Tarantula spiders can survive 2 and a half years without food. 2.

When 2 zebras stand side by side they usually face each other in opposite directions to keep an eye out for predators. 3. 60 cows can produce a ton of milk each day. 4. The 'black box' that houses an airplanes voice recorder is actually orange so it can be more easily detected amid the debris of a plane crash. 5. A baby fetus develops fingerprints at eighteen weeks. 6. More than 1,000,000 Earths could fit inside the Sun. 1. The 9-year-old Belgian horse "Gelding" is the Guinness World Record-holder for world's tallest Horse (6 foot 11 inches). 2. The word 'Strengths' is the longest word in the English language with just one vowel. 3. Sri Shanmukhananda Hall in Mumbai is the largest auditorium in India. 4. The World's largest auditorium is the LDS Conference Center in Salt Lake City, UT. 5. Brussels is the capital of Belgium and the administrative centre of the European Union. 6. Indaia made its first Nuclear Bomb test on May 18, 1974. ============================ 1. HTC Touch. was the first mobile phone to feature intuitive multi-touch interface. 2. The Swiss National Bank has 2 head offices, one is in Berne and the other one in Zurich. 3. Expansions - GSM: Global System for Mobile communication. CDMA: Code Division Mutiple Access. 4. The World Trade Center (WTC) was destroyed in September 11, 2001. The site is currently being rebuilt with six new skyscrapers and a memorial to the casualties of the attacks. 5. Mexico City has hosted the nineteenth Olympic Games in 1968. It is the only Latin America country to do so.

6. Erode Venkata Ramasamy (Thanthai Periyar) was born on September 17, 1879 in Erode, ============================ 1. Chewing gum, according to research carried out at the University of Northumbria, can improve your memory significantly. 2. Wrigley Company was founded on April 01' 1891 by selling baking powder, and began packaging chewing gum with each can of baking powder. Later, the chewing gum eventually became more popular than the baking powder itself. 3. Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her bodyguards 'Beant Singh', and 'Satwant Singh' on October 31, 1984. 4. Babu Chiri Sherpa stayed at the summit (Mt.Everest) full 21 hours and a half which was recorded as "Longest stay on top". 5. The Port of Rotterdam is the largest port in Europe, located in the city of Rotterdam. 6. Mumbai harbour is the biggest one in India & 2nd biggest is Chennai harbour.

-69% Americans use Internet & 5.5% Indians only. 2 -El Azizia in Libya recorded a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) on Sept. 13, 1922 - the hottest ever measured. 3 -Plastics take 500 years to break down. 4 -America has 30.30% airports of the world & India has only 0.70%. 5 -There are roughly 4,000 known minerals, although only about 200 are of major importance. 6 -The total surface area of the Earth is 197 million square miles.

7 -Crocodile only animal & reptile that sheds tear while eating. 8 -The worlds deadliest recorded earthquake occurred in 1557 in central China, more than 830,000 people were killed. 9 -Angel Falls in Venezuela is the worlds highest waterfall, The water of Falls drops 3,212 feet (979 meters). 10 -The sunrays reached at the earth in 8 minutes & 3 seconds. 11 -8.7 million of United State residents who were born in Asia. 12 -The worlds population has been increased 3.1 billion in last 40 years. 13 -180 million nos. of Valentines Day cards exchanged annually, making Valentines Day the second-most popular greeting-card-giving occasion. 14 -3,467 Nos. of confectionery nut stores in the United States, they are among the best sources of sweets for Valentines Day. 15 -4% people drink cold drink daily. 16 -Traffic lights are being used before the invention of motor car. 17 -More than 50 million Americans said they had a disability; for 32.5 million of them, the disability was severe. 18 -About 40% Proportion of all Valentine card purchases which parents account for.

19 -First Stock Exchange of America was in Philadelphia & it was established in 1791. 20 -Girls however are slightly more likely than boys to use home computers for e-mail, word processing and completing school assignments than playing games. 21 -A normal person laughs five times in a day. 22 -Approximate 300 million film tickets are sold every year in India. 23 -In Britain 70% mothers go for work. 24 -More artists live in California than any other state in the United States. There are 10,000 arts organizations in California. 25 -Alfred Southwick developed the idea of using electric current & Professionally he was a Dentist (MDS, DDS). 26 -A man says average 4850 words in 24 hours. 27 -The world's populaton is approximately 6.53 billion (2006), India & China represent 36.92% of the world's populations. 28 -Look at your zipper. See the initials YKK? It stands for Yoshida Kogyo kabushikigaisha, the world's largest zipper manufacturer. 29 -40 percent of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

30 -315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled. 31 -Chocolate can be killed dogs! True, chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog. 32 -Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as a medicine. 33 -Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time. 34 -Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood. 35 -There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos. 36 -Leonardo da Vinci invented scissors. 37 -Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow a film down so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm. 38 -The original name for the butterfly was "flutterby"! 39 -By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand. 40 -Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.

41 -Dentists recommend that a toothbrush be kept at least six feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush. 42 -The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum. 43 -Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than the entire Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined. 44 -Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor. 45 -The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order. 46 -To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, prick your fingers into its eyeballs. It will let you go instantly. 47 -The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. 48 -The "pound" (#) key on your keyboard is called an octothorp. 49 -The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat. 50 -Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. 51 -The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. 52 -Dreamt" is the only word in the English language that ends in "mt".

53 -It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. 54 -In Chinese, the KFC slogan "finger lickin' good" comes out as "eat your fingers off". 55 -A cockroach can live for 10 days without a head. 56 -We shed 40 pounds of skin a lifetime. 57 -Yo-Yos were once used as weapons in the Philippines. 58 -Mexico City sinks abut 10 inches a year. 59 -Brains are more active in sleeping than watching TV. 60 -Blue is the favorite color of 80 percent of Americans. 61 -When a person shakes their head from side to side, he is saying "yes" in Sri Lanka. 62 -There are more chickens than people in the world. 63 -The thumbnail grows the slowest, and the middle nail grows the fastest. 64 -There are more telephones than people in Washington, D.C.

65 -The average four year-old child asks over four hundred questions a day. 66 -The average person presses the snooze button on their alarm clock three Times each morning. 67 -The three wealthiest families in the world have more assets than the Combined wealth of the forty-eight poorest nations. 68 -The first owner of the Marlboro cigarette Company died of lung cancer. 69 -Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair. 70 -The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910. 71 -Our eyes remain the same size from birth onward, but our noses and ears Never stop growing. 72 -You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV. 73 -A normal person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a Few weeks. 74 -Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying. 75 -The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

76 -When the moon is directly overhead, you weigh slightly less. 77 -Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never telephoned His wife or mother because they were both deaf. 78 -A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a Carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After Weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe Leaving her mentally retarded 79 -Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking Countries because Colgate translates into the command "go hang Yourself." 80 -Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different. 81 -"Bookkeeper" is the only word in English language with three consecutive Double letters. 82 -The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every Letter in the English language. 83 -If the population of China walked past you in single line, the line Would never end because of the rate of reproduction 84 -China has more English speakers than the United States. 85 -Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

86 -Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels. 87 -An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day. 88 -Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our Bodies. 89 -Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average Man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his Lifetime. 90 -According to Genesis 1:20-22, the chicken came before the egg. 91 -The longest place name still in use is: TaumatawhakatangihangaoauauotameteaturiPukakpikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu - a New Zealand hill. 92 -If you leave Tokyo by plane at 7:00am, you will arrive in Honolulu at Approximately 4:30pm the previous day. 93 -Scientists in Australia's Parkes Observatory thought they had positive Proof of alien life, when they began picking up radio-waves from space. However, after investigation, the radio emissions were traced to a Microwave in the building. 94 -More than 40,000 parasites and 250 types of bacteria are exchanged during a French kiss. 95 -Men can read smaller print than women, but women can hear better.

96 -Coca-Cola was originally green. 97 -The most common name in the world is Mohammed. 98 -There are two credit cards for every person in the United States. 99 -TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. 100 -Women blink nearly twice as much as men!! 101 -You can't kill yourself by holding your breath. 102 -It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky. 103 -The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language. 104 -If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die. 105 -Each king in a deck of playing cards represents great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts Charlemagne, Diamonds - Julius Caesar. 106 -111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 107 -If a statue of a person in the park on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle.

108 -If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. 109 -If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes. 110 -Question - This is the only food that doesn't spoil. What is this? Ans. - Honey 111 -A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out. 112 -A snail can sleep for three years. 113 -All polar bears are left handed. 114 -American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class. 115 -Butterflies taste with their feet. 116 -Elephants are the only mammal that can't jump. 117 -In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated. 118 -On average, people fear spiders more than they do death. 119 -Shakespeare invented the word 'assassination' and 'bump'.

120 -Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand. 121 -The ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated. 122 -The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet. 123 -Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over million descendants. 124 -The cigarette lighter was invented before the match. 125 -Most lipstick contains fish scales.

60 Interesting Facts of World & Earth

Friday, August 10, 2007

1- Earth is the only planet on which water can exist in liquid form on the surface. 2- Antarctica is the highest, driest, and coldest continent on Earth. 3- The dormant volcano Mauna Kea (on the Big Island of Hawaii) could be considered the tallest mountain in the world. If you measure it from its base in the Hawaiian Trough (3,300 fathoms deep) to its summit of 13,796 feet, it reaches a height of 33,476 feet. 4- Earth is referred to as the BLUE PLANET. WHY? Because from space, the oceans combined with our atmosphere make our planet look blue. 5- The worlds deadliest recorded earthquake occurred in 1557 in central

China, more than 830,000 people were killed. 6- The Worlds largest hot desert is the Sahara in North Africa, at over 9,000,000 km, it is almost as large as the United States. 7- Earth travels through space at 66,700 miles per hour. 8- Mount Everest 8850 meter (29035 ft) Nepal/China is the tallest mountain. 9- The sunrays reached at the earth in 8 minutes & 3 seconds. 10- Only 11 percent of the earth's surface is used to grow food. 11- The coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983. 12- About 70% of the worlds fresh water is stored as glacial ice. 13- Only 3% water of the earth is fresh, rest 97% salted. Of that 3%, over 2% is frozen in ice sheets and glaciers. Means less than 1% fresh water is found in lakes, rivers and underground. 14-The warmest sea in the world is the Red Sea, where temperatures range from 68 degrees to 87.8 degrees F depending upon which part you measure. 15- The hottest planet in the solar system is Venus, with an estimated surface temperature of 864 F (462 C) 16- Angel Falls in Venezuela is the worlds highest waterfall, The water of Falls drops 3,212 feet (979 meters). 17- Asia Continent is covered 30% of the total earth land area, but represent 60% of the worlds population.

18-The total surface area of the Earth is 197 million square miles. 19- El Azizia in Libya recorded a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) on Sept. 13, 1922 - the hottest ever measured. 20- A 1960 Chilean earthquake was the strongest earthquake in recent times, which occurred off the coast, had a magnitude of 9.6 and broke a fault more than 1000 miles (1600 kilometers) long. 21- The lowest dry point on earth is the Dead Sea in the Middle East is about 1300 feet (400 meters) below sea level. 22- The Largest Ocean of the World is the Pacific Ocean (155,557,000 sq km), It covers nearly one-third of the Earth's surface. 23- The distance from the surface of Earth to the center is about 3,963 miles (6,378 kilometers). 24- The saltiest sea in the world is the Red Sea with 41 parts of salt per 1,000 parts of water. 25- The Angel Falls in Venezuela is the world's highest waterfall (979 meters / 3212 ft.), three times the size of the Eiffel Tower. 26- The Earth is the densest major body in the solar system. 27- The age of the earth is Loudly proclaimed by the scientific establishment of evolution believers and the mass media as being around 4.6 billion years old. 28- Baikal Lake in Russian Fed. is the deepest lake (5315 ft) in the world. 29- Lightning does not always create thunder. In April 1885, five lightning bolts struck the Washington Monument during a thunderstorm, yet no thunder was heard.

30- The Sarawak Chamber in Malaysia is the largest cave in the world is 2300 feet (701 meters) long, 1300 feet (400 meters) wide, and more than 230 feet (70 meters) high. 31- The Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii is the largest volcanoon on Earth. It rises more than 50,000 feet (9.5 miles or 15.2 kilometers) above its base, which sits under the surface of the sea. 32- Due to gravitational effects, you weigh slightly less when the moon is directly overhead. 33- One-tenth of the Earth's surface is always under the cover of ice. And almost 90 per cent of that ice is to be found in the continent of Antarctica. 34- The coldest seas are found near the poles such as the Greenland, Barents, Beaufort, Kara, Laptev & East Siberian Seas found near the north pole & Weddell & Ross Seas found in the south poles. The Baltic Sea is also considered one of the coldest seas. 35- The Nile River in Africa is the longest river (6,825 kilometers) of the earth. 36-Caspian Sea, Asia-Europe is the major lake (371,000 sq km) in the world. 37- Depending upon the amount of salt in the water, sea water freezes at about 28 degrees F. 38- The most dangerous animal in the world is the common housefly. Because of their habits of visiting animal waste, they transmit more diseases than any other animal. 39- The Peregrine Falcon around 200mph (320 km/h) is the fastest bird on the planet, the top speed recorded is 242.3mph (390 km/h). 40- The largest eggs in the world are laid by a shark.

41-The deepest hole ever made by humans is in Kola Peninsula in Russia, was completed in 1989, creating a hole 12,262 meters (7.6 miles) deep. 42- Total fertility rate of the world is 2.59 children born/woman. 43- An African woman's lifetime risk of dying from pregnancy related causes is one in 16, in Asia, its one in 65. In Europe, its one in 1,400. 44- There are roughly 4,000 known minerals, although only about 200 are of major importance. 45- About 400 billion gallons water is used worldwide each day. 46- Aluminum cans take 500 years to break down. 47- Total fertility rate of the world is 2.59 children born/woman. Niger is 7.46 (highest), India is 2.73, US is 2.09 & Hong Kong is 0.95 only (Lowest). 48- Northern Mariana Islands is only the country where death rate (2.29/1000) is lowest in the world. 49- Earth's oceans are an average of 2 Miles deep 50- Shanghai, China is the largest city by population (13.3 million) in the world. 51- English is the second most spoken language (Native speakers 512 million) & the first is Chinese Mandarin (more then 1 billion speakers). 52- The flower with the world's largest bloom is the Rafflesia arnoldii. This rare flower is found in the rainforests of Indonesia. It can grow to be 3 feet across and weigh up to 15 pounds. 53- At least 1,000 million grams, or roughly 1,000 tons of material (dust)

enters the atmosphere every year and makes its way to Earths surface. 54- The gravity on Mars is 38% of that found on Earth. So a 100 pounds person on Earth would weigh 38 pounds on Mars. 55- The worlds population has been increased 3.1 billion in last 40 years. 56- Global Positioning System (GPS) is the only system today that can show your exact position on the Earth anytime, in any weather, no matter where you are! 57- The water that falls on a single acre of land during one inch of rainfall, it would weigh 113 tons that is 226,000 pounds. 58- 180 million nos. of Valentines Day cards exchanged annually, making Valentines Day the second-most popular greeting-card-giving occasion. 59- Plastics take 500 years to break down. 60- Each year, more than 500,000 women (approximate 1 every minute) die from pregnancy related causes. The vast majority of these deaths occur in developing countries.

