There are five UNESCO World Heritage sites in Uzbekistan. Itchan Kala, which boasts more than 250 historic buildings, was one of the last resting spots of caravans in the mediaeval times before crossing the desert to Iran. Itchal Kala was designated a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1990. Bukhara is a mediaeval city in central Asia located on the famed Silk Road, and it is said to be over 2000 years old, with various structures that are still intact. UNESCO designated the complex as a cultural World Heritage site in 1993. Other attractions in the nation include Samarkand, which is a crossroads of civilizations and was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2007.

Contrary to common opinion, the Eiffel Tower is not Paris' most visited landmark! The Eiffel Tower is the fourth most valuable structure in Paris. The Notre-Dame Cathedral comes in top, followed by the Sacré-Coeur Basilica and the Louvre Museum. When in Paris, make sure to visit them all!

In Paris, there are more than 300,000 dogs. Dogs are unquestionably man's best friend, but Parisians take it to a whole new level. In Paris, people sincerely care about their pets, spending nearly half a million dollars to ensure their dogs receive the greatest care; it's not uncommon to see their owners giving their pups to a doggie spa session. We adore dogs here at MEININGER, so bring them along when you travel; they are more than welcome to stay in our hotels.

Flying kites without wind is difficult in the open air. However, at the Windless Kite Festival, kites can be flown indoors even if there is no wind. Every year, this festival takes place on the Longbeach Peninsula.

That's correct! There are several species of this bird, including the black-winged kite, black-shouldered kite, white-tailed kite, and letter-winged kite. These birds are said to be known for their graceful gliding in flight.

Who knew there was so much to know about kites? Aerial warfare has played an important role in history, particularly during both World Wars. Kites were the first air devices used to drop bombs on enemies before planes were invented, let alone used for war. They were also used to communicate and distribute messages through leaflets. Later in the nineteenth century, kites would be used to lift up a soldier for surveillance of their enemies and intelligence gathering.

Kites were first seen in America in the mid-1700s, according to history. Benjamin Franklin, one of America's founding fathers, famously flew a kite during a thunderstorm in 1752 to demonstrate an experiment about electricity and nature. This is the first documented kite flight in American history, and Franklin demonstrated that lightning carries electricity. He would later invent the lightning rod as a result of this experiment. What a fascinating fact about kites—it aided one of the world's best inventors in making a fascinating discovery.

The Louvre is the world's biggest art gallery and museum, housing over 38,000 works of art, including the most renowned painting ever created, the Mona Lisa. The Louvre received 10.8 million visitors in 2018, making it the most visited gallery on the globe!

The smallest kite in the world that actually flies is 5mm high; the largest kite in the world is 55 x 22 metres in size (630sq meters). The world's longest kite is 1034 metres (3394 feet). A kite's fastest recorded speed is more than 120 mph (193 km/h).

Nobody knows for sure where the kites came from. Flying kites is said to have begun around 3000 years ago in China. The first person to fly a kite was Chinese General Han Hsin of the Han Dynasty. Han was actually calculating the distance his army would have to travel to reach the defences.

In 1760, the Japanese thought flying kites was more fun than working. As a result, the Japanese government outlawed kite flying. During the Cultural Revolution, China also prohibited kite flying. Kites are known as Fen Zheng in Chinese. It's an abbreviation for wind harp. The name comes from the use of kites to transport musical instruments by the Chinese. Furthermore, Chinese people believe that looking at kites in the sky is good for their eyesight.

Libyan tea is thick because it is made with a lot of tea leaves and a lot of sugar. It is mostly made by women. The tea boils for 20 to 30 minutes after the two components are combined and a suitable amount of water is added. When the tea is done, it's served in little pyrex glasses with sumak and khobza, two popular Libyan snacks.

With a height of 7,434 feet, Bette Peak is Libya's tallest peak. The mountain, also known as Bikku Bitti, is located in southern Libya, near the Chadian-Libyan border. Ginge Fullen and his Chadian guides made the first reported ascent of the Bette Peak in December 2005. Despite this, the mountain's remote position makes access difficult and infrequent.

Cyrene, now known as Shahhat, was formerly part of the Greek kingdom that ruled Libya hundreds of years ago. It was a significant Greek city since it was the epicentre of philosophical instruction. Cyrene is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because it is one of the country's oldest cities.

