which evidence (in the form of human remains) has been discovered. Modern physicians continue to perform trepanations, though the medical rationale surrounding the surgery has since evolved.
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By 1880, through elimination of competitors, mergers, and railroad rebates, John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil controlled the refining of up to 95 percent of all oil produced in the US. In 1892, the Ohio Supreme Court ordered the trust dissolved, but it continued to operate. Exposed in Ida Tarbell’s History of the Standard Oil Company in 1904, it was broken up in 1911 after a lengthy antitrust suit by the US government.
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L FRANK Baum was an American author of more than 70 children’s books who is best known for penning The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He moved from New York to South Dakota in 1888. When his newspaper there failed, he moved to Illinois and found work as a journalist. His first children’s book, Mother Goose in Prose (1897), was followed by Father Goose: His Book, an immediate bestseller.
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SANJA Matsuri, one of the most spectacular festivals in Tokyo, Japan, honours the three fishermen brothers who founded the Asakusa Kannon Temple in the 14th century. The festival has been held each year since the late 1800s. More than 100 portable shrines called mikoshi are paraded through the streets to the gates of the temple. Carrying them are men in happi coats – the traditional short labourers’ jackets – worn to advertise their districts. There are also priests on horseback, musicians playing “sanja-bayashi” festival music, and dancers in traditional costume.
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SCIENTISTS have found a microbe that does something textbooks say is impossible: It’s a complex cell that survives without mitochondria.Mitochondria are the powerhouses inside eukaryotic cells, the type of complicated cell that makes up people, other critters and plants and fungi.
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QUOTE of the day: What is a woman? I assure you, I do not know…I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. – Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)
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