50 science facts

1 The speed of light is generally rounded down to 186,000 miles per second. In exact terms it is 299,792,458 m/s (equal to 186,287.49 miles per second). 2 It takes 8 minutes 17 seconds for light to travel from the Suns surface to the Earth. 3 10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.

4 The Earth spins at 1,000 mph but it travels through space at an incredible 67,000 mph. 5 Every year, over one million earthquakes shake the Earth. 6 When Krakatoa erupted in 1883, its force was so great it could be heard 4,800 kilometers away in Australia. 7 Every second around 100 lightning bolts strike the Earth. 8 Every year lightning kills 1000 people. 9 In October 1999 an Iceberg the size of London broke free from the Antarctic ice shelf . 10 If you could drive your car straight up you would arrive in space in just over an hour. 11 Human tapeworms can grow up to 22.9m. 12 The Earth is 4.56 billion years oldthe same age as the Moon and the Sun. 13 The dinosaurs became extinct before the Rockies or the Alps were formed. 14 Female black widow spiders eat their males after mating. 15 When a flea jumps, the rate of acceleration is 20 times that of

the space shuttle during launch. 16 If our Sun were just inch in diameter, the nearest star would be 445 miles away. 17 Astronauts cannot belch there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs. 18 The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level. 19 One million, million, million, million, millionth of a second after the Big Bang the Universe was the size of a pea. 20 DNA was first discovered in 1869 by Swiss Friedrich Mieschler. 21 The molecular structure of DNA was first determined by Watson and Crick in 1953. 22 The first synthetic human chromosome was constructed by US scientists in 1997. 23 The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo. 24 Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866. 25 Wilhelm Rontgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics for discovering X-rays in 1895. 26 The tallest tree ever was an Australian eucalyptus In 1872 it

was measured at 435 feet tall. 27 Christian Barnard performed the first heart transplant in 1967 the patient lived for 18 days. 28 An electric eel can produce a shock of up to 650 volts. 29 Wireless communications took a giant leap forward in 1962 with the launch of Telstar, the first satellite capable of relaying telephone and satellite TV signals. 30 The Ebola virus kills 4 out of every 5 humans it infects. 31 In 5 billion years the Sun will run out of fuel and turn into a Red Giant. 32 Giraffes often sleep for only 20 minutes in any 24 hours. They may sleep up to 2 hours (in spurts not all at once), but this is rare. They never lie down. 33 There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body. 34 An individual blood cell takes about 60 seconds to make a complete circuit of the body. 35 On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute. 36 The low frequency call of the humpback whale is the loudest noise made by a living creature.

37 A quarter of the worlds plants are threatened with extinction by the year 2010. 38 Each person sheds 40lbs of skin in his or her lifetime. 39 At 15 inches the eyes of giant squids are the largest on the planet. 40 The Universe contains over 100 billion galaxies. 41 Wounds infested with maggots heal quickly and without spread of gangrene or other infection. 42 More germs are transferred shaking hands than kissing. 43 The fastest speed a falling raindrop can hit you is 18mph. 44 It would take over an hour for a heavy object to sink 6.7 miles down to the deepest part of the ocean. 45 Around a million, billion neutrinos from the Sun will pass through your body while you read this sentence. 46 The deepest part of any ocean in the world is the Mariana trench in the Pacific with a depth of 35,797 feet. 47 Every hour the Universe expands by a billion miles in all directions.

48 Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang. 49 Even traveling at the speed of light it would take 2 million years to reach the nearest large galaxy, Andromeda. 50 A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons.

Unbelievable--Spider vs snake
Friday, September 29, 2006

Labels: unb

Snake swallowing a kangaroooooo. This is really amazing!

Labels: un 1. 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire a strung across the U.S. 2. 101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie. 3. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321 4. 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily. 5. 123,000,000 cars are being driven down the U.S's highways. 6. 160 cars can drive side by side on the Monumental Axis in Brazil, the world's widest road. 7. 166,875,000,000 pieces of mail are delivered each year in the U.S. 8. 27% of U.S. male college students believe life is "A meaningless existential hell." 9. 315 entries in Webster's Dictionary will be misspelled. 10. 5% of Canadians don't know the first 7 words of the Canadian anthem, but know the first 9 of the American anthem. 11. 56,000,000 people go to Major League baseball each year. 12. 7% of Americans don't know the first 9 words of the American anthem, but know the first 7 of the Canadian anthem. 13. 85,000,000 tons of paper are used each year in the U.S. 14. 99% of the solar systems mass is concentrated in the sun. 15. A 10-gallon hat barely holds 6 pints. 16. A cat has 32 muscles in each ear. 17. A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off. 18. A company in Taiwan makes dinnerware out of wheat, so you can eat your plate. 19. A cow produces 200 times more gas a day than a person. 20. A dime has 118 ridges around the edge. 21. A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours. 22. A fully loaded supertanker travelling at normal speed takes a least twenty minutes to stop.

23. A giraffe can clean its ears with its 21-inch tongue. 24. A giraffe can go without water longer than a camel can. 25. A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds. 26. A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there. 27. A hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute on average. 28. A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside. 29. A hummingbird weighs less than a penny. 30. A jellyfish is 95 percent water. 31. A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. 32. A jumbo jet uses 4,000 gallons of fuel to take off. 33. A male emperor moth can smell a female emperor moth up to 7 miles away. 34. A man named Charles Osborne had the hiccups for 6 years. Wow. 35. A mole can dig a tunnel 300 feet long in just one night. 36. A monkey was once tried and convicted for smoking a cigarette in South Bend, Indiana. 37. A pig's orgasm lasts for 30 minutes. 38. A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. 39. A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee. 40. A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes. 41. A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge, a dime has one less groove. 42. A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water. 43. A skunk can spray its stinky scent more than 10 feet. 44. A sneeze travels out your mouth at over 100 m.p.h. 45. A toothpick is the object most often choked on by Americans! 46. A walla-walla scene is one where extras pretend to be talking in the background - when they say "walla-walla" it looks like they are actually talking. 47. A whale's penis is called a dork. 48. About 3000 years ago, most Egyptians died by the time they were 30. 49. About 70% of Americans who go to college do it just to make more money. [The rest of us are avoiding reality for four more years.] 50. According to a British law passed in 1845, attempting to commit suicide was a capital offense. Offenders could be hanged for trying. 51. Actor Tommy Lee Jones and former vice-president Al Gore were freshman roommates at Harvard. 52. Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer. 53. All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the back of the $5 bill. 54. All of the clocks in the movie "Pulp Fiction" are stuck on 4:20. 55. All porcupines float in water. 56. Almonds are a member of the peach family. 57. Almost a quarter of the land area of Los Angeles is taken up by automobiles. 58. America once issued a 5-cent bill. 59. America's first nudist organization was founded in 1929, by 3 men. 60. Ancient Egyptians slept on pillows made of stone. 61. An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.

62. An average person laughs about 15 times a day. 63. An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes. 64. An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain. 65. Armadillos are the only animal besides humans that can get leprosy. 66. Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always all the same sex. 67. Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute. 68. Aztec emperor Montezuma had a nephew, Cuitlahac, whose name meant "plenty of excrement." 69. Babe Ruth wore a cabbage leaf under is cap to keep him cool. He changed it every 2 innings. 70. Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2-6 years of age. 71. Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day. 72. Back in the mid to late 1980's, an IBM-compatible computer wasn't considered a hundred percent compatible unless it could run Microsoft's Flight Simulator. 73. Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball. 74. Barbie's measurements if she were life size: 39-23-33. 75. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave. 76. Ben and Jerry's send the waste from making ice cream to local pig farmers to use as feed. Pigs love the stuff, except for one flavor: Mint Oreo. 77. Bird droppings are the chief export of Nauru, an island nation in the Western Pacific. 78. Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan. 79. Bubble gum contains rubber. 80. Camel's milk does not curdle. 81. Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand. 82. Canada is an Indian word meaning "Big Village". 83. Cat's urine glows under a blacklight. 84. Cats can produce over one hundred vocal sounds, while dogs can only produce about ten. 85. Charles Lindbergh took only four sandwiches with him on his famous transatlantic flight. 86. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying. 87. Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them use to burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired." 88. Cleo and Caesar were the early stage names of Cher and Sonny Bono. 89. Columbia University is the second largest landowner in New York City, after the Catholic Church. 90. David Prowse was the guy in the Darth Vader suit in Star Wars. He spoke all of Vader's lines, and didn't know that he was going to be dubbed over by James Earl Jones until he saw the screening of the movie. 91. Did you know that there are coffee flavored PEZ? 92. Dogs and cats consume almost $7 billion worth of pet food a year. 93. Dolphins sleep with one eye open. 94. Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

95. Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth... and whose shame created the expression for ignominy, "His name is Mudd." 96. Dr. Seuss pronounced "Seuss" such that it rhymed with "rejoice." 97. "Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt." 98. Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors. 99. During your lifetime, you'll eat about 60,000 pounds of food, that's the weight of about 6 elephants. 100. Einstein couldn't speak fluently when he was nine. His parents thought he might be retarded. 101. Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason. 102. Eskimo ice cream is neither icy, or creamy. 103. Even if you cut off a cockroach's head, it can live for several weeks. 104. Every person has a unique tongue print. 105. Every time Beethoven sat down to write music, he poured ice water over his head. 106. Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie. 107. Facetious and abstemious contain all the vowels in the correct order, as does arsenious, meaning "containing arsenic." 108. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon. 109. Fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails. 110. Fortune cookies were actually invented in America, in 1918, by Charles Jung. 111. Gilligan of Gilligan's Island had a first name that was only used once, on the never-aired pilot show. His first name was Willy. The skipper's real name on Gilligan's Island is Jonas Grumby. It was mentioned once in the first episode on their radio's newscast about the wreck. 112. Giraffes have no vocal cords. 113. Goethe couldn't stand the sound of barking dogs and could only write if he had an apple rotting in the drawer of his desk. 114. Hang On Sloopy is the official rock song of Ohio. 115. Hershey's Kisses are called that because the machine that makes them looks like it's kissing the conveyor belt. 116. Honeybees have hair on their eyes. 117. Human teeth are almost as hard as rocks. 118. Human thigh bones are stronger than concrete. 119. Hydroxydesoxycorticosterone and hydroxydeoxycorticosterones are the largest anagrams. 120. Hypnotism is banned by public schools in San Diego. 121. "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language. 122. If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

123. If NASA sent birds into space they would soon die; they need gravity to swallow. 124. If you bring a raccoon's head to the Henniker, New Hampshire town hall, you are entitled to receive $.10 from the town. 125. If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies, you have $1.19. You also have the largest amount of money in coins without being able to make change for a dollar. 126. If you toss a penny 10,000 times, it will not be heads 5,000 times, but more like 4,950. The heads picture weighs more, so it ends up on the bottom. 127. If your eyes are six feet above the surface of the ocean, the horizon will be about three statute miles away. 128. In 1980, a Las Vegas hospital suspended workers for betting on when patients would die. 129. In 1980, there was only one country in the world with no telephones Bhutan. 130. In 1983, a Japanese artist made a copy of the Mona Lisa completely out of toast. 131. In 1984, a Canadian farmer began renting ad space on his cows. 132. In 75% of American households, women manage the money and pay the bills. 133. In Bangladesh, kids as young as 15 can be jailed for cheating on their finals. 134. In England, in the 1880's, "Pants" were considered a dirty word. 135. In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak. 136. In every episode of "Seinfeld" there is a Superman somewhere. 137. In Kentucky, 50 percent of the people who get married for the first time are teenagers. 138. In Los Angeles, there are fewer people than there are automobiles. 139. In most advertisements, including newspapers, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10. 140. In space, astronauts cannot cry, because there is no gravity, so the tears can't flow. 141. In the 1940s, the FCC assigned television's Channel 1 to mobile services (two-way radios in taxicabs, for instance) but did not re-number the other channel assignments. That is why your TV set has channels 2 and up, but no channel 1. 142. In the great fire of London in 1666 half of London was burnt down but only 6 people were injured. 143. In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated. 144. In the movie "Casablanca," Humphrey Bogart never said "Play it again, Sam." 145. In the White House, there are 13,092 knives, forks and spoons. 146. In Tokyo, they sell toupees for dogs. 147. Isaac Asimov is the only author to have a book in every Dewey-decimal category. 148. It takes a lobster approximately seven years to grow to be one pound.

149. It takes about a half a gallon of water to cook macaroni, and about a gallon to clean the pot. 150. It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up its stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of its mouth. Then the frog uses its forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again. 151. It was once against the law to have a pet dog in a city in Iceland. 152. It was once against the law to slam your car door in a city in Switzerland. 153. It's against the law to burp, or sneeze in a certain church in Omaha, Nebraska. 154. It's against the law to catch fish with your bare hands in Kansas. 155. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. (Don't try this at home!) 156. Ivory bar soap floating was a mistake. They had been overmixing the soap formula causing excess air bubbles that made it float. Customers wrote and told how much they loved that it floated, and it has floated ever since. 157. John Lennon's first girlfriend was named Thelma Pickles. 158. "Kemo Sabe" means "soggy shrub" in Navajo. 159. Kotex was first manufactured as bandages, during WWI. 160. Lee Harvey Oswald's cadaver tag sold at an auction for $6,600 in 1992. 161. Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. 162. Lightning strikes about 6,000 times per minute on this planet. 163. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different. 164. Lincoln Logs were invented by Frank Lloyd Wright's son. 165. Lorne Greene had one of his nipples bitten off by an alligator while he was host of "Lorne Greene's Wild Kingdom." 166. Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula" and can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its original size: "L.A." 167. Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable. 168. Many hamsters only blink one eye at a time. 169. Mel Blanc (the voice of Bugs Bunny) was allergic to carrots. 170. Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined. 171. Millie the White House dog earned more than 4 times as much as President Bush in 1991. 172. Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton. 173. Montpelier, VT is the only U.S. state capital without a McDonalds. 174. More Monopoly money is printed in a year, than real money printed throughout the world. 175. More people are killed annually by donkeys than die in air crashes. 176. More people use blue toothbrushes, than red ones. 177. Mosquitoes have teeth. 178. Most Americans' car horns beep in the key of F. 179. Most cows give more milk when they listen to music. 180. Most dust particles in your house are made from dead skin. 181. Most lipstick contains fish scales.

182. Mr. Rogers is an ordained minister. 183. Murphy's Oil Soap is the chemical most commonly used to clean elephants. 184. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, and purple. 185. Non-dairy creamer is flammable. 186. Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously 187. On a Canadian two dollar bill, the flag flying over the Parliament Building is an American flag. 188. On an American one-dollar bill, there is an owl in the upper left-hand corner of the "1" encased in the "shield" and a spider hidden in the front upper right-hand corner. 189. One in every 4 americans has appeared on television. 190. One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today is because cotton growers in the 1930's lobbied against hemp farmers -- they saw it as competition. It is not as chemically addictive as is nicotine, alcohol, or caffeine. 191. One quarter of the bones in your body, are in your feet. 192. Only 55% of all Americans know that the sun is a star. 193. Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older. 194. Only two people signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, John Hancock and Charles Thomson. Most of the rest signed on August 2, but the last signature wasn't added until 5 years later. 195. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. 196. Over 1000 birds a year die from smashing into windows. 197. Owls are one of the only birds who can see the color blue. 198. Pamela Anderson Lee is Canada's Centennial Baby, being the first baby born on the centennial anniversary of Canada's independence. 199. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. 200. Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air. 201. Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head." 202. Playing cards were issued to British pilots in WWII. If captured, they could be soaked in water and unfolded to reveal a map for escape. 203. Polar Bears trying to blend in with the ice will sometimes cover up their black nose with their paws. 204. Pollsters say that 40 percent of dog and cat owners carry pictures of the pets in their wallets. 205. Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States. 206. Recycling one glass jar, saves enough energy to watch T.V for 3 hours. 207. Reindeer like to eat bananas. 208. Research indicates that mosquitoes are attracted to people who have recently eaten bananas. 209. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. 210. Sherlock Holmes never said "Elementary, my dear Watson." 211. Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.

