1251/ On 22nd May 1960 the Earth of the coast of Southern Chile suffered a violent earthquake. Under enormous strain for many years, the so-called Nazca Plate beneath the Eastern Pacific thrust itself under the South American Plate in a series of violent jerks. The Earthquake registered magnitude 8.6 on the Richter scale and released as much energy as 500 Hiroshima bombs.
1252/ The Whale Shark can get up to 50 feet long and weigh over 16 tons. Its mouth can open as wide as five feet.
1253/ A rhinoceros beetle can support up to 850 times its own weight on it's back. That would be the equivalent of a man carrying 76 family-sized cars around on his back.
1254/ The most colourful sunsets appear when there is dust in the atmosphere. Some of the most colourful and memorable sunsets have occurred after episodes of explosive volcanic eruptions of the type that send tons of particulate material into the atmosphere. Other climatic conditions that can cause large amounts of dust to
enter the atmosphere include prolonged droughts.
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1255/ It takes 3000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of American Footballs.
1256/ The dial tone of a normal telephone is in the key of F.
1257/ Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand.
1258/ Researchers in Denmark found that beer tastes best when drunk to the accompaniment of a certain musical tone. The optimal frequency is different for each beer, they reported. The correct harmonious tone for Carlsberg Lager, for example, is 510-520 cycles per second.
1259/ Hitler was claustrophobic. The large elevator leading to his Eagles nest in the Austrian Alps was mirrored so it would appear larger and more open.
1260/ Chairman Mao loved to chain-smoke cigarettes. When his doctor asked him to cut down, he explained that "smoking is also a form of deep-breathing exercise, don't you think?"
1261/ The term 'scientist' was invented by a Victorian Vicar called William Whewell. He was Master at Trinity College Cambridge, and also held chairs in mineralogy
and moral philosophy. He introduced the word 'scientist' in the Quarterly Review for March 1834. The word immediately caught on in the USA, but took about
another 60 years to gain general acceptance in Britain. As well as the word 'scientist' he is also credited with inventing numerous other science words such as, 'physicist', 'anode' and 'cathode'.
1262/ The ancient library at Alexandria at the time of Alexander the Great (around 320BC) was called 'the temple of the muses'. It contained about 400,000 books
and it is from this that we get the modern word 'museum'.
1263/ The plague in Zurich killed 3,700 of the cities 6,000 inhabitants in 1567.
1264/ The Black Death (bubonic plague) killed one quarter of Europe's population between 1346 and 1352, with death tolls ranging up to 70 per cent in some cities.
1265/ The discover of oxygen was Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) in 1774.
1266/ In 1905, over a year after their first short flight, the Wright Brothers offered their invention to the US War Department. They were turned down.
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1267/ The mass of the Earth is roughly 6,700 million, million, million tons.
1268/ Copernicus' great book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in the year of his death, 1543. The book put foward the then scandalous
idea that the Sun is at the centre of the Universe, not the Earth, and that the Earth along with the other planets revolves around it. He is said to have been handed a
copy of his book as he lay on his death bed. In 1616 it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Catholic Church and wasn't removed until 1835.
1269/ The Index of Forbidden Books ceased its publication in 1966 when Cardinal Ottaviani, Head of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, declared that there
would be no further editions of the Index. (The last edition was in 1948.) More
1270/ The Flat Earth Society has been around since 1547 and apparently is still going strong. To join go here.
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1271/ On a clear night in the Northern Hemisphere the naked eye can discern some 5000 stars.
1272/ The fossil record commences in pre-Cambrian times with organisms resembling bacteria and blue-green algae in deposits 3 billion years old.
1273/ The world's largest open-pit copper mine can be found near Antofagasta in the North of Chile.
1274/ The first newspaper article on crack cocaine appeared in the Los Angeles Times in November 1984.
275/ By the mid 1990s, up to two thirds of clubbers in the city of Amsterdam were using Ecstasy.
1276/ The Sumerians, who inhabited an area in what is now Southern Iraq, from around 5000 to 2000 BC appear to have been active Opium users. This is
suggested by the fact that they have an ideogram for it which has been translated as "hul", meaning joy or rejoicing.
1277/ The total number of human genes is estimated at 30,000 to 35,000 much lower than previous estimates of 80,000 to 140,000 that had been based on extrapolations from gene-rich areas as opposed to a composite of gene-rich and gene-poor areas. This new figure comes as a direct result of the human genome project. You can read all about it here.
1278/ In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published their investigation of twenty different languages, and how each language performed the coding of experience into sound. They found experimentally that a basic set of eleven colour categories were common to all the languages studied - white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. Interestingly, they also investigated 78 other languages via scientific literature, and found that those that encoded fewer then 11 colour categories still seemed to follow strict rules as to which categories they would encode. So that 1/ All languages contain terms for black and white 2/ If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red 3/ If a language contains three terms then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both) 4/ If a language contains five terms then it contains terms for both green and yellow 5/ If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue 6/ If a language
contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown 7/ If a language contains eight or more terms then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange and grey. Paul
Kays homepage can be found here - Other information can be found here - or here - Plus take a colour survey here.
