When was the last time you walked to the corner stationery shop? Most of these shops double up as mobile recharge dispensers & photocopy stations.   As the world goes digital the physical photocopying business has lost some of its foothold to scanning. Well, 16 th September 1959 was a monumental day in the world of photocopying & this weekend’s GK nugget will shed some light on that.  16 th September 1959 was the day when the Xerox 914 , the first successful commercial plain paper copier (which revolutionized the document-copying industry) was introduced to the public in a demonstration at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York, shown on live television. Chester Carlson , the inventor of photocopying, was a patent attorney who invented the technology since he found the task of making multiple copies of important papers by hand extremely tedious. He experimented with photoconductivity to develop a process called ‘ electrophotography ’ which ...

The Guinness World Records’ 2017 edition is being released on 8 th September (a day after the iPhone 7 goes on sale, no connection though). But they’ve already declared some of the record holders. 22 year old singing sensation Justin Beiber walks away with 8 titles in the record book, some of them being Most streamed track on Spotify in one week (The song “What Do You Mean?”), Most viewed music channel on YouTube (individual) , Most followers on twitter (male) (85 million and counting), etc. Also, in the week gone by, Majuli, Assam (in the Brahmaputra river) was recognized as the largest river island . It covers an area of around 880 km² (340 miles²). So this week’s GK Nugget will look at the Guinness World Records: First published in 1955 , the Guinness Book of Records was the brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver , Managing Director of the Guinness Brewery , UK. (It was later renamed the Guinness Book of World Records and finally, the Guinness World Records). ...

So I'm sure you haven't missed all the talk about "BrExit" in the week gone by. While this has deeper repercussions aross the world, this week's general knowledge nugget will look at which countries make up the European Union and a brief history of the EU. Because let’s face it, the EU will never be the same again, and it'll be great for you to know a bit about the background of the EU, since everyone around you will be talking about it for a few days. (I won’t be getting into the pros & cons of the EU, because then this will become a really long message). After the devastating 2nd world war, 6 European countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, Luxembourg & the Netherlands) got together in 1951 to sign an economic treaty to run their heavy industries under a common management (Called the European Coal & Steel Community). The idea was simple - to unite the countries politically & economically so that there will be lasting peace all across Eur...