212. Since 1896, the beginning of the modern Olympics, only Greece and Australia have participated in every Games. 213. Slugs have 4 noses. 214. Some ribbon worms will eat themselves if they can't find any food. 215. Some toothpaste's contain antifreeze. 216. Spotted skunks do handstands before they spray. 217. "Stewardesses" is the longest word that is typed with only the left hand. 218. Studies show that if a cat falls off the seventh floor of a building it has about thirty percent less chance of surviving than a cat that falls off the twentieth floor. It supposedly takes about eight floors for the cat to realize what is occurring, relax and correct itself. 219. Sylvia Miles had the shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar with "Midnight Cowboy." Her entire role lasted only six minutes. 220. Texas is also the only state that is allowed to fly its state flag at the same height as the U.S. flag. 221. The airplane Buddy Holly died in was the "American Pie." (Thus the name of the Don McLean song.) 222. The average American drinks about 600 sodas a year. 223. The average American will eat about 11.9 pounds of cereal per year. 224. The average bank teller loses about $250 every year. 225. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes. 226. The average person has over 1,460 dreams a year. 227. The average person is about a quarter of an inch taller at night. 228. The average person laughs 15 times a day. 229. The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. 230. The Baby Ruth candy bar was actually named after Grover Cleveland's baby daughter, Ruth. 231. The band Duran Duran got their name from an astronaut in the 1968 Jane Fonda movie "Barbarella. 232. The blesbok, a South African antelope, is almost the same color as grapejuice. 233. The Boston University Bridge (on Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts) is the only place in the world where a boat can sail under a train driving under a car driving under an airplane. 234. The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's "Its A Wonderful Life". 235. The combination "ough" can be pronounced in nine different ways. The following sentence contains them all: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." 236. The company providing the liability insurance for the Republican National Convention in San Diego is the same firm that insured the maiden voyage of the RMS Titanic. 237. The condom - made originally of linen - was invented in the early 1500s. 238. The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

239. The Earth weighs around 6,588,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons. 240. The Eisenhower interstate system requires that one mile in every five must be straight. These straight sections are usable as airstrips in times of war or other emergencies. 241. The electric chair was invented by a dentist. 242. The elephant is the only mammal that can't jump. 243. The first Ford cars had Dodge engines. 244. The first known contraceptive was crocodile dung, used by Egyptians in 2000 B.C. 245. The first toilet ever seen on television was on "Leave It To Beaver." 246. The giant squid has the largest eyes in the world. 247. The glue on Israeli postage stamps is certified kosher. 248. The highest point in Pennsylvania is lower than the lowest point in Colorado. 249. The housefly hums in the middle octave, key of F. 250. The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672. 251. The katydid bug hears through holes in its hind legs. 252. The "L.L." in L.L. Bean stands for Leon Leonwood. 253. The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched." 254. The longest recorded flight of a chicken is thirteen seconds. 255. The longest word in the English language, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis. The only other word with the same amount of letters is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconioses, its plural. 256. The Main Library at Indiana University sinks over an inch every year because when it was built, engineers failed to take into account the weight of all the books that would occupy the building. 257. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. 258. The moon is moving away at a tiny, although measurable distance from the earth every year. Do the math and you will clearly see that 85 million years ago it was orbiting the earth at a distance of about 35 feet from the earth's surface. This would explain the death of the dinosours; the tallest ones, anyway. 259. The most common name in the world is Mohammed. 260. The name for Oz in the "Wizard of Oz" was thought up when the creator, Frank Baum, looked at his filing cabinet and saw A-N, and O-Z, hence "Oz." 261. The name Jeep came from the abbreviation used in the army for the "General Purpose" vehicle, G.P. 262. The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan." 263. The national anthem of Greece has 158 verses. No one in Greece has memorized all 158 verses. 264. The Neanderthal's brain was bigger than yours is. 265. The oldest known goldfish lived to 41 years of age. Its name was Fred. 266. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable.

267. The only nation whose name begins with an "A" but doesn't end in an "A" is Afghanistan. 268. The only two days of the year in which there are no professional sports games (MLB, NBA, NHL, or NFL) are the day before and the day after the Major League All-Star Game. 269. The penguin is the only bird who can swim, but not fly. 270. The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites. 271. The phrase, "It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye" is from Ancient Rome. The only rule during wrestling matches was, "No eye gouging." Everything else was allowed, but the only way to be disqualified was to poke someone's eye out. 272. The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb. 273. The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times. 274. The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head. 275. The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children. 276. The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases. 277. The Sanskrit word for "war" means "desire for more cows." 278. The "save" icon on Microsoft Word shows a floppy disk, with the shutter on backwards. 279. The saying "it's so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey" came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they would crack and break off... thus the saying. 280. The sound of E.T. walking was made by someone squishing her hands in Jello. 281. The starfish is one of the only animals who can turn it's stomach insideout. 282. The state of Florida is bigger than England. 283. The term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards." 284. The three best-known western names in China: Jesus Christ, Richard Nixon, and Elvis Presley. 285. The United States Government keeps its supply of silver at the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York. 286. The United States has never lost a war in which mules were used.

287. The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: adhere and separate. 288. The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo. 289. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king is dead". 290. The word "modem" is a contraction of the words "modulate, demodulate." (MOdulate DEModulate) 291. The word "samba" means "to rub navels together." 292. The world population of chickens is about equal to the number of people. 293. The worlds oldest piece of chewing gum is 9000 years old. 294. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar. 295. There are 336 dimples on a regulation golf ball. 296. There are over 52.6 million dogs in the U.S. 297. There are more chickens than people in the world. 298. There are more plastic flamingos in America than real ones. 299. There are only four words in the English language which end in "-dous": tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous. 300. There are only thirteen blimps in the world. Nine of them are in the United States. 301. There are two credit cards for every person in the United States. 302. There is a town in Newfoundland, Canada called Dildo. 303. There wasn't a single pony in the Pony Express, just horses. 304. Thomas Edison, lightbulb inventor, was afraid of the dark. 305. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. 306. To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, push your thumbs into its eyeballs -- it will let you go instantly. 307. Two-thirds of the world's eggplant is grown in New Jersey. 308. Until 1796, there was a state in the United States called Franklin. Today it is known as Tennessee. 309. Until 1965, driving was done on the left-hand side on roads in Sweden. The conversion to right-hand was done on a weekday at 5pm. All traffic stopped as people switched sides. This time and day were chosen to prevent accidents where drivers would have gotten up in the morning and been too sleepy to realize that this was the day of the changeover. 310. When opossums are playing 'possum, they are not "playing." They actually pass out from sheer terror. 311. When snakes are born with two heads, they fight each other for food. 312. When the University of Nebraska Cornhuskers play football at home, the stadium becomes the state's third largest city. 313. White Out was invented by the mother of Mike Nesmith (formerly of the Monkees). 314. Who's that playing the piano on the "Mad About You" theme? Paul Reiser himself. 315. Wilma Flintstone's maiden name was Wilma Slaghoopal, and Betty Rubble's Maiden name was Betty Jean Mcbricker.

316. Windmills always turn counter-clockwise. Except for the windmills in Ireland. 317. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance. 318. Women's hearts beat faster than men's. 319. You blink over 20,000,000 times a year. 320. You can only smell 1/20th as well as a dog. 321. You'll eat about 35,000 cookies in a lifetime. 322. You're born with 300 bones, but when you get to be an adult, you only have 206. 323. You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day than in any other weather. 324. Your heart beats over 100,000 times a day. 325. Your ribs move about 5 million times a year, everytime you breathe. 326. Your right lung takes in more air than your left one does. 327. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself. More Strange Facts and one-liners

Facts are stupid things. Ronald Reagan

If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of 6 months waiting at red lights. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors. Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable. No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver, or purple. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated. 'Stewardesses' is the longest word typed with only the left hand and 'lollipop' with your right. The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing. The cruise liner, QE2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. The sentence: 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog', uses every letter of the alphabet. The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze completely solid. The words 'racecar', 'kayak' and 'level' are palindromes. They read the same whether you read them left to right or right to left. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar. There are more chickens than people in the world. There are only four words in the English language which end in 'dous' : tremendous, horrendous, stupendous, and hazardous

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: 'abstemious' and ' facetious.' There's no Betty Rubble in the Flintstones Chewables Vitamins. Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard. Winston Churchill was born in a ladies' room during a dance. Women blink nearly twice as much as men. Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks; otherwise it will digest itself. Now you know everything.

Read more: http://www.horseforum.com/jokes-funnies/strange-facts-one-liners18825/#ixzz2Db433XGU

Still uncovinced about all of this..?! Try this and see how you feel afterwards, it made my hair stand on end: REALLY TRY THIS ITS VERY WEIRD AND SCARY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Open Microsoft Word and do the following(TRY THIS FOR REAL)

1. Type in capitals Q33 NY. This is the flight number of the first Plane to hit one of the Twin Towers. 2. Highlight the Q33 NY 3. Change the font size to 72. 4. Change the actual font to the WINGDINGS 1 Scary huh??

In the 1400's a law was set forth in England that a man was allowed to beat his wife with a stick no thicker than his thumb. Hence we have 'the rule of the thumb'

 Many years ago in Scotland , a new game was invented. It was ruled 'Gentlemen Only....Ladies Forbidden'.. ..and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language. Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than the U.S.. Treasury. Men can read smaller print than women can; women can hear better. Coca-Cola was originally green. It is impossible to lick your elbow. Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair. The first novel ever written on a typewriter: Tom Sawyer. The San Francisco Cable cars are the only mobile National Monuments. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades - King David Hearts, Charlemagne Clubs, Alexander - the Great, Diamonds - Julius Caesar 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987, 654,321 If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes. At least 75% of people who read this will try to lick their elbow! Read more: http://sprihaa.blogspot.com/2009/11/funny-one-liner-facts.html#ixzz2Db5APa2B

1. A zebra is white with black stripes. 2. All the planets in our solar system rotate anticlockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet that rotates clockwise. 3. Hummingbirds are the only animal that can also fly backwards. 4. Insects do not make noises with their voices. The noise of bees, mosquitoes and other buzzing insects is caused by rapidly moving their wings. 5. The cockroach is the fastest animal on 6 legs covering a meter a second. 6. The word "listen" contains the same letters as the word "silent". 7. The only 2 animals that can see behind itself without turning it's head are the rabbit and the parrot. 8. A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second. 9. India invented the Number System. Zero was invented by Aryabhatta. 10. The whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound. 11. A hippopotamus can run faster than a man. 12. India never invaded any country in her last 10000 years of history. 13. 'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia' is the fear of long words. 14. Didaskaleinophobia is the fear of going to school. 15. A snail can sleep for 3 years. 16. The names of the continents all end with the same letter with which they start. 17. In 1883 the explosion of the volcano Krakatau put so much dust into

the earth's atmosphere that sunsets appeared green and the moon appeared blue around the world for almost two years. 18. "Almost" is the longest word in the English language with all the letters in alphabetical order. 19. Twenty-Four-Karat Gold is not pure gold since there is a small amount of copper in it. Absolutely pure gold is so soft that it can be molded with the hands. 20. Electricity doesn't move through a wire but through a field around the wire.
Labels: Interesting fact
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What spider could construct such a massively creepy web?

Friday, August 31, 2007 Comments (0)

There are times when you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in this eerie spider web. Officials at Lake Tawakoni State Park say the sprawling spider web is a big attraction for some visitors, while others will not go anywhere near it. Now entomologists are debating the origin and rarity of the web that blankets several trees, shrubs and the ground along a 200-yard (182-metre) stretch of trail in a North Texas park.

The webs bring to mind the terrifyingly large spiders featured in the Harry Potter movies

"At first, it was so white it looked like fairyland," said Donna Garde, superintendent of the park about 45 miles (72 kilometres) east of Dallas. "Now it's filled with so many mosquitoes that it's turned a little brown. There are times you can literally hear the screech of millions of mosquitoes caught in those webs." Spider experts say the web may have been constructed by social cobweb spiders, which work together, or could be the result of a mass dispersal in which the arachnids spin webs to spread out from one another. "I've been hearing from entomologists from Ohio, Kansas, British Columbia - all over the place," said Mike Quinn, an invertebrate biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department who first posted photos online. Herbert A. "Joe" Pase, a Texas Forest Service entomologist, said the massive web is very unusual. "From what I'm hearing it could be a oncein-a-lifetime event," he said. But John Jackman, a professor and extension entomologist for Texas A&M University, said he hears reports of similar webs every couple of years.

"There are a lot of folks that don't realise spiders do that," said Jackman, author of "A Field Guide to the Spiders and Scorpions of Texas." "Until we get some samples sent to us, we really won't know what species of spider we're talking about," Jackman said. Garde invited the entomologists out to the park to get a firsthand look at the giant web. "Somebody needs to come out that's an expert. I would love to see some entomology intern come out and study this," she said. Park rangers said they expect the web to last until fall, when the spiders will start dying off.
World's fattest mouse appears immune to diabetes

The worlds fattest mice, genetically engineered to overproduce a key hormone, weigh five times as much as normal mice do but bizarrely do not develop diabetes, reveals a new study. The findings shed light on how current diabetes medications work and point to new drug targets to treat the disease, say the study's researchers.

A mouse (pictured on the left) engineered to overproduce the hormone adiponectin weighs 100 grammes five times as much as a normal mouse (pictured on the right)

Philipp Scherer at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, Texas, US, and his colleagues studied mice that had been genetically engineered to overeat. The mice gorged on food because they lacked the ability to produce an important appetite-suppressing hormone called leptin. The researchers then bred a subgroup of these leptin-deficient mice to overproduce another key hormone that gets released by fat cells, called adiponectin, by about threefold. Under normal circumstances, an increase in adiponectin levels signals that an animal has entered "starvation mode" because it has not eaten for some time. All of the leptin-deficient mice ate non-stop, but those bred to overproduce adiponectin packed on almost twice as much weight by the end of the 20week experiment. Location, location, location Whereas a normal, healthy mouse weighs about 20 grammes, the mice lacking leptin weighed roughly 60 grammes. The adiponectin overproducers weighed about 100 grammes. "It's probably the most obese mouse that's ever been reported," Scherer says of their particular mouse strain. Interestingly, none of the rodents that made extra adiponectin developed symptoms of diabetes, such as high blood sugar. By comparison, all of the other leptin-deficient mice developed this disease during the course of the experiment. When Scherer and his team examined the distribution of body fat within the mice, they found that the obese rodents with an abundance of adiponectin had a great deal of fat stored under the skin, but very little fat within organs such as the liver. This unusual allocation of fat might explain why the animals remained in good health extra fat in the liver can make the organ less sensitive to insulin, thereby leading to diabetes.

