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Interesting Facts

•  At the 1900 Paris Olympics events included Live Pigeon Shooting and Long Jump for Horses. The three croquet gold medals were won by France, which is not surprising since all the competitors in the event were French.

•  The large known diamond in the universe is the star BPM 37093.  Astronomers believe that the interior of this white dwarf has crystallised into a diamond with a diameter of 4000 km.

•  When the Soviets launched their Salyut 3 space station in 1974, they were so convinced that America would try to attack the spacecraft that they fitted it with a machine gun – a modified Nudelman 23mm air-to-air cannon.

•  We are moving at about 1,340,000 km/h relative to the Universe as a whole.

•  Until 1913 is was legal in America to send children by parcel post.

•  98% of the atoms in the human body are replaced every year.

•  The 1^st World War officially ended on 3^rd Oct 2010.

•  The world’s largest living thing is a mushroom in America which covers 2,200 acres and is between 2,000 and 8,000 years old.

•  The largest thing a whale can swallow is something about the size of a grapefruit.

•  Female mosquitoes have killed half the human beings that have ever died.

•  Smoking reduces global pollution because the effect of eliminating the polluters is greater than the pollution arising from smoking itself.

•  Originally carrots, which were from Afghanistan, were purple on the outside and yellow on the inside.  As Arab traders spread their use their colours varied to purple, white, yellow, red, green, and even black.  The first orange carrots originated in Holland to match the colour of the Royal House of Orange.  Since the Dutch were the main European producers of carrots this set the way forward.

•  ‘Carrots help you see in the dark’ was misinformation put out by the British during the second world war to mislead about the early use of Radar.

•  There are a group of spruce trees in in western Sweden which are about 8,000 years old. The oldest plant is thought to be 40,000 years old.  It’s a shrub found in Tasmania, Australia.

•  Mount Kea, the highest point on the island of Hawaii, is the world’s tallest mountain, noting that most of it is underwater. It is 10,200m (33,465 ft) high. Mount Everest is the highest mountain, not the tallest.

•  Underground fires are a frequent phenomenon, with fires travelling along seams of coal.  They travel slowly because of the limited supply of oxygen, but can burn for a very long period of time.  An underground fire at Burning Mountain Nature reserve in Australia is believed to have been burning for about 5,500 years.

•  The UK has a higher rate of tornadoes per square-kilometre than anywhere else in the entire world.

•  The empirical chemical formula for human beings is approximately:  H₁₅₇₅₀N₃₁₀O₆₅₀₀C₂₂₅₀Ca₆₃P₄₈K₁₅S₁₅Na₁₀C₁₆Mg₃Fe_1.

•  Modern humans have as many hairs per square centimetre as chimpanzees. They are just finer and lighter and thus less visible.

•  The Greeks and Romans all read aloud.  It wouldn’t have occurred to them to read silently.

•  Statistically you are more likely to be attacked by a cow than by a shark, and more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a venomous spider.

•  Chocolate chip cookies have 15 times as much energy as the same weight of TNT.  It’s just that TNT is able to release its energy a lot quicker.

•  Shakespeare died when 46 in the same year that the King James bible was published.  The 46^th word from the start of Psalm 46 is ‘shake’ and the 46^th word from the end of the Psalm is ‘spear’.

•  Aldous Huxley, C S Lewis, and J F Kennedy all died on the same day in 1963.

•  A dispute started in 1283 between the Prior and Convent of Durham Cathedral with the Archbishop of York over the administering of the spiritualities of the diocese.  The latest attempts to settle the dispute in November 1975 came to nothing.

•  The 1940s Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr patented a frequency-switching system for guided torpedoes.

•  Before WWII only 800 planes had been built in the US.

•  The tongue of a blue whale can weigh more than an elephant.

•  The fastest bird is the peregrine falcon which can fly faster than 200 miles/hr (320 km/hr).

•  Mosquitos are attracted to dark colours, particularly dark blue, and repelled by light colours.

•  A woodpecker can peck up to 20 times per second.

•  Australian earthworms can grow up to 10ft (3m) in length.

•  All of the common type of pet hamster are descended from a single pregnant female found in the wild in Syria in 1930.

•  Antarctica is the driest place on the planet.

•  Watermelons are grown square in Japan so they take up less space, are easier to stack, and fit neatly into typically sized Japanese refrigerators.

•  The smallest tree in the world is the dwarf willow which grows to about 2 ins (5cms) in the tundra in Greenland.

•  Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his life.

Common Misconceptions

•  Ancient Greek geographers knew that the world was spherical.  European scholars had good access to such information, and most, who thought about such matters, fully accepted it.  There were only a few eccentric thinkers who denied it.  So why do most people believe that flat-earthers once prevailed?  Simply put, during the battle over evolution in the late 1800s a few of Darwin’s supporters got a bit carried away in denouncing the intellectual obstinacy of the Christian tradition.

•  There is no evidence to suggest that the forbidden fruit from the Book of Genesis is an apple. The Bible does not identify what type of fruit it was only from the 12^th century that artists began to depict the fruit as an apple. Equally possibilities include a grape, an apricot, or a fig, amongst others.

•  Vomiting was not a regular part of Roman dining customs.

•  The Vikings did not wear horned helmets.

•  The Pilgrim Fathers did not wear all black, and their clothes would have been in a range of colours including reds and yellows and greens. The image of their being all in Black did not emerge until the 19^th century.

•  Napoleon was not particularly short, and was in fact slightly taller than the average Frenchman of the time.

•  There was no outbreak of panic across the United States as a result of Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds in 1938. The idea that there was was itself played up and the myth was one that the radio station and Wells played up in later years.

•  Albert Einstein did not fail at mathematics when at school. He did fail his first entrance exam into the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in 1895, but then he was two years younger than his fellow students. He scored well in the mathematics and science sections and then passed on his second attempt.