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1279/ After the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in AD 313, it was made a punishable offence in the Roman Empire for a father to kill his child
in 318, and in 331 Constantine decreed that those who raised exposed children could legally adopt them.
1280/ In the 1970s, Peter Sturrock sent questionnaires to 2,611 members of the American Astronomical Society. Replies were received from 79 percent of the members (2062). Of these 62 respondents had either personally observed a UFO or had detailed knowledge of a sighting. Two respondents reported something like a searchlight playing on a cloud when there were no clouds in the sky, 11 described disklike objects, 3 objects that seemed to emit sparks, and in 2 cases sightings were accompanied by problems with car electrical systems
1281/ When two Guatemalen villages were given ad-lib protein supplements for several years, the IQ of children, measured ten years later, had risen markedly.
1282/ A New Zealand based political scientist, James Flynn, noticed in the 1980s that IQ is increasing in all countries all the time, at an average rate of about three IQ points per decade.
1283/ Originally made for the New York World's Fair of 1964-65, the worlds largest cheese weighed 17.25 tons and used more than 170,000 quarts of milk. On display in Neillsville, Wisconsin is a replica of the original, which was devoured in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1966.
1284/ A team of Canadian paleontologists working along Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba has discovered the world's largest recorded complete fossil of a trilobite, a many-legged, sea-dwelling animal that lived 445 million years ago. The giant creature is more than 70 cm long (about 28 inches), 70 percent larger than the previous record holder.
1285/ In a massive, long-term study of 17,000 civil servants in the UK, the surprising conclusion emerged that the status of a person's job was better able to predict
their likelyhood of a heart attack than obesity, smoking or high blood pressure. Somebody in a low-grade job in Whitehall, such as a janitor, was nearly four times as
likely to have a heart attack as a permanent secretary at the top of the heap. Indeed, even if the permanent secretary was fat, hypertensive or a smoker, he was still
less likely to suffer a heart attack at a given age than a thin, non-smoking, low-blood-pressure janitor. Exactly the same result emerged from a similar study of a million
employees of the Bell Telephone Company in the 1960s.
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1286/ In a study investigating pain tolerance, it was found that the same pain was perceived as being almost twice as bad during certain times of the day, most notably
in the morning. Just after lunchtime, the pain seemed to be far more bearable.
1287/ If people are woken up when their EEG shows that they are in REM sleep, and thus probably dreaming, they try and compensate the following night: the amount of REM sleep that they undergo increases. In one experiment, people were woken up to ten times on the first night, but by the sixth night they were woken up as many as thirty-three times as their brains tried time and again, in vain, to plunge into the dream world.
1288/ Flattened out, the rat cortex would be the size of a postage stamp, that of the chimp would be the size of a piece of standard typing paper, while the human brain would be four times greater still!
1289/ The first recorded Olympic Games were held in 776 BC and were a purely local affair that lasted only one day. By 650 BC the games had grown much larger.
Citizens of many cities came to compete, including some from Italy and Asia. In 393 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius I, a Christian, abolished the Games
because of their pagan influences. The very first modern Olympic Games opened in the first week of April 1896.
1290/ The GPS (Global Positioning System) is a constellation of twenty-four satellites (Plus two spares - making twenty six in total), in twelve-hour orbits at an
altitude of 12,543 miles. Each satellite carries an atomic clock for precise determination of time, while ground-based tracking permits each one to know its position
with similar accuracy. It was initially a US military project; but President Ronald Reagan ordered the GPS signals to be made available internationally. The complete
GPS system became fully operational in March 1994. Also there is no longer any encryption encoded error built into the system (as there was originally), as it was taken out under President Clinton's orders during the late 1990's.
1291/ When growing at the maximum weight at around thirty-two to thirty-four weeks of pregnancy, normal human babies are increasing their weight by nearly 250 grams (over half a pound) a week.
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1292/ Premature birth occurs in about 10 percent of all pregnancies, but is the cause of 75 percent of infant deaths that occur during labour or in the first month of life.
1293/ Volcanic activity since 1700 A.D. has killed more than 260,000 people.
1294/ The total number of planets detected around stars outside our solar system has now topped 100, with more being discovered all the time.
1295/ Cirrus clouds are high, cold clouds composed of ice crystals. In the tropics, cirrus clouds form at altitudes of about 30,000 to 60,000 feet (9-18 km).
1296/ Charles Darwin came tenth (out of 178 people) in his Divinity BA Degree in 1831.
1297/ The word 'muppets' was invented by Jim Henson by combining the words marionettes and puppets.
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1298/ 50 percent or more of individuals in Western society are overweight.
1299/ The now extinct woolly mammoth of Northern Europe and Russia have been found in ever increasing numbers deep frozen in remarkable condition. Some of these bodies flesh, many of which have lain undesturbed for tens of thousands of years, are still said to be edible!