Scherer firmly believes that the distribution of fat can make all the difference in terms of whether obesity will lead to diabetes. "It's a little bit like real estate; it's location, location, location." Sudden death Adiponectin appears to help the body store fat under the skin by increasing the number of fat cells there. Notably, in the weeks following the formal end of the experiment, about 10% of the mice that overproduced adiponectin experienced sudden death. But this was due to the fact that their vital organs stopped functioning under the crushing weight of their fat, not because of a particular disease. Some of the 100-gramme mice also developed enlarged hearts, which in humans can predispose people to heart failure. The new findings might lead to new ways of treating diabetes in the future, says Scherer. He notes that many drugs currently used to treat diabetes lead to an increase in adiponectin levels in patients. Scherer says that giving adiponectin itself would not work well since the protein gets broken down very quickly in the body. But he adds that scientists might want to look for compounds that can act directly on the adiponectin signalling pathway to migrate fat out of the liver of obese patients.
he worlds fastest, smallest mobile chip
Tuesday, August 21, 2007 Comments (0)

Seoul: South Koreas Hynix Semiconductor announced it has developed the worlds fastest and smallest one-gigabyte chip for mobile phones. The new chip is capable of processing 1.6 GB of data per second, the company said. The company added that the chip which can be applied to ultra-small electronic devices and memory products would start production on a large scale in early 2008.
Scientists unlock the secrets of the Rubik's cube
Friday, August 17, 2007 Comments (0)

Remember the Rubik's Cube? That little box of multi-coloured squares that you could only complete by carefully steaming off all of the stickers and then re-sticking them in the right positions? A team of US scientists has used a powerful number-crunching supercomputer to work out that the minimum moves needed to complete a Rubik's Cube from any starting position, is 26, one less than the previous record. In reaching this figure Daniel Kunkle and Gene Cooperman from Northeastern University in Boston developed algorithms that can be useful for all kinds of different applications from scheduling air flights to determining how proteins will fold. Scroll down for more...

The Rubik's cube was a huge success in the 1980s - despite the frustration it caused

As a Rubik's Cube has approximately 43 billion billion (43,000,000,000,000,000,000) possible positions it would have taken too long for even the most powerful supercomputer to work through all of the different configurations. So Kunkle and his advisor Gene Cooperman developed some clever mathematical and computational strategies to make the puzzle more manageable. They programmed the supercomputer to arrive at one of 15,000 half-solved solutions. They knew they could fully solve any of these 15,000 cubes with a few extra moves. The final results showed that any disordered cube could be fully solved in a maximum of 29 moves, but that most cubes could be completed in 26 moves. Many mathematicians still believe that it should take only 20 moves to solve any Rubik's cube, but no one has been able to prove this theory yet. Failing that, a steaming kettle and some deft fingerwork should do the trick.

At this year's Caltech 2007 competition American Rubik's Cube expert Dan Dzoan broke the world record for one-handed cubesolving by completing one in an incredible 17.9 seconds
The world's strangest laws
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Did you know it's illegal in France to name a pig Napoleon? Or that in Ohio you're not allowed to get a fish drunk? Alex Wade celebrates the spirit of the silly season with a list of the world's most ridiculous laws

Did you know that in France it is forbidden to call your pig Napoleon?

25- It is illegal for a cab in the City of London to carry rabid dogs or corpses. 24- It is illegal to die in the Houses of Parliament. 23- It is an act of treason to place a postage stamp bearing the British monarch upside down. 22- In France, it is forbidden to call a pig Napoleon. 21- Under the UKs Tax Avoidance Schemes Regulations 2006, it is illegal not to tell the taxman anything you dont want him to know, though you dont have to tell him anything you dont mind him knowing. 20- In Alabama, it is illegal for a driver to be blindfolded while driving a vehicle. 19- In Ohio, it is against state law to get a fish drunk.

18- Royal Navy ships that enter the Port of London must provide a barrel of rum to the Constable of the Tower of London. 17- In the UK, a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants even, if she so requests, in a policemans helmet. 16- In Lancashire, no person is permitted after being asked to stop by a constable on the seashore to incite a dog to bark. 15- In Miami, Florida, it is illegal to skateboard in a police station. 14- In Indonesia, the penalty for masturbation is decapitation. 13- In the UK, all men over the age of 14 must carry out two hours of longbow practice a day. 12- In London, Freemen are allowed to take a flock of sheep across London Bridge without being charged a toll; they are also allowed to drive geese down Cheapside. 11- In San Salvador, drunk drivers can be punished by death before a firing squad. 10. In the UK, a man who feels compelled to urinate in public can do so only if he aims for his rear wheel and keeps his right hand on his vehicle. 9- In Florida, unmarried women who parachute on Sundays can be jailed. 8- In Kentucky, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon more than six-feet long. 7- In Chester, Welshmen are banned from entering the city before sunrise and from staying after sunset. 6- In the city of York, it is legal to murder a Scotsman within the ancient city walls, but only if he is carrying a bow and arrow.

5- In Boulder, Colorado, it is illegal to kill a bird within the city limits and also to own a pet the towns citizens, legally speaking, are merely pet minders. 4- In Vermont, women must obtain written permission from their husbands to wear false teeth. 3- In London, it is illegal to flag down a taxi if you have the plague. 2- In Bahrain, a male doctor may legally examine a womans genitals but is forbidden from looking directly at them during the examination; he may only see their reflection in a mirror. 1- The head of any dead whale found on the British coast is legally the property of the King; the tail, on the other hand, belongs to the Queen - in case she needs the bones for her corset.
Worlds tiniest art
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This image from IBM shows an atomicsized image resulting from scientific work at IBMs labs. Made of 48 iron atoms using IBMs low temperature Scanning Tunneling Microscope, this tiny work of art will be featured in an exhibition in the US titled The Art of Invention. While experimenting with materials that might make up future computer chips and storage components, IBM scientists built images with individual atoms such as this stadium-shaped Quantum Corral
The Top 10 Weirdest Keyboards ever

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 Comments (0)

Keyboards come in many shapes - from the simplest computer grey $9.99 standard 102-key keyboard to variants that seem to come straight out of a Star Trek episode. Here's our Top 10 list of the weirdest keyboards ever. 10. Roll-up keyboard

This keyboard has the same measurements as a standard 102-key keyboard, but there's a big difference. You can roll this one up and put it in your pocket. Nice. 9. The wrist keyboard

This one might be useful if you're in the need to type stuff while doing practical work in tough climates - but if you would wear this keyboard at the office, you might be considered a bit geeky. 8. Maltron 3D Ergonomic Keyboard

Things are starting to get a bit more weird, ey? Getting used to this keyboard isn't something you'll do in 10 minutes or so - it will take a while for sure. But if you have medical problems with your hands, this might be a good choice since it's a very ergonomic keyboard. It looks very weird though! 7. The SafeType keyboard

Just take a look at this one. Do you understand how to use it? The idea is that your hands and arms shall be in a more relaxed position while working with the SafeType compared to a traditional keyboard. 6. Virtual Laser Keyboard

Wow, it's heating up, don't you agree? This is more cool than weird though. This laser gadget projects a virtual keyboard on a table or other suitable material, and then interpret your finger movement and pass them on to your PDA or whatever you have it connected to. Cool. 5. The frogpad

The frogpad is a tiny, tiny keyboard - or it would be more suitable to call it a keypad actually. The manufacturer say that you can get up to 40 words per minute if you practice between 6 to 10 hours with it. Any idea why they are calling it a frogpad?

4. The Twiddler 2

What do you say about the Twiddler 2? It looks to be quite painful to use, or what do you think? According to the testimonials at their site, it will take you 'a weekend' to learn typing 30 words per minute, so the frogpad wins that round. 3. The Orbitouch

This one could be a leftover from Area 51, or a prop from the set of any science fiction movie. Wonder how it works? Here's what the manufacturer say: "The orbiTouch creates a keystroke when you slide the two domes into one of their eight respective positions. You type the different characters by sliding the domes to create letters and numbers. The orbiTouch also has an integrated mouse, so moving the domes gives you full mouse and keyboard capability!" The target group for this keyboard is of course people who have limited or no motion in their fingers or hands, and that's a very good thing - but anyway, it's a weird keyboard.

2. The Datahand

This product is aimed for people who get pain in their hands from typing with a traditional keyboard - and that's a good thing. It's still looks like a very strange keyboard. Everytime I see this one I think of the movie Predator with Arnold Schwarzenegger, don't know why. I love this one the keyboard, not the movie. 1. The Tidy Tippist

Isn't this one lovely? The keyboard is hidden inside a decorative, washable tablecloth. The electronic is woven into a fabric, which finds itself between layers of water resistant felt as sandwich material. The soft felt surface makes it a pleasure for fingers to tip - a cosy keyboard. Awesome, hehe.
THE WORLD'S FASTEST HUMAN CALCULATOR

Thursday, December 13, 2007 Comments (0)

The human calculator: 393 trillion answers - and he picks the right one in 70 seconds
When the answer is 2,407,899,893,032,210 you know the question is tough. Not so tough, however, that Alexis Lemaire could not work it out in his head. His challenge yesterday was to come up with the 13th root of a computergenerated 200-digit number.

And, with 393 trillion possible answers to choose from, the PhD student made it almost look easy. A mere 70.2 seconds later, he cracked it and officially became the world's fastest human calculator.

A slight frown and a stare of deep concentration had been the only sign the 27-year-old "mathlete" was doing anything more than running through the eight times table. Appropriately, the Frenchman broke his previous world record of 72.4 seconds at the Science Museum in London, where he had a backdrop of Charles Babbage's 1840s Difference Engine No2, the first successful mechanical calculator. For those in the know, 13th roots are a yardstick in mental arithmetic for mathletes determined to show ever greater feats of brainpower. A 13th root is - if your maths is no longer at Mr Lemaire's level - a number that multiplied by itself 13 times matches the initial figure.

Lemaire used a computer to generate a massive 200-digit number before working out its 13th root

Mr Lemaire, from Reims, began demonstrating his mental prowess by finding the 13th root of a random 100 digit number. But this soon became too easy. The first time he tried a 200-digit challenge, it took him 40 minutes.

Since then, he has put himself through a mental training regime that has seen him repeatedly cut his time. Cracking the answer is, apparently not all about maths, it also owes a lot to memory. Mr Lemaire, who is single, has memorised thousands of combinations of 13th root numbers. "It's a bit like multiplication tables but with huge digits," he said. "It's a combination of techniques, partly memory and partly maths." Asked to explain further, he would only say: "I won't give you my secret." He did, however, agree to try the Daily Mail's 30-Second Challenge, and finished the advanced task in eight seconds. It was a more than respectable performance - but, for a champion "13th rooter", it didn't seem that impressive. Perhaps he was still tired after his world record.
Record-busting scorpion was bigger than man
Saturday, November 24, 2007 Comments (0)

Paris: This was a bug you couldnt swat and definitely couldnt step on. British and German researchers reported Wednesday that they had discovered the giant fossilised claw of an ancient sea scorpion that, hundreds of millions of years ago, would have been over 8 feet long - much taller than the average man, and almost as long as a car. The find, in a quarry near the German town of Pruem, is the biggest specimen of arthropod ever found, they said in a study published by Biology Letters, a journal of Britains Royal Society. This is an amazing discovery, said Simon Braddy, from the University of Bristol in England. We have known for some time that the fossil record yields monster millipedes, super-sized scorpions, colossal cockroaches and jumbo dragonflies, but we never realised until now just how big some of these ancient creepy-crawlies were The 18.4-inch claw was wielded by a species of sea scorpion called the Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, which lived between 460 and 255 million years ago.

Using the claw as a benchmark, the scientists believe its owner was between 7.57 and 8.41 feet long. Chelicerae - wand-like appendages used to grasp food and bring it to the beasts mandibles - would have added another 1.6 feet. This exceeds the previously-recorded maximum body length of any arthropod by almost half a metre, the chelicerae not included, their study says. Despite their name, sea scorpions, known as eurypterids, were not true scorpions. Equipped with long, flat, jointed carapaces, they stalked warm shallow sea waters from around 500 million to 250 million years ago, eventually moving into fresh water. Biologists delving into Earths distant past are divided as to how some arthropods were able to develop into such monstrous size. Some suggest that they benefit from an oxygen-rich atmosphere, while others argue that they had to get bigger in order to keep up with the supersizing of their likely prey, the early armoured fish. There is no simple single explanation, said Braddy. It is likely that some ancient arthropods were big because there was little competition from the vertebrates, as we see today. If the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere increased suddenly, it doesnt mean all the bugs would get bigger.

The world's tiniest baby - born at 24 weeks and weighing just 10oz
Thursday, September 27, 2007 Comments (0)

Tiny Kimberley Mueller weighed just over 10 ounces when she was born making her the world's smallest surviving baby. Her chances of living were rated at worse than 1,000-1 when she was born

15 weeks prematurely. These incredible pictures published for the first time today show that Kimberley was about the size of a mobile phone at birth. Now six months old, the miracle baby has been allowed home for the first time.

The size of a mobile phone: Kimberley Mueller weighed just over 10 ounces when she was born in Hanover, Germany - making her the world's smallest surviving baby

But Kimberley, who was just 10.2cm long, spent months on a life support system as doctors in Germany fought to save her. The tiny mite was kept in an incubator for warmth and drip-fed, while a respirator help her breathe. British birth experts said it was "incredible" that she had survived.

Now six months, Kimberley has been allowed home for the first time (Above with mother Petra and father Andreas)

Dr Arvind Shah, consultant paediatrician at Great Ormond Street's Middlesex unit, said: "This is amazing - she must be a little fighter. "Now we have more sophisticated equipment premature babies do have a better chance of living. But there are obviously huge health risks."

Kimberley's chances of living were rated at worse than 1,000-1 when she was born 15 weeks prematurely

Kimberley's mother Petra Mueller, from Hanover, said: "I was allowed to stroke her with my finger and I always spoke to her. "It was the nicest thing when she would grip my finger in her tiny hands."
World's First Cryochick Hatches At Audubon
Friday, August 03, 2007 Comments (0)

NEW ORLEANS -- He's less than two months old, but a Mississippi sandhill crane is already making history. Researchers at the Audubon Institute said the crane is the world's first cryochick -- a bird created by fertilizing an egg with semen that had been frozen. The male chick hatched June 20 at the Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species. According to the Audubon Institute, Mississippi sandhill cranes are endangered, with fewer than 100 found at or near the Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuge in Gautier, Miss. Disappearing habitat is believed to be the primary reason for their reduced numbers. The Audubon Center for Research of Endangered Species has released more than 130 chicks to the refuge over the past 10 years. The chicks are raised by a staff member carefully trained to mimic natural crane feeding and dressed in a crane costume.

The cryochick chick will be raised the same way and will be sent to the refuge when it is older.
Worlds largest carpet
Thursday, August 02, 2007 Comments (0)

A view of the handmade carpet at the Imam Khomeini grand mosque in Tehran on Tuesday. Iran has unveiled what it said was the worlds largest handwoven carpet, worth $5.8 million and larger than a football pitch, to be laid out in a United Arab Emirates mosque. Iranian officials say the 6,000 square-metre carpet is the biggest handmade carpet in the world and will be carried to the Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan mosque in Abu Dhabi, UAE The biggest hand-woven carpet in the world has been unveiled in Iran. The sumptuous masterpiece, which measures 5,625 square metres (60,500sq ft), is almost big enough to cover the football pitch at Wembley Stadium (7,140 sq m).

The carpet is called the Qasr al-Alam (The Palace of the World) and took

Ali Khaliqi, an Iranian artist, eight months to design. It was woven by 1,200 women, aged between 15 and 60, over 16 months. Working in three villages in northeastern Iran, they tied 2.2 billion knots and used 38 tonnes of the finest mothproof wool and cotton. They were supervised by 50 men acting as technical experts.

The carpet, worth 2.8 million ($5.5 million), will grace the floor of the main prayer hall in a huge mosque in Abu Dhabi named after Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahyan, the late President and founder of the United Arab Emirates. Given the unprecedented size of the carpet, it had to be knotted on nine looms and the nine pieces will be stitched together in Abu Dhabi.

Photographers had to board helicopters yesterday to capture the magnificent carpet in full when it was revealed for the first time on an open-air prayer ground in Tehran. Several lorries were needed to haul the carpet to the location and it will be taken to the UAE in two aircraft.

The predominantly green and cream carpet features the traditional Persian

motifs of swirling vines and five medallion centrepieces. Twenty-five colours were used incorporating 20 different natural dyes.
An eggcellent idea
Tuesday, July 31, 2007 Comments (0)

Staff at US-based Smithsonians National Zoo use telemetric devices, such as this one, to record important information about how birds incubate their eggs. The electronic egg is put under the adult bird and records incubation temperature and the rate the parent birds turn the egg. The data is sent from the egg to a receiver and recorded throughout the day. This information is vital to better understand the complete biology of bird species
Smallest teddy bear in the world
Sunday, September 24, 2006 Comments (0) Bettina Of kaminski from Germany Sewed [pyatimillimetrovogo] bear. As they report, this is the smallest bear in the world.

Labels: unbelievable

Scientists create the world's first see-through frog

Thursday, September 27, 2007 Comments (0)

Frogs come in nearly every colour of the rainbow - from the dull greens of British species, to the vivid yellows and reds of their tropical relatives. But Japanese scientists have gone one step further than mother nature - and created a transparent frog. The creature's see-through skin allows researchers to see details of its internal organs and blood vessels. They say this could bring huge benefits to medicine, making it easier and cheaper to study diseases such as cancer.

Professor Masayuki Sumida, who led the project at the Institute for Amphibian Biology at Hiroshima University, said scientists could look at the effect of drugs and chemicals on the frog's internal organs and blood vessels without the animals having to be killed and dissected. 'Because the frogs remain transparent from their birth to adulthood, organs of the same frog could be studied throughout,' he said. 'This is simple and cheap when studying, for instance, how certain chemicals influence bones.' By attaching green fluorescent markers to a stretch of DNA and injecting it into the frog, researchers can also study the behaviour of genes in a living

organism. The transparent frog (pictured) is the offspring of common Japanese brown frogs. It was created through traditional selective breeding, rather than genetic modification, using wild frogs with a mutation that gives them pale skin. By mating the palest frogs they could find and then breeding from their palest offspring the researchers were able to create the see-through strain. The scientists say they plan to patent the technique but have yet to perfect the process. Only one in 16 frogs they breed has transparent skin and they have not succeeded in getting the transparent frogs to breed see-through offspring. Most of the world's natural see-through creatures live underwater. Animals such as jellyfish, sea worms, sea snails and octopuses evolved transparency as a form of camouflage. In an environment where there are few hiding places, being see-through can give them an edge.

Computer : New Laptops

Wednesday, December 06, 2006 Comments (0) Microsoft loves tablets. Here is CEO Steve Ballmer holding up the new ThinkPad X41 Tablet, from China's Lenovo Group, at Microsoft's TechEd 2005 back in June. Ballmer was quoted as saying that the tablet will run on Windows XP Tablet PC Edition 2005. Credit: Microsoft

Gateway's new CX2600 notebook family, starting at $1,349, has a 14-inch wide screen that swivels around on a titanium frame. The 6-pound tablet comes with a flash card reader, wireless networking and slots for batteries that last for up to nine hours. Credit: Gateway

Think tablet PCs are too expensive? Prices for Hewlett-Packard' s Compaq tc4200, which was first released in February 2005, start at $1,599, which is $44 less than a similarly outfitted Compaq nc4200 notebook. Credit: Hewlett-Packard

Lenovo's X41T tablet is the first ThinkPad with a screen that swivels around to make a tablet PC. Retailing for $1,899, the tablet is Lenovo's first offering following its purchase of IBM's PC business earlier this year. Credit: Lenovo

At just 2.2 pounds, the Fujitsu Siemens P1510 LifeBook convertible manages to squeeze in an 8.9-inch wide screen, 1.2GHz processor, 60GB hard drive, 1GB of RAM, Wi-If and Blue tooth. The notebook was released on Aug. 8 and retails for $1,499. Credit: Fujitsu

Acer was one of the first computer companies to make a tablet PC. Its fourth-generation TravelMat--the C310--retails for $1,649.99 and features a 14-inch screen, an Intel Pentium M processor, 8.5 hours of battery life (when the battery extender is used) and a two-spindle convertible tablet design. Credit: Acer

Convertibles may be the new fashion trend, but slate tablets have some sizzle too. Motion Computing's LE1600 is used by hospitals and insurance agents. The tablet retails for $2,049 and comes with a 1.5GHz Intel processor, 512MB of RAM and a 30GB hard drive. Credit: Motion Computing

Labels: technology

Laptop With Transparent Screen

Monday, October 30, 2006 Comments (0)

Worlds oldest prosthesis?

Monday, July 30, 2007 Comments (0)

London: An artificial big toe attached to the foot of an Egyptian mummy could be the worlds oldest prosthetic body part, British researchers said Friday. The fake toe, which is made of wood and leather and is currently on display at the Cairo Museum in Egypt, dates from between 1000 and 600 BC. Researchers at Manchester University in north-west England hope to prove

it was used to help someone who had lost their original big toe to walk. If they do, it could mean that prosthetic body parts were in use up to 700 years earlier than was previously thought. The oldest known prosthesis is a bronze Roman leg, dating from about 300 BC, which was kept at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Unfortunately, it was destroyed during a German bombing raid in the Second World War. A second false big toe, which is on display at the British Museum, will also be tested by scientists in Manchester. If either one is functional, it may be interesting to manufacture it with modern materials and trial it for use on people with missing toes, said Jacky Finch, a researcher working on the study. She added that the Cairo toe is the most likely to have been a prosthesis, because it shows signs of wear and is attached to a well-healed amputation site. The London toe, by contrast, does not bend and is, therefore, more likely to have been cosmetic, she said.
Fridge magnets go high-tech
Sunday, July 29, 2007 Comments (0)

You are at work and forgot to remind your children to buy milk, so you email... your fridge!

The Israeli branch of Taiwanese high-tech firm Winbond Electronics Corp has developed prototypes of devices with software giant Microsoft that transmit data from a computer to a portable screen, such as one on a refrigerator magnet. The devices incorporate a technology called SideShow, a feature in Windows Vista, which was released earlier this year. They can connect to a computer up to 100 metres away with a Bluetooth wireless connection, even if the PC is turned off. The gadgets allow you to write notes, check and send email, view pictures and read news, stock reports and more. Among the devices Winbond is working on is the Scribbler, a palm-sized, one-inch thick magnet with a touch-pad monitor. The user can use these monitors without going to the PC. Using a stylus pen commonly used for pocket computers, a person could scrawl notes on The Scribbler or send emails from work that they can read on the device. The gadgets are expected to be launched later this year.

Funny invention but useful technology

Friday, September 29, 2006 Comments (3)

Could Ming the mollusc hold the secret to Nature's greatest mystery?
Wednesday, October 31, 2007 Comments (0)

Growing old and and dying is inevitable yet meet the mighty Ming who has been around for 405 years Growing old and dying is as inevitable as paying taxes. However much we may moan and rage or smear ourselves with youthpreserving potions, we'll be lucky to blow out the candles on our 90th birthday cake. For one of our fellow creatures, however, nine decades is scarcely the length of its childhood. The ocean quahog (a type of deep-sea clam) can, it seems, chug on and on and on for several centuries.

In fact, one specimen that has been dredged from the Atlantic sea-floor off the coast of Iceland has just set a record as the oldest living creature on the planet. Meet the mighty Ming, whom scientists say has been around for a grand total of 405 years. And no, he wasn't named after the former Lib Dem leader. This chap was given his title in honour of the Imperial dynasty that ruled China at the time of his birth at the start of the 17th century.

Record-breaker: Ming was 405 years old when he died

Having seen off Queen Elizabeth I, the English Civil War, the entire Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, two World Wars and the advent of reality TV, Ming was caught last year when scientists from the University of Bangor were dredging the seabed near Iceland as part of a study into climate change. He was taken back to the laboratory where tests were conducted on his shell to determine his age. As the quahog's shell grows at different rates at

different times of the year, it consists of hundreds of distinct layers that can be counted like rings in a tree trunk to give its age. Researcher Alan Wanamaker found the first layers of Ming's shell were made more than four centuries ago. That made him 32 years older than the previous oldest recorded creature (another quahog) whose shell is now in a German museum. But that is not the only reason why scientists have got so excited about the discovery. For although Ming may be small he'd fit in the palm of your hand he could hold a mighty secret. Creatures like him may show us why some species are able to cheat ageing and death for so much longer than others. And perhaps just perhaps he can show us that our own lifespan is not so inevitable after all. That's the hope of charity Help the Aged, which has given the marine biologists from Bangor University 40,000 to investigate why this animal lives so long. For if we discover how a living creature can live into its fifth century, then we might be able to do something to extend human longevity as well, or at least make old age a little more palatable. That is the theory, anyway. In the meantime, we still have to get to grips with just why there are such fantastic differences in the lifespans of different species. Some Galapagos tortoises, for instance, have been recorded to reach nearly 200 years. And bowhead whales have been found recently with antique harpoons embedded in their skulls dating from the 1790s.

Unless these were a freak, this means that in the sea today there may be large, intelligent animals that pre-date the invention of the railway engine. Other Methuselahs include orange roughy, a Pacific fish increasingly popular as food. These cold-water fish can live to more than 150 years old, meaning that your dinner could date back to a time when Queen Victoria was still middle-aged. But how do these creatures live so long? In fact, while the lifespans of different species may seem random, there is a pattern. Generally, big creatures live longer than small ones and this goes for plants as well as animals. At one end of the scale are mice and shrews, which live just a couple of years, while at the other are large animals like rhinos, hippos, giant tortoises, lions and elephants, which have life expectancies measured in decades or even centuries. But there are some interesting anomalies. Humans, for instance, live longer than is to be expected for our size the record stands at 122 years, achieved by the Frenchwoman Jeanne Calment, who personally knew Vincent van Gogh and died in 1997. We certainly do better than our closest relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees, which are lucky to make 70, even in pampered captivity. Horses and cattle, however, do badly despite their large size, while some parrots live for 70 years or more despite being small. And fish and molluscs can, as we have seen, survive for centuries.

So, what determines how long a species can live? Biologists used to think that animals (and plants) die because, like machines, they simply wear out. But unlike machines, animals' bodies are equipped with efficient repair mechanisms. The question is: why do these fail and what determines how old we are when they do? The evolutionary theory of ageing, now widely accepted, states simply that animal lifespans reflect the amount of time an organism can expect to survive in the wild before being killed by predators, cold, disease or starvation. This explains why big animals tend to live longer than small ones they are simply less likely to be eaten or die of starvation, so their bodies have evolved to age and develop more slowly, as time is not of the essence for them. The theory also explains the anomalies: bats and birds have long lifespans because they can fly, making them far safer from predators than comparably sized ground-living creatures. Tortoises, too, live a long time because they are armour-plated as are clams. Few things eat whales, or large crocodiles, and it takes a long time for a big animal to die of starvation. Mice, on the other hand, are so vulnerable to being eaten or squashed that their bodies are designed for speed, not endurance. They have rapid, high-octane metabolisms that help them do just one thing make lots of babies, very quickly, before getting eaten. However, these fast, superheated metabolisms take a toll on their bodies.

Flooded with sex hormones and corrosive sugars, small mammals soon succumb to cancers and other ageing diseases, even if protected in the lab. But is it possible to use this knowledge to increase human longevity? Could we tweak our metabolisms in some way so that we could live as long as Ming the clam? The answer is almost certainly yes, but not any time soon. Some scientists believe it may be possible to fool our bodies into ticking over more slowly by going on a very low-calorie diet, living in a state of near-starvation. But in the future, our best hope probably lies with genetic manipulation, combined with drug therapies to defuse the genetic timebombs left in our DNA by our savannah ancestry. That's all a long way off. But the good news for our generation is that while the human lifespan is probably unassailable for now, human life expectancy is not. In other words, the numbers of us who can expect to live close to the current maximum possible age for humans is growing all the time. A girl, born to affluent middleclass parents in the world's richer countries, now has a life expectancy of more than 85 (80 for boys) and this will increase further. This alone may cause us problems, as the ratio of pensioners to workers changes dramatically. What would happen in a world where people lived to be 405 can only be guessed at. As for Ming? Well, he's already paying the price of fame.

By the time the mollusc had been inspected in the lab, and his record confirmed, he'd passed over to that great ocean bed in the sky. No one can say it wasn't an impressive innings.

Amazing Science Facts

1- Turtles can live for more than 100 years. 2- An elephant trunk has no bone but 40,000 muscles. 3- The cicada, a fly found in Africa, spends 17 years of its life sleeping; and only two weeks is awake during which mates and then dies. 4- The ant can lift things 10 times its own weight. 5- If your skin is laid flat it will cover an area of 18 square feet. 6- A Giraffe has the same number of bones in its neck as a man. 7- Ocean waves can travel as fast as a JET Plane. 8- The first drawings of a helicopter are nearly 500 years old. 9- A butterfly warms up its body up to 81 degrees Fahrenheit before flying. 10- A whale can swim for 3 months without eating. 11- A human being drinks 16,000 tons of water in a lifetime. 12- We blink 25 times a minute.

13- To melt away 1 pound of fat you will need to walk 34 miles. 14- The star fish is actually not a fish, its an animal. ( phylum : Echinodermate ) 15- Male mosquitoes do not bite, so blame the females next time. 16- A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. 17- The body's largest internal organ is the small intestine at an average length of 20 feet. 18- Oysters can change from one gender to another and back again. 19- The small intestine is 7-8 meters long, making it the largest organ inside the human body. The large intestine is only 1-1.5 meters long! 20-The largest lizard in the world is the Komodo dragon which reaches up to 3 meters and sometimes longer was named because of it's fiery tongue. It is often longer than a car. .
Labels: immense

The amazing telescope that lets you see New York from London's Tower Bridge
Wednesday, May 28, 2008 Comments (0)

Deep beneath the Atlantic Ocean, forgotten for the best part of a century, lies a tunnel linking London and New York. It was built on the whim of a Victorian inventor with the aim of linking two great cities and developing the kind of friendship that still exists today.

London waving: Looking down the Telectroscope at Tower Bridge end

But bad fortune befell the venture - and the tunnel lay idle ever after. Until today, that is, when the project was rekindled with a modern twist. Using a giant "electronic telescope" and state-of-the-art technology, England and America were joined once again when the tunnel entrances were reopened beside Tower Bridge in London and Brooklyn Bridge in New York. It meant that New Yorkers and Londoners could wave to each other across the sea and begin the kind of mute dialogue that was only a dream all those years ago for eccentric engineering entrepreneur Alexander Stanhope St George (deceased). Or at least, that's the way the story goes. What is certain is that now you can indeed stand on the South Bank of the UK end of the 21st century "Telectroscope" - and see someone standing 3,460 miles away across the water.

It's raining in New York: Taking in the view on Brooklyn bridge

And - oh dear - it didn't take us Brits too long to utilise it for a bit of fun at the expense of our American cousins. First there was the chap unbuttoning his shirt for an interested party on the other side. Then came the group whose hand-held banner urged an assembly of curious New York cops to hop on one leg (which, incidentally, they declined). Goodness only knows what everyone will get up to when darkness falls. But artist and creator Paul St George is delighted that this reworking of his great-grandfather's project is helping to spread a little happiness. It takes some while to grasp the concept of the Telectroscope, unless you're happy enough to accept as gospel the story behind its creation. According to the publicity material being handed out yesterday, the original tunnel was pioneered by an orang-utan running its entire length in a safety test before disappearing with the wife of the New York City mayor. Perhaps you get the picture now. The truth is that the Telectroscope - installed by Artichoke, the same people who spectacularly paraded a mechanical elephant through London

two years ago - probably employs the latest broadband, camera and satellite technology to close the gap between our two great nations. Anyone you asked today, however, simply put it down to magic. The Telectroscope uses 6ft screens and a Jules Verne style telescope that gleams with brass and an array of Victorian dials. Participants peer into one end of the screen - and hey presto - they can see anyone standing at the other side. Much of the first few hours of this morning were taken up by bemusedlooking Americans gazing cautiously at the antics of the London transatlantic gazers before realising that it wasn't a set-up, that they weren't being filmed for a candid camera TV stunt, and that it wasn't a terrorist threat.

Aliens at City Hall? The London Telectroscope looks like something out of War Of The Worlds

One of them broke the ice with a message they must have thought was a subject close to British hearts - the weather. "Raining here!" said the Yank's handwritten note, pressed tentatively to the screen. "Sunny here!" replied a trio of blondes in London, before fanning their faces and performing heat-wave actions in mime.

Jewellery company worker Annie McDonald, from North London, exchanged kisses at a stranger standing beneath Brooklyn Bridge after beginning a semaphore style conversation with him. I tried it with a 30-something who looked as if she was on her way to work - but she just giggled, pointed to her watch, and disappeared from view. Ho hum. That's the thing about Telectroscope flirting - if you don't fancy it, you can just step aside. So unless you happen to find someone in Brooklyn who can lip-read, it's impossible to talk the talk. But you can still chalk the chalk. Thus, with the used of a liberated restaurant blackboard, I tried a transatlantic conversation with Todd Glass, 41, who was pushing his five-month-old son Simon in a buggy. He assured me he was not a hologram - but, crucially perhaps, was unable to tell me who the next President would be. So was he really real? "You bet," he replied. Andy Slater, 28, from Edinburgh, visited the Brooklyn screen with his girlfriend Sarah Cook, 33, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. The message from these Brits abroad was classically simple: "Send Tea!"

Police chase: Keeping an eye on crime in New York from Tower Bridge

Visitors to the Telectroscope web site - www.tiscali.co.uk/telectroscope have already revealed online that they will use its wizardry to bond with friends or relatives abroad, show off an unseen grandchild to grandparents in New York, and - who knows - maybe even to propose marriage. One couple plan to use it so their Manhattan friend can flick through brochures of apartments they are trying to rent.

Designer: Paul St George

"Part of the idea is just to allow people to use it in whatever way they want," said Mr St George, 53, from Bristol, who insists he developed the Telectroscope after discovering his great-grandfather's dusty notes and diaries in an attic. "The thought of a tunnel under the Atlantic is fascinating," he said. "What child has never dug a hole at the beach and wondered how long it would take to go through to the other side of the world? "The Telectroscope is a stage, and the people who use it are the performers. "Their unpredictability is all part of it. It's encouraging people think about different ways of communicating, to see people living everyday lives thousands of miles away - and, perhaps, to study the way everyone reacts differently to something they're not quite sure about."

As we speak, another group of NYPD cops pulls up at the Brooklyn end in a squad car with flashing red lights. At first they give only wooden waves to the Brits assembled at Tower Bridge. Then one of them - dressed in uniform and packing a handgun - is encouraged to assume a cowboy-style pose. Across the Atlantic, an unheard cheer goes up. The cop becomes an instant hero. Here's lookin' at you, kid...

2. 92 nuclear bombs lost at sea. 3. A group of frogs is called an army. 4. An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain. 5. Perth is Australia's windiest city. 6. The Amazon rainforest produces half the world's oxygen supply. -----------------------1. The dot on top of the letter 'i' is called a 'Tittle'. 2. The Eiffel Tower has 1,792 steps. 3. A shark's top speed is 70kmh (44mph). 4. A Cheetah's top speed is 114kph (70mph). 5. Dolphin's can detect underwater sounds from 24 km (15 miles) away. 6. Carrots contain 0% fat. -----------------------1. A snail can sleep for 3 years. 2. Brazil covers 50% of the South American continent. 3. Diamonds are the hardest natural substance.

4. The word 'rhythm' is the longest word without a vowel. 5. Our brain uses 25% of all the oxygen for our breathing function. 6. Horses sleep standing up. -----------------------1. China manufacturers 70% of the worlds toys. 2. Buckingham Palace has over 600 rooms. 3. The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is uncopyrightable. 4. Snakes can't blink. 5. Shah-Jahan lost Mumtaz, when she got giving birth to their 14h child. 6. The first James Bond movie was called 'Dr. No' ------------------------

Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times. 2. Camels can drink 94 litres of water in less than 3 minutes. 3. There are over 7,000 different types of apples. 4. Ants can lift 50 times their own weight. 5. The pound key (#) on the Keyboard / Keypad is called an octothorpe. 6. Octopus have 3 hearts. -----------------------1. Penguins can convert salt water into fresh water. 2. Venus is the only planet that rotates clockwise. 3. Snakes are immune(protected) to their own poison. 4. If a statue of a person in the park on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle.

5. Monumental Axis in Brazil is the world's widest road. 160 cars can drive side by side at the same time. 6. A female mackerel fish (Kanagnkelluthi in Tamil) lays about 1,000,000 eggs at a time. -----------------------1. Avocados (Vennai-Pazham) have more protein than any other fruit. (For picture: http://images.google.gr/images?hl=el&q=Avocados&oe=UTF-8&um=1&ie=UTF8&sa=N&tab=wi) 2. Bats always turn left when exiting a cave. 3. The Central Railway in Peru is the world's highest railway. It climbs to 15,694 feet in the Galera Tunnel. 4. There are only 3 sets of letters on a keyboard which are in alphabetical order (f g h, j k l, and o p). 5. Chewing gum while peeling onions will reduce your tears. 6. Read this now: Abraham Lincoln was elected to Congress in 1846. John F. Kennedy was elected to Congress in 1946. Abraham Lincoln was elected President in 1860. John F. Kennedy was elected President in 1960. The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters. Both wives lost their children while living in the White House. Both Presidents were shot on a Friday. Both Presidents were shot in the head. Lincoln's secretary was named Kennedy. Kennedy's secretary was named Lincoln. Both were assassinated by Southerners. Both were succeeded by Southerners. John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated Lincoln, was born! in 1839. I was corrected on this and he was born on 1838 Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, was born in 1939. Both assassins were known by their three names. Kennedy was shot in a car called 'Lincoln.' Booth ran from the theater and was caught in a warehouse.

Oswald ran from a warehouse and was caught in a theater. Booth and Oswald were assassinated before their trials. And here's the kicker... A week before Lincoln was shot, he was in Monroe, Maryland. A week before Kennedy was shot, he was with Marilyn Monroe. 1. The eyes of Chameleon (Pachoanthi in Tamil) can move independently. It can see in two different directions at the same time. 2. The human brain is 80% water. 3. It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open. 4. The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets. 5. The term Cop comes from Constable on Patrol, which is a term used in England. 6. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades -- King David, Clubs -- Alexander the Great, Hearts -- Charlemagne Diamonds -- Julius Caesar. --------------------------------------------------------------1. Ants never sleep. 2. Ten tons of space dust falls on the Earth every day. 3. The snake can see through its eye lids when its eyes are closed. 4. 'Orology' is the study of mountains. 5. Spots on Dice are called as 'Pip'. 6. 'Acrophobia' is the fear of heights. --------------------------------------------------------------1. No piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half. 2. There is a city called Rome on every continent. 3. The sun is 330,330 times larger than the earth! 4. Gasohol is a fuel made from sugar cane. (Vastly used in Brazil)

5. When you sneeze air rushes out your nose at a rate of 100 miles per hour. 6. The bulls-eye on a dartboard must be 5 feet 8 inches off the ground. --------------------------------------------------------------1. The first domain name ever registered was Symbolics.com. 2. New born babies have 350 bones (by age 5 the amount of bones merges to 206). 3. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows. It was the fashion in Renaissance Florence. 4. Butterflies smell with their feet. 5. Paraguay and Moldova are the only countries with national flags with different emblems on the obverse and reverse sides. 6. Infants(New Born Baby) spend more time dreaming the Earth. 1. The light bulb was invented in 1879 by Thomas Alva Edison. 2. The male mosquitoes are vegetarians and live on eating the lives of the plants and the trees. 3. Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil. 4. California condors can fly 10 miles without flapping their wings. 5. Eating a packet of crisps a day is equivalent to drinking five liters of cooking oil a year. 6. Most of the birds heart beats 400 times per minute while they are at rest. When they are flying however, their heart could beat up to 1000 beats per minute. ============================ 1. The thermometer was invented in 1607 by Galileo. 2. Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing. 3. The flea can jump 350 times its body length. Its like a human jumping the length of a football field. 4. One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second. 5. Blood flows down one leg and up the other. 6. Most lipstick contains fish scales!

============================ 1. A newborn kangaroo is about 1 inch in length. 2. Strawberry is the only fruit with its seeds on the outside. 3. The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat," which means "the king (shah) is dead (mat)." 4. Camel's milk, which is widely drunk in Arab countries, has 10 times more iron than cow's milk. 5. The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F is "feedback." 6. 18% of all global carbon dioxide emissions are from Cars. ============================ 1. A baby bat is called a pup. 2. The first zoo in the USA was in Philadelphia. 3. Bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers are invented by women. 4. Coca-Cola was originally green because of fresh cocoa leaves. 5. The youngest Pope was 11 years old. (Pope Benedict IX). 6. Titanic was running at 22 knots (4o kms/hour) when she hit the iceberg. ------------------------------------------------------------------------1. Ostriches can live up to 75 years old and can outrun a horse. 2. The ball on top of a flag pole is called the 'Truck'. 3. There is no sound in space. 4. VHS stands for Video Home System. 5. The smallest dog is the Chihuahua breed. 6. The first taxi service began in New York in 1907.

1. Frogs can't swallow with their eyes open. 2. A 'Jiffy' is actually 1/100th of a second.

3. Hummingbirds are the only bird that can fly backwards. 4. The official Sanskrit name for 'India' is 'Bharat'. 5. Sanskrit is the mother of all the European languages. 6. There are around 3.22 millions of Indians in USA. ============================ 1. Washington, D.C. has one lawyer for every 19 residents! 2. Windows Nashville (windows 96), Cairo (1997 - 1998), Windows Neptune (1999) are some of the cancelled / unreleased versions of Windows O/S. 3. Windows has been around for 25 years now, Windows 1.0 hit the shelves in November of 1985. 4. A duck can't walk without bobbing its head. 5. Dragonflies have 6 legs but can't walk. 6. The word laser stands for 'Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation'. ============================

1. When Elizabeth-I of Russia died in 1762, there were 15,000 dresses in her closets. 2. During World War II, the Japanese used shark liver oil in the engines of their fighter planes. 3. Pumice is the only rock that floats in water. 4. The word "set" has more definitions than any other word in the English language. 5. DNA stands for DeoxyriboNucleic Acid. 6. The average computer user blinks 7 times a minute (Bad exercise), less than half the normal rate of 20. ============================ 1. The word typewriter is the longest word that can be typed using only the top row of a keyboard. 2. The longest possible eclipse of the sun is 7.31 minutes.

3. The Olympic flag was designed in 1913. 4. The average hen lays 228 eggs a year. 5. The first English dictionary named "A Dictionary of the English Language", sometimes published as 'Johnson's Dictionary' was written in 1755 by Samuel Johnson. 6. The average Porcupine (Mullampandri in tamil) has 30,000 spikes. 1. Rubber bands last longer when kept refrigerated. 2. Porsche also builds tractors. 3. The lifespan of a squirrel is 9 years. 4. Emus can't walk backwards. 5. African elephants only have 4 teeth. 6. Hot water freezes quicker than cold water. ============================ 1. No two spider webs are the same. 2. The study of insects is called entomology. 3. Once a women reachs the age of 30 they lose 1% of their bone mass every year thereafter (by the time a women is 50 she will have lost 20%) 4. The center of the Sun is approximately 15 million C. 5. The human eye can detect more shades of green that any other colour. 6. In Germany, an official approval is needed before a new born is named. ============================ 1. A group of whales is called a pod. 2. A soap bubble is 10,000 times thinner than the average human hair 3. 'Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia' is the fear of long words. 4. 56% of typing is completed by your left hand. 5. Human head contains 22 bones.

6. Sharks are immune to all known diseases. ============================ 1. E is the most frequently used letter in English. 2. The first metered taxi was introduced in 1907. 3. A Sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure. 4. The drinking straw was invented in 1886. 5. Most birds eat twice their body weight each day. 6. A blue whale can go up to 6 months without eating.-----2. There are over 10 trillion living cells in the human body. 3. It takes a plastic container over 50,000 years to start decomposing. 4. A group of foxes is called a skulk. 5. A male baboon can kill a leopard. 6. Hindustan Unilever Ltd has a distribution channel of 6.3 million outlets and owns 35 major Indian brands. ============================ 1. Dutch, on average are the tallest people. 2. The Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt holds a constant temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit. 3. The winter of 1932 was so cold that Niagara Falls froze over completely. 4. You will weigh less if you weigh yourself when the moon is full. 5. Some dinosaurs had tails over 13m (45 feet) long. 6. Eiffel Tower is repainted every 7 years. ============================ 1. Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu (Mother Teresas real name) was born on August 26, 1910 in Skopje, Macedonia. 2. Bees and house flies flap their wings atleast 200 times a second.

