Use school vacation to visit important places - Education Minister

by Ananda KANNANGARA

During this school vacation, teachers and parents should show the way for children to acquire a better understanding of the country’s religious, historical and geographical places of importance in addition to their general school educational activities, the Education Minister Bandula Gunawardane said.

Minister Gunawardane made these remarks at a function held at Richmond College, Galle recently.

A large number of parents, teachers and students were present on this occasion.

He said a school vacation is given for children to mainly spend their leisure indulging in extra curricular activities.

He said the present day children are the leaders in tomorrow’s society and therefore, they should not be like frogs in a well, bookworms or couch potatoes. They should broaden their knowledge by engaging always and it is the duty of elders to encourage them to indulge in other activities including visiting country’s important places.

Minister Gunawardane called upon teachers and parents to take their children on trips to religious and historically valued places such as Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa and Kataragama.

The children should also be taken to see the various development projects launched by the Government like the country’s massive electricity generating plants,in Norochcholai coal power plant, the solar power plant in Hambantota and other major construction sites.

The Minister urged parents to visit the Northern Province with their children to see not only the geographical conditions but also the economic development in the Jaffna Peninsula and the surrounding areas carried out by the Government since many children in our country have never been to the Northern area for the past several decades.

A possible Earth twin discovered

At a time when predictions are being made by various people that the world we live in is likely to be destroyed,if not fully at least partially in 2012, the announcement made on December 5 by NASA that a new earth-like planet has been discovered certainly comes as good news. Already the race to research as to how habitable this planet is must have begun.

We will have to wait for the experts to tell us whether we have another planet that we may be able to refer to as 'home' someday.

The new planet discovered by the Kepler space mission, is dubbed Kepler-22b and is said to be orbiting a sun-like star 600 light-years away.

"The new planet may be in just the right spot for supporting life" say NASA officials adding that it is the first world, smaller than Neptune , to be found in middle of its star's habitable zone which is referred to as the Goldilocks zone.

The habitable zone is the region around a star where a planet's surface is not too hot and not too cold for liquid water “and thus life as we know it” to exist.

Along with the confirmed extra-solar planet, one of 28 discovered so far by Kepler, researchers today also announced the discovery of 1,094 new exoplanet candidates, pushing the spacecraft's total so far to 2,326, including 10 candidate Earth-size worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of their parent stars.

Additional observations are required to tell if a candidate is, in fact, an actual world. But astronomers say the planet known as Kepler-22b, orbiting a star some 600 light years from Earth, is the real thing.

- Courtesy:Internet

Key features the new planet :
Kepler-22 shares with Earth:

* It circles a star that could be the twin of Earth's Sun, and at approximately the same distance.
* The planet's year of 290 days is also close to Earth's.
* It probably has water and rock, but is a little large for life to exist on the surface.
* The planet is about 2.4 times the size of Earth and could be more like the gas-and-liquid Neptune with only a rocky core and mostly ocean.
* Kepler cannot identify signs of life, only where the conditions might be right for it to thrive.
* The latest discovery has been confirmed in several ways, including by two other telescopes.
* The planet is 600 light years away. Each light year is 5.9 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometres).
* It would take a space shuttle about 22 million years to get there.

Scientists baffled by stone carvings in Jerusalem

Mysterious stone carvings made thousands of years ago and recently uncovered in an excavation underneath Jerusalem have archaeologists stumped.

Israeli diggers who uncovered a complex of rooms carved into the bedrock in the oldest section of the city recently found the markings: Three "V'' shapes cut next to each other into the limestone floor of one of the rooms, about 2 inches (5 centimetres) deep and 20 inches (50 centimetres) long. There were no finds to offer any clues pointing to the identity of who made them or what purpose they served.

The archaeologists in charge of the dig know so little that they have been unable even to pos e it as a theory said Eli Shukron, one of the two directors of the dig.

"The markings are very strange, and very intriguing. I have never seen anything like them," Shukron said.

The shapes were found in a dig known as the City of David, a politically sensitive excavation conducted by Israeli government archaeologists and funded by a nationalist Jewish group under the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan in east Jerusalem. The rooms were unearthed as part of the excavation of fortifications around the ancient city's only natural water source, the Gihon spring.

It is possible, the dig's archaeologists say, that when the markings were made at least 2,800 years ago the shapes might have accommodated some kind of wooden structure that stood inside them, or they might have served some other purpose on their own. They might have had a ritual function or one that was entirely mundane. Archaeologists faced by a curious artifact can usually at least venture a guess about its nature, but in this case no one, including outside experts consulted by Shukron and the dig's co-director, archaeologists with decades of experience between them, has any idea.

There appears to be at least one other ancient marking of the same type at the site. A century-old map of an expedition led by the British explorer Montague Parker, who searched for the lost treasures of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem between 1909 and911, includes the shape of a "V'' drawn in an underground channel not far away. Modern archaeologists haven't excavated that area.

-AP