Muammar Gaddafi took power in Libya in 1969 and reigned for 42 years. As a result, he became one of Africa's and the world's longest-serving leaders of state. Gaddafi was well-known for being a despotic ruler. He did, however, serve his country well by increasing health care to the point that it was among the finest in Africa. He also boosted Libya's literacy rate from 25 percent to 87 percent during his tenure. When he was removed from power in 2011, his reign came to an end. The militia hunted him down and murdered him in his hometown, where he had sought safety. Gaddafi's net worth was $200 billion at the time of his death.

Libya imports the majority of the food it consumes due to its inability to produce it locally. Because the nation is located within the vast Sahara desert, it receives extremely little precipitation. It also has weak soil and a harsh climate, both of which hinder food production. The financing of the Great Manmade River Project, which was designed to irrigate farmed fields, was a major attempt by former Libyan President Gaddafi to reverse the situation. This project ended up becoming the largest irrigation project in the world. It consists of a 1750-mile subterranean water pipe network. Libya's people, meanwhile, continue to rely on imported food to survive.

The $700 million New Horizons probe is just the size of a grand piano, weighing in about 1,000 pounds. On Tuesday morning, it completed the nine-year, 3-billion-mile trek to Pluto, passing within 6,000 feet of the dwarf planet at 31,000 mph and taking the closest images of Pluto ever taken.

NASA images published on Tuesday reveal a heart shape measuring around 1,000 kilometres broad. Much of the heart's inside is strikingly featureless–possibly an indication of ongoing geologic processes, according to NASA.

The news of Pluto’s larger than expected size on Monday was particularly exciting to Pluto partisans because many believe the outsider was stripped of its planetary status because it was too small. However, Pluto was actually downgraded to dwarf planet because it’s simply not unique. Pluto is merely the brightest member of the Kuiper Belt, a mass of objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune.
 

While Pluto's icy neighbours are to blame for the planet's demise, they are also part of what makes the New Horizons mission so interesting. "Pluto may be the star witness to the entire third zone of the solar system," NASA's Jeff Moore told TIME. The solar system was thought to be divided into two zones until the Kuiper Belt was discovered: the inner zone, which contained the rocky planets from Mercury to Mars, and the outer zone, which contained the gas giants from Jupiter to Neptune. Pluto, on the other hand, introduced astronomers to the third zone of our solar system, which Moore described as a "vast region of ice planets."

Clyde Tombaugh, a 24-year-old research assistant at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, was the first to spot photographic evidence of the former eighth planet. The ashes of Tombaugh are on board the New Horizons spacecraft, which flew by Pluto on Tuesday. Pluto's existence was predicted 15 years before Tombaugh's discovery, with astronomer Percival Lowell even calculating its approximate position based on the irregularity of Neptune's orbit.

Venetia Burney suggested the name Pluto after the Roman god of the Underworld after her grandpa informed her about the newly found planet. Pluto the planet, like the God, sat in the furthest ends of the solar system, thus it felt appropriate. Her grandpa was taken with the name and proposed it to a friend, who happened to be an Oxford University astronomy professor. Pluto piqued the interest of astronomers since the first two letters of the name are Percival Lowell's initials.

Temperatures on the Sun's surface reach 6,000 Kelvin. However, this is far less than the atmosphere of the Sun. The chromosphere is a region of the atmosphere located above the Sun's surface, with temperatures reaching 100,000 K. That, however, is insignificant. The corona, which extends to a volume larger than the Sun itself, is an even more distant region. The corona can reach temperatures of one million degrees Celsius.

The Sun, unlike the planets, is a massive sphere of hydrogen gas. As a result, different parts of the Sun rotate at different rates. Tracking the movement of sunspots across the surface allows you to see how fast the surface rotates. It takes 25 days for regions near the equator to complete one rotation, while features near the poles can take 36 days. And it appears that the inside of the Sun takes about 27 days.

The Sun appears to be a burning ball of fire, but it has an internal structure. The visible surface is known as the photosphere, and it heats up to approximately 6,000 degrees Kelvin. The convective zone lies beneath that, where heat slowly moves from the inner Sun to the surface and cooled material falls back down in columns. This region begins at 70% of the radius of the Sun. The radiative zone lies beneath the convection zone. Heat can only travel through radiation in this zone. The Sun's core extends from the Sun's centre to a distance of 0.2 solar radii. Temperatures reach 13.6 million degrees Kelvin here, and hydrogen molecules fuse to form helium.