3. Coca Cola was founded by Joseph A Biedenharn. 4. Hippopotamuses have skin 3.8cm (1.5in) thick. 5. Cabbage is 91% water. 6. Sachin Tendulkar, wanted to be a fast bowler but focused on batting at the recommendation of Australian fast bowler Dennis Lillee. ============================ 1. India has the largest number of Post Offices in the world. 2. There are 300,000 active mosques in India, more than in any other country. 3. Albert Einstein (About India) said: "We owe a lot to the Indians, who taught us how to count, without which no worthwhile scientific discovery could have been made. " 4. 'Vinod Dahm' from Punjab created the Pentium chip and he was called as"Father of Pentium". 5. 'Sabeer Bhatia' from Punjab was the "Founder of Hotmail" 6. Most of the Vitamin C found in fruits is in the skin. 3. The worlds smallest bird is the 'bee hummingbird' found in Cuba. 5. Tokyo was once known as Edo. 6. The human body contains 96,000km(59,650miles) of blood vessels. ============================ 1. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi'ji born on 2nd october 1869. 2. Only four test series have ended 0-0 with all five matches being drawn. India was involved in three of them, including two in a row against Pakistan. 3. The Arctic Ocean is the smallest in the world. 4. Kite flying is a professional sport in Thailand. 5. The right lung takes in more air than the left. 6. The word 'News' is actually an acronym standing for the 4 cardinal compass points - North, East, West, and South! ============================

1. Our normal body temperature is 37C (99F). 2. Sir Isaac Newton was 23 when he discovered the law of gravity. 3. Google's name is a play on the word googol, which refers to the number 1 followed by one hundred zeroes. 4. Open Microsoft Word and type =rand (200, 99) and then press ENTER 5. Elephants are the only animals that cant jump. 6. The Japanese call their country as 'Nippon'. ============================ 1. The skeleton of a spider is located on the outside of the body. The name for this is exoskelton. 2. Walt Disney had originally suggested using the name Mortimer Mouse instead of Mickey Mouse. 3. The smallest man ever was Gul Mohammed (1957-1997) of India, who measured 1 feet, 10? inches. 4. In Belgium, there is a museum just for strawberries. 5. Actress Meryl Streep holds the record for the most Oscar nominated actress, with a record of 13 nominations. 6. Seagate introduced the first hdd for pcs in 1979.It held 5 M.B of data. 2. In total, our Indian hockey team has won eight Olympics gold medals. (1928 to 1956 - remained unbeaten in the Olympics) 3. A mole can dig a 300 feet long tunnel in just one night! 4. The coloured part of your eye is called the iris. 5. Hiroshima bombed by "Col. Paul Tibbets" on August 6, 1945, at 8:15 A.M. local time. 6. The US flag has 13 stripes (Red & White) representing the original 13 states. ============================ 1. Hummingbirds can't walk. 2. The average soccer ball is made up of 32 leather panels and held together by 642 stitches.

3. A Chameleons tongue is twice the length of its body. 4. Coffee is the largest item bought and sold next to Petrol. 5. Japan surrendered to USA on September 2 1945. (After Hiroshima & Nagasaki atomic bomb blasts) 6. Rajiv Gandhi was born on August 20 1944. ============================ 1. Unless food is mixed with saliva you can't taste it. 2. Real name of Sonia Gandhi is 'Edvige Antonia Albina Maino'. 3. Sachin Tendulkar is the first batsman declared run out by a third umpire decision in the history of cricket. 4. Indian national football team qualified for the 1950 World Cup finals in Brazil, but could not appear as they still played bare feet at the time. 5. Douglas Engelbart (invented computer mouse) was awarded the 1997 Lemelson-MIT Prize of $500,000, the world's largest single prize for invention and innovation. 6. World's most expensive budget film: "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End" - Released: 5/25/2007 Distributor: Buena Vista Budget: $300,000,000 Profit (US alone): $309,420,425 Profit (Worldwide): $960,996,492 ============================ 1. The first bowler to take 10 wickets in a Test innings was Jim Laker in 1956. 2. World War II was lasting from 1939 to 1945. 3. A humming bird flaps its wings up to 90 times a second (5,400 times a minute) 4. By the age of 17, Bill Gates had sold his first computer program, a time-tabling system for his high school, for $4,200. 5. Orkut Buyukkokten (a Turkish software engineer) is the creator of Orkut. 6. Google.com - After entering search keyword, On clicking 'I'm feeling lucky' button, it will open the first result's website directly.

1. Hilton was the first international hotel chain. 2. Cats sleep 16 to 18 hours per day. 3. Karoke means "empty orchestra" in Japanese. 4. It took Leo Tolstoy six years to write "War & Peace". 5. About 20% of all volcanoes are under water. 6. When "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" was released in Great Britain, the publisher asked stores not to sell the book until schools were closed for the day to prevent truancy. ============================ 1. Roughly 70 percent of an adults body is made up of water. 2. Viswanathan Anand won "Chess Oscar" award 5 times. (1997, 1998, 2003, 2004, 2007) 3. Kumar Ram Narain Karthikeyan was born on Jan 14, 1977. 4. Sir Isaac Newton became the Member of Parliament in the year 1689 and continued till the next year. 5. King Fahd International Airport in Damman, Saudi Arabia is one of the world's biggest airport with 780 square kilometres (larger than the nearby country of Bahrain). 6. The lion that roars in the MGM logo is named Volney. ============================ 1. The dial tone of a normal telephone is in the key of "F". 2. February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon. 3. The Koala bear is not really a bear, but is really related to the kangaroo and the wombat. 4. Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking countries. Colgate translates into the command "go hang yourself." 5. Some octopuses have been known to eat their arms off when they are exposed to stressful situations. 6. The word "diamond" comes from the Greek word "adamas," which means "unconquerable." ============================ 1. Earth's Circumference between the North and South Poles: 24,859.82 miles (40,008 km)

2. Tallest Mountain on Earth from Base to Peak - Mauna Kea, Hawaii: 33,480 feet (rising to 13,796 feet above sea level) 3. Highest Temperature Recorded: 135.8F - Al Aziziyah, Libya, September 13, 1922 (57.7C) 4. A single 'RYE' plant can spread up to 400 miles of roots underground. 5. Word "Science" derives from Latin word scientia meaning knowledge. 6. Surprisingly an average little mosquito has 47 teeth.

Bermuda Triangle Mystery Solved

Johnny Cat Sunday, August 8, 2010 at 10:28 AM 4

Computer studies of ocean floors around the world, particularly the area known as The Bermuda Triangle, reveal evidence of massive methane explosions in the past. For years, believers in the paranormal, aliens, and other outlandish theories pointed to the the disappearance of ships and aircraft as an indicator of mysterious forces at work in the "Devil's triangle." Scientists have finally pointed the rest of us to a more plausible cause. The presence of methane hydrates indicates enormous eruptions of methane bubbles that would swamp a ship, and projected high into the air- take out flying airplanes, as well.

Any ships caught within the methane mega-bubble immediately lose all buoyancy and sink to the bottom of the ocean. If the bubbles are big enough and possess a high enough density they can also knock aircraft out of the sky with little or no warning. Aircraft falling victim to these methane bubbles will lose their engines-perhaps igniting the methane surrounding them-and immediately lose their lift as well, ending their flights by diving into the ocean and swiftly plummeting

Facts 1 5

1. There are 62,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body laid end to end they would circle the earth 2.5 times 2. At over 2000 kilometers long, The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth 3. The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years 4. A thimbleful of a neutron star would weigh over 100 million tons 5. A typical hurricane produces the energy equivalent of 8,000 one megaton bombs Facts 6 10

6. Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide 7. The highest speed ever achieved on a bicycle is 166.94 mph, by Fred Rompelberg 8. We can produce laser light a million times brighter than sunshine 9. 65% of those with autism are left handed 10. The combined length of the roots of a Finnish pine tree is over 30 miles

Facts 11 15

11. The oceans contain enough salt to cover all the continents to a depth of nearly 500 feet 12. The interstellar gas cloud Sagittarius B contains a billion, billion, billion liters of alcohol [JFrater is planning to move there in the near future] 13. Polar Bears can run at 25 miles an hour and jump over 6 feet in the air 14. 60-65 million years ago dolphins and humans shared a common ancestor 15. Polar Bears are nearly undetectable by infrared cameras, due to their transparent fur Facts 16 20

16. The average person accidentally eats 430 bugs each year of their life 17. A single rye plant can spread up to 400 miles of roots underground 18. The temperature on the surface of Mercury exceeds 430 degrees C during the day, and, at night, plummets to minus 180 degrees centigrade 19. The evaporation from a large oak or beech tree is from ten to twenty-five gallons in twentyfour hours 20. Butterflies taste with their hind feet, and their taste sensation works on touch this allows them to determine whether a leaf is edible

Scientists solve the mystery behind the flight of the bumblebee

Scientists have solved the mystery of the flight of the bumblebee' by attaching tiny little antennae to the insects and tracking them as they visit thousands of flowers each day.

Despite having brains the size of grass seeds, bumblebees are able to calculate the most efficient route from flowers back to the nest.

Bumblebees will buzz around flowers throughout the day in a seemingly random manner. But a study by British universities have discovered that in fact bees are constantly working out the quickest route to collect the most amount of food. Despite having brains the size of grass seeds, bumblebees are able to calculate the most efficient route from flowers back to the nest. The team from Queen Marys University and Royal Holloway University in London in London attached tiny antennae to tens of bees that pinged back the location of the insects as they foraged for pollen and nectar. The results showed that the bees would try a number of different routes to a flower and between plants in order to work out the quickest way to and from a food source. Within hours or even minutes, the apparently random 'flight of the bumblebee' is an efficient and learned route.

The study, published in PLOS Biology, could help farmers work out the best way to grow crops so bees can pollinate them more easily. It could also help computer programmes to develop more efficient travel routes for humans. Dr Nigel Raine, one of the authors of the study from RHU, said bees are performing quite a complicated 'computational task' for such as small creature with a tiny brain. Without the benefit of sat nav or GPS they can work out quickest way to do their job, he said. Meanwhile, new research in the journal Science claimed pesticides are not as bad for bees as previously claimed.
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. Worm Clones

Many people believe that if you cut a worm in two, it will continue to live as two worms. In fact, a worm can survive being cut in half, but only one half can survive the operation; the other half dies. 3. Lemming Suicide

There is a widespread myth that lemmings throw themselves off cliffs in order to commit suicide in a bizarre natural method of keeping the populace under control. This is entirely untrue. The myth came about because of the Disney film White Wilderness, in which lemmings were filmed throwing themselves off cliffs. What really happened is the film crew used brooms to push the lemmings off the cliff. 2. Memory of a Goldfish

Goldfish are often thought of as having very short memories usually up to a few seconds at the most. In fact, goldfish have been trained to navigate mazes, and after a few months it can recognize its owner. 1. Hair and Fingernails

Contrary to popular belief, hair and fingernails do not continue to grow after a person dies. The most likely cause of this myth is shrinkage in the skin after death which gives the false appearance of growth of the nails.

20 Differences That Confuse Us All

by Jamie Frater | October 26, 2012

English can be a very confusing language with similar terms for different things and different terms for similar things. Add to that the inclusion of foreign terms for almost all things (Romance language versus Germanic language) and it makes perfect sense that it is one of the most difficult languages for foreigners to master. Below I have selected 20 things that have vastly different names for things we consider the same but as you will see, in most cases they are completely different. Add your own favorites to the comments.
1 Differences 1 5

1. Lobster Crayfish: Lobsters come from the sea; crayfish come from freshwater. Crayfish (also known as crawfish) also tend to be smaller. Further confusion over these animals exists in some countries like Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa where the term crayfish is often used when referring to lobster. 2. Broth Soup Stock: While these terms are often used interchangeably, they do all have a difference. Stock is water (and optionally other liquids) in which vegetables or animals or both are simmered over a long period to extract flavors. Stock normally contains no salt. When you add salt to the stock to make it tasty it becomes a broth. Broth is a type of soup soup is a liquid savory food which can be thin (broth) or thick. Stock is not soup as it is not meant to be eaten until it is combined with seasonings. 3. Ghost Ghoul: A ghost is the departed soul of a dead human. A ghoul is an immaterial being who never lived as a human. Ghouls come from Arabic legends in which they are creatures that eat stolen corpses and children. 4. Shrimp Prawn: Most people consider shrimps to be small and prawns to be large. But in fact you can get large shrimps and small prawns too. They are from the same order (Decapoda) but different suborders prawns are Dendrobranchiata and shrimps are Pleocyemata. The way to tell whether you are eating a prawn or a shrimp you need to look beneath the tail. On a shrimp the second plate overlaps the first and third plates on a prawn only the second plate overlaps the third.

5. Boat Ship: Basically ships are bigger. Boats weight less than 500 tons while ships weigh more than 500 tons. A ship can carry boats (such as lifeboats) and ships always require a license from an authority to sail. Some boats need a license but most dont (fishing boats, for example). It should be noted that the definition does vary from region to region.
2 Differences 6 10

6. Crocodile Alligator: Both crocodiles and alligators are from the Crocodilia family and both thrive in freshwater. But there the difference ends. Alligators are black and crocodiles are olive brown. Alligators have u-shaped snouts to make it easier to crush their prey while crocodiles have a v-shaped snout to make it easier to catch fish. 7. Dracula Vampire: Dracula is a vampire a creature that exists by drinking human blood. Vampires have existed as part of human society for millennia whereas Dracula is the embodiment of Prince Vlad Tepes the impaler from Romania. The term Dracula comes from Vlads patronymic name Dracula his full title was Vlad III Dracula, Prince of Wallachia and he was born in 1431 dying in 1476. 8. Coke Pepsi: Pepsi cola originally known as Brads Drink was invented in North Carolina in 1893. Its new name comes from the enzyme pepsin which is found in it. The main

differences are that pepsi is sweeter, has a stronger cola flavor but otherwise their ingredients are essentially the same. Coke is fruitier and fizzier. 9. Great Britain United Kingdom: Great Britain is the geographical area comprising England, Scotland, and Wales (Britain on its own a term seldom used refers to the political entity of England and Wales only). The United Kingdom is what you get when you combine Great Britain with Northern Ireland. 10. Speed Velocity: To put is in its most basic sense: speed is distance / time; velocity is displacement / time in other words velocity also takes into consideration the direction of the object being measured.

3 Differences 11 15

11. Mass Weight: Mass tells us how much matter an object contains. Weight tells us the pull of gravity on an object. Mass remains the same wherever you weigh it the Moon, Earth, Jupiter. The weight changes at least location because there is a different amount of gravity pull on the object. 12. Sex Gender: Sex is determined by anatomy but gender is determined by sexual identity it is those characteristics by which we tell the sexes apart (not including genitals) this is a

socially constructed concept. So next time you see a toilet with Males or Females on the door beware those toilets have sex organs! 13. Affect Effect: Affect is a verb (unless you are a psychologist in which case it refers to feelings and desires) and effect is a noun. You affect an effect. When you affect something, it creates an effect. John built (affect verb) a house (effect noun). 14. Weather Climate: Weather is here today and gone tomorrow it is the day to day situation of the atmosphere in a particular place or time. For example: the weather today is humid and warm. Climate, on the other hand, is the pattern of weather that a particular region experiences over a long period of time. For example the summer climate refers to the weather through the whole three month summer period. 15. HIV AIDS: HIV is a virus that weakens the human immune system over time. With proper treatment it can remain stable for many years without worsening. If, however, it is untreated, it can develop to a highly advanced level in which case it is called AIDS. AIDS is a syndrome because virtually any disease or infection can cause fatal harm to a person because they are no longer able to fight off the illness.
4 Differences 16 20

16. College University: In the US a college and university are essentially the same thing they are interchangeable terms they are both institutions which give degrees. In commonwealth nations the terms are more confused. A college can be a school affiliated with a university the

college prepares the student for the degree and the university with which it is affiliated gives the degree. But some colleges in the UK are really secondary schools (such as a high school in the UK) one famous example is Eton College. And then in Australia and New Zealand, college means high school. 17. Hurricane Cyclone: All hurricanes are cyclones but only cyclones over 74mph are hurricanes. In addition to that a cyclone hits in the Indian Ocean or Southwestern Pacific Ocean. A hurricane hits in the Atlantic Ocean and the Eastern Pacific. 18. Butterfly Moth: Butterflies are seen in the day whilst moths are seen at night. Butterfly antennas are knobbed, long, and thin but moth antennas are short and hairy. When sleeping a butterfly closes its wings but a moth doesnt. 19. Pill Tablet: All pills are tablets but not all tablets are pills. Properly speaking a pill is round shaped and a tablet is anything else. 20. Race Ethnicity: Race is the major physical divisions between humans which have unique characteristics. Ethnicity is the cultural tradition. You cant say your ethnicity is black that is an aspect of your race. Ethnicity contains the customs and traditions from a region. Race cannot be changed ethnicity can through learning new customs and replacing old.

Our bodies are amazing things. Although this site has listed some fascinating facts about our bodies before, one list just doesnt cover it all. Im not sure a hundred lists would do it. So, here are another 10 interesting facts about your body. Enjoy! 10 Swallow and Breathe

Fact: Humans are the only mammal that cant swallow and breathe at the same time. Every other mammal, and many other non-mammalian animals, can breathe while they eat. In fact, human infants are also able to do so, which lets them breathe while they nurse. We lose this ability around the age of 9 months, when our voice box drops as part of our development. As children and adults, the human voice box lays unusually low in the neck compared to other animals. This allows sound to resonate much more, which is why we are able to produce the wide range of sounds that makes up our speech. 9 Second Brain

Fact: You have a second brain in your gut. Well, sort of. You have around 100 million neurons, more than are in your spinal cord, that line your gut from your esophagus to your anus. This is known to scientists as the enteric nervous system. This second brain is incapable of conscious thought and is largely responsible for digestion, but it does more than that. If youve ever felt butterflies in your stomach or felt as if youve been punched in the gut when receiving bad news, that was caused by your enteric nervous system. This also plays a roll in your overall mood, why certain foods can alter your mood and why bad situations or feelings often cause you to lose your appetite. 8 Loneliness

Fact: Loneliness is physically painful. Ok, you probably knew that. But do you know why? Researchers at the University of California asked volunteers to play a computer game that simulated a simple game of catch with two other players. What they didnt know was that the other players were just the computer and it was designed to leave them out after a few minutes of play, resulting in feelings of loneliness and rejection. They found that the feeling of loneliness is actually processed in the same part of your brain as physical pain, called the anterior cingulate cortex. This explains the human desire to fit in, to seek out companionship and helps to understand the power of peer pressure. Scientists are also hoping to use this information to help explain and treat some forms of depression. 7 Saliva

Fact: You salivate more before you vomit. This is an automatic bodily reflex designed to protect your throat, mouth and teeth. Stomach acid is, of course, highly acidic and if it werent for the lining in your stomach it would eat a hole right through it. Unfortunately, you dont have that same lining in your throat or mouth. Salivating before vomiting helps to dilute and rinse away the acid so it wont harm the rest of your body. Your saliva can also help to neutralize the acid somewhat. This is also why its a good idea to rinse out your mouth and brush your teeth after you vomit. 6 Bitter Sweet

Fact: Cut yourself? Put sugar on it! Healers in Africa have been putting crushed sugar cane on wounds for generations. Moses Murandu is a nurse who grew up watching his father use the remedy in Africa and was surprised to find that doctors in England didnt use it. He started a study to research the idea, testing it on patients with bed sores, leg ulcers and amputations before dressing the wounds. They found that the sugar can reduce pain and kill bacteria that slow healing. Sugar is hygroscopic, meaning it naturally absorbs water which the bacteria need to survive. Sugar is also much cheaper than more modern antibiotics. So the next time you cut yourself, give it a sprinkle of sugar before putting on a band-aid!

5 Forgetful

Fact: Forget why you walked into a room? There is a reason. Have you ever walked into a room and forgot why you were there? And after that, have you ever noticed that you can sometimes remember if you go back through the doorway? There is actually a reason for that. Researchers in Notre Dame conducted several experiments on rooms and their effect on memory. Subjects in the study were divided into two groups and given a simple task while traveling the same distance. The only difference is one group went through a doorway and the other didnt. They found that people who traveled through the doorway were three times more likely to forget their task. Researchers concluded that our mind perceives doorways as event boundaries and that decisions you made in that room are stored there when you leave. That is also why you can remember if you go back into that room. 4 Color Vision

Fact: Some woman actually see more colors. Frustrated because you told your hubby to bring your peach shirt and he grabbed a pink one? It might not be his fault. A study from the University of California shows that up to 50% of women carry four types of color receptors, or iodopsins, rather than the usual three. Normal visioned people will look at a rainbow and see seven different colors, while one with four receptors will see around 10 colors. The reason this happens in woman is that the red and green receptors are located on the X chromosome, while the blue is on the Y. The red and green receptors can be slightly shifted allowing for a greater range of color vision. There are also a small number of women who will have both kinds of red and green, resulting in 5 color receptors. This is also why color blindness is much more common in men than women. 3 Boogers

Fact: Eating your boogers may been good for you! Your nasal mucus (booger) is designed to filter out airborne contaminants and so eating it has long thought to be bad for you, but recent study shows that it may actually help to boast your immune system by introducing those contaminants in small amounts, training your body to recognize and fight against them. But dont worry, you dont have to start picking your nose. You have most likely already eaten your boogers, even if you are unaware of it. Mucus accumulated in your nasal passages is often directed backwards and down your throat by the motion of your cilia (hair like structures on your cells used to move things). Yum 2 Redundant Nostril

Fact: You probably only breath through one nostril at a time. This happens in about 85% of people. The truly interesting thing about that is in those people the body with automatically switch between nostrils every four hours or so, although it can vary based on body position, illness or just from person to person. This is accomplished through erectile tissue in your nose similar to that in a penis or clitoris. The erectile tissue will slowly swell up in one nostril, eventually blocking most of it while the tissue in the other one will shrink, allowing for more air flow. It has been found that which side you are breathing from can have an effect on your body. If you are breathing from the right side, for example, your blood glucose levels will rise and you will use much more oxygen. Also, breathing through the right will cause higher activity in the left side of your brain and vise versa. This could be useful in stimulating your right (creative) side or your left (logical) side as needed. 1 Blood Vessels

Fact: Every pound of fat gained causes your body to make 7 new miles of blood vessels. Knowing this, its easy to see why obesity and heart disease often go together. Most of the new blood vessels are tiny capillaries, but also include small veins and arteries. This means if you are only 10 pounds overweight your heart has to pump blood through an extra 70 miles of blood vessels. The good news is that this also works in reverse. If you lose a pound of fat, your body will break down and reabsorb the no longer needed blood vessels. This is encouraging to dieters, as one pound does not seem like a lot to lose, but even that little bit of difference will result in a large benefit for your heart!

Ten Most Disturbing Scientific Discoveries

Scientists have come to some surprising conclusions about the world and our place in it. Are some things just better left unknown?
Science can be glorious; it can bring clarity to a chaotic world. But big scientific discoveries are by nature counterintuitive and sometimes shocking. Here are ten of the biggest threats to our peace of mind.

1. The Earth is not the center of the universe.

Weve had more than 400 years to get used to the idea, but its still a little unsettling. Anyone can plainly see that the Sun and stars rise in the east, sweep across the sky and set in the west; the Earth feels stable and stationary. When Copernicus proposed that the Earth and other planets instead orbit the Sun, his contemporaries found his massive logical leap patently absurd, says Owen Gingerich of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. It would take several generations to sink in. Very few scholars saw it as a real description of the universe. Galileo got more grief for the idea than Copernicus did.

He used a telescope to provide evidence for the heliocentric theory, and some of his contemporaries were so disturbed by what the new invention revealedcraters on a supposedly perfectly spherical moon, other moons circling Jupiterthat they refused to look through the device. More dangerous than defying common sense, though, was Galileos defiance of the Catholic Church. Scripture said that the Sun revolved around the Earth, and the Holy Office of the Inquisition found Galileo guilty of heresy for saying otherwise.

2. The microbes are gaining on us.

Antibiotics and vaccines have saved millions of lives; without these wonders of modern medicine, many of us would have died in childhood of polio, mumps or smallpox. But some microbes are evolving faster than we can find ways to fight them.

Electronmicrograph of influenza virus particles. (Courtesy of Linda M. Stannard, University of Cape Town) The influenza virus mutates so quickly that last years vaccination is usually ineffective against this years bug. Hospitals are infested with antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus bacteria that can turn a small cut into a limb- or life-threatening infection. And new diseases keep jumping from animals to humansebola from apes, SARS from masked palm civets, hantavirus from rodents, bird flu from birds, swine flu from swine. Even tuberculosis, the disease that killed Frederic Chopin and Henry David Thoreau, is making a comeback, in part because some strains of the bacterium have developed multi-drug resistance. Even in the 21st century, its quite possible to die of consumption.

3. There have been mass extinctions in the past, and were probably in one now.
Paleontologists have identified five points in Earths history when, for whatever reason (asteroid impact, volcanic eruptions and atmospheric changes are the main suspects), mass extinctions eliminated many or most species. The concept of extinction took a while to sink in. Thomas Jefferson saw mastodon bones from Kentucky, for example, and concluded that the giant animals must still be living somewhere in the interior of the continent. He asked Lewis and Clark to keep an eye out for them.

Artwork copyright by Peter Arnold, Inc./Alamy Today, according to many biologists, were in the midst of a sixth great extinction. Mastodons may have been some of the earliest victims. As humans moved from continent to continent, large animals that had thrived for millions of years began to disappearmastodons in North America, giant kangaroos in Australia, dwarf elephants in Europe. Whatever the cause of this early wave of extinctions, humans are driving modern extinctions by hunting, destroying habitat, introducing invasive species and inadvertently spreading diseases.

4. Things that taste good are bad for you.

In 1948, the Framingham Heart Study enrolled more than 5,000 residents of Framingham, Massachusetts, to participate in a long-term study of risk factors for heart disease. (Very long termthe study is now enrolling the grandchildren of the original volunteers.) It and subsequent ambitious and painstaking epidemiological studies have shown that ones risk of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, certain kinds of cancer and other health problems increases in a dose-dependent manner upon exposure to delicious food.

Subject related Article: The Sugar Conspiracy Steak, salty French fries, eggs Benedict, triple-fudge brownies with whipped creamturns out theyre killers. Sure, some tasty things are healthyblueberries, snow peas, nuts and maybe even (oh, please) red wine. But on balance, human taste preferences evolved during times of scarcity, when it made sense for our hunter-gatherer ancestors to gorge on as much salt and fat and sugar as possible. In the age of Hostess pies and sedentary lifestyles, those cravings arent so adaptive.

5. E=mc
Einsteins famous equation is certainly one of the most brilliant and beautiful scientific discoveriesbut its also one of the most disturbing. The power explained by the equation really rests in the c, or the speed of light (186,282 miles per second) times itself, which equals 34,700,983,524. When thats your multiplier, you dont need much massa smidgen of plutonium is plentyto create enough energy to destroy a city.

6. Your mind is not your own.

Freud might have been wrong in the details, but one of his main ideasthat a lot of our behaviors and beliefs and emotions are driven by factors we are unaware of turns out to be correct. If youre in a happy, optimistic, ambitious mood, check the weather. Sunny days make people happier and more helpful. In a taste test, youre likely to have a strong preference for the first sample you tasteeven if all of the samples are identical. The more often you see a person or an object, the more youll like it. Mating decisions are based partly on smell. Our cognitive failings are legion: we take a few anecdotes and make incorrect generalizations, we misinterpret information to support our preconceptions, and were easily distracted or swayed by irrelevant details.

And what we think of as memories are merely stories we tell ourselves anew each time we recall an event. Thats true even for flashbulb memories, the ones that feel as though theyve been burned into the brain: Like millions of people, [neuroscientist Karim] Nader has vivid and emotional memories of the September 11, 2001, attacks and their aftermath. But as an expert on memory, and, in particular, on the malleability of memory, he knows better than to fully trust his recollections As clear and detailed as these memories feel, psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate.

7. Were all apes.

Its kind of deflating, isnt it? Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection can be inspiring: perhaps youre awed by the vastness of geologic time or marvel at the variety of Earths creatures. The ability to appreciate and understand nature is just the sort of thing that is supposed to make us special, but instead it allowed us to realize that were merely a recent variation on the primate body plan. We may have a greater capacity for abstract thought than chimps do, but were weaker than gorillas, less agile in the treetops than orangutans and more ill-tempered than bonobos.

Image Source >>

Charles Darwin started life as a creationist and only gradually came to realize the significance of the variation he observed in his travels aboard the Beagle. For the past 151 years, since On the Origin of Species was published, people have been arguing over evolution. Our ape ancestry conflicts with every cultures creation myth and isnt particularly intuitive, but everything weve learned since thenin biology, geology, genetics, paleontology, even chemistry and physicssupports his great insight.

8. Cultures throughout history and around the world have engaged in ritual human sacrifice.
Say youre about to die and are packing some supplies for the afterlife. What to take? A couple of coins for the ferryman? Some flowers, maybe, or mementos of your loved ones? If you were an ancient Egyptian pharaoh, youd have your servants slaughtered and buried adjacent to your tomb. Concubines were sacrificed in China to be eternal companions; certain Indian sects required human sacrifices. The Aztecs slaughtered tens of thousands of people to inaugurate the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan; after sacred Mayan ballgames, the losing team was sometimes sacrificed.

Its hard to tell fact from fiction when it comes to this particularly gruesome custom. Ritual sacrifice is described in the Bible, Greek mythology and the Norse sagas, and the Romans accused many of the people they conquered of engaging in

ritual sacrifice, but the evidence was thin. A recent accumulation of archaeological findings from around the world shows that it was surprisingly common for people to ritually killand sometimes eatother people.

9. Weve already changed the climate for the rest of this century.
The mechanics of climate change arent that complex: we burn fossil fuels; a byproduct of that burning is carbon dioxide; it enters the atmosphere and traps heat, warming the surface of the planet. The consequences are already apparent: glaciers are melting faster than ever, flowers are blooming earlier (just ask Henry David Thoreau), and plants and animals are moving to more extreme latitudes and altitudes to keep cool. Even more disturbing is the fact that carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. We have just begun to see the effects of human-induced climate change, and the predictions for whats to come range from dire to catastrophic.

Global Warming It exists, but not due to greenhouse gases.

10. The universe is made of stuff we can barely begin to imagine.

Everything you probably think of when you think of the universeplanets, stars, galaxies, black holes, dustmakes up just 4 percent of whatever is out there. The rest comes in two flavors of dark, or unknown stuff: dark matter, at 23 percent of the universe, and dark energy, at a whopping 73 percent: Scientists have some ideas about what dark matter might beexotic and still hypothetical particlesbut they have hardly a clue about dark energy. University of Chicago cosmologist Michael S. Turner ranks dark energy as the most profound mystery in all of science.

Dark Matter Visualization. Image Source >> The effort to solve it has mobilized a generation of astronomers in a rethinking of physics and cosmology to rival and perhaps surpass the revolution Galileo inaugurated on an autumn evening in Padua. [Dark energy] has inspired us to ask, as if for the first time: What is this cosmos we call home? But astronomers do know that, thanks to these dark parts, the universe is expanding. And not only expanding, but expanding faster and faster. Ultimately, everything in the universe will drift farther and farther apart until the universe is uniformly cold and desolate. The world will end in a whimper. -Article Source: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/The-Ten-Most-DisturbingScientific-Discoveries.html#ixzz23pQQqjjt