1300/ Whereas English books are written in words of variable length using twenty six letters, genomes are written entirely in three-letter words using only four letters:
A, C, G and T (which stand for adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine). And instead of being written on flat pages, they are written on long chains of sugar and
phosphate called DNA molecules
1301/ Relative to its body weight the chimpanzee has the biggest testicles of any primate. They weigh 120 grams - about the weight of the meat in a quarter-pound
burger, and constitute 0.3 per cent of its body weight.
1302/ Some 120 males are conceived for every 100 human females; but just before birth the ratio has been reduced to 110:100 by the male's extra vulnerability to
miscarriages, many caused by chromosomal abnormalities. In terms of live births males outnumber females by only 106 to 100, and the extra vulnerability of males
continues throughout life so that by the age of seventy the ratio at conception is reversed and there are 120 women for every 100 men.
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1303/ The average human chromosome carries between 10,000 and 1,000,000 genes. Recombining can occur between any two genes, so that two parental chromosomes can recombine into over 100,000 different offspring. There are 23 pairs of chromosomes, so one cell could give rise to more than 10 to the power of 115 different gametes (100,000 combinations of 23 chromosomes).
1304/ Astronomers estimate that in the entire visible universe, all the stars of all the galaxies, there are altogether roughly 10 to the power of 80 fundamental particles - protons, neurons and electrons. So it would take 10 to the power of 35 universes like our own to provide one such particle to represent every possible unique human being.
1305/ The number of chromosomes varies from species to species, although all members of a species have the same number. A human being has 46 chromosomes, a fruit fly 8 and some ferns more than 600.
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1306/ Whilst we share almost 99 percent of our DNA with the chimpanzee and the gorilla; they have twenty four pairs of chromosomes and humans have twenty three. It has been established that our chromosome number two is equivalent to two pairs of the chimpanzee's chromosomes.
1307/ It was accepted practice to castrate certain inmates in 'lunatic asylums' in some parts of America until quite recently. These unfortunate individuals lived on
average fourteen years longer than their intact companions.
1308/ Dolly the 'cloned' sheep was not really a proper clone as there were traces of DNA from the original donor egg in her genetic make-up as well as the DNA of her clone mother.
1309/ Monogamy is rare in nature. It is most common in birds, where more than 95 per cent of known species are monogamous.
1310/ The sex of a turtle depends on its temperature during development. At 26 degrees centigrade all the eggs hatch as males; at 34 degrees centigrade all are female. Equal numbers hatch only if the eggs are at about 30 degrees centigrade.
1311/ Studies of baboons and macaques have shown that sex ratio is intimately linked to social status. Socially dominant mothers tend to produce an excess of females, while subordinates favour sons. High-ranking females amongs the baboons of Amboseli produced ten males to nineteen females, that is 34 per cent males.
Low-ranking females in the same troops produced 68 per cent males.
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1312/ The 1976 census of Canada showed that a man is statistically more than three times as likely to die then a woman between the ages of twenty and thirty. This difference is almost totally attributable to external causes - accidents, suicides, homicides, poisonings etc - rather than the internal causes of disease and decay.
1313/ In 1999, a report from the Office for National Statistics in Britain showed that young men are three times more likely to die in road accidents than young women, and that most of the women who do die are passengers. The particular danger areas highlighted for men in the report were fifteen to twenty-four and over seventy-five.
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1314/ The Amazon Molly fish has almost, but not quite, done away with males. The species is thought to have arisen from a hybrid of two closely related sexual species. It reproduces asexually, laying unfertilised eggs that grow into exact genetic replicas of the mother. No male mollys have ever been found. but the females retain a curious reminder that the species was once sexual. In order to trigger the growth of the egg into a clone, the egg must be penetrated by a sperm. To get the neccesary sperm the emancipated Amazon Molly has to dupe a male of one of the closely related 'parental' species into mating with her. His genetic material is then totally ignored in the production of the subsequent offspring.
1315/ Scientists studied the seals of Ano Nuevo island for many years. In one season they watched as five of the 115 males performed 123 of the 144 copulations. In other words, 4 per cent of the males accounted for almost 90 per cent of the matings.
1316/ Hanging-flies are small insects that live in the woods of North America. The male hunts for small insects, but, when he catches one, instead of eating it he simply holds onto it and uses a special scent to advertise for females. The female finds the male, who offers her his nuptial gift. She takes it, and allows him to copulate. The larger the insect he has caught, the longer it will take her to eat it, and the longer she will allow him to copulate.
1317/ Mormon church leaders of the nineteenth century, who had to provide a seperate establishment for each wife, averaged 5 wives and 25 children. Lesser
mortals, not members of the church hierarchy, could afford an average of only 2.4 wives and fathered an average of 15 children. And the unfortunates who could keep but a single wife fathered just 6.6 children.
1318/ Bobbi Low, of the University of Michigan, surveyed 138 different cultures as part of a thesis on ornamentation in the human species. Of the 138 societies, 99 had a signal that advertised whether a woman was married or not. But only 4 of the 138 had similar signals for men.1319/ A survey of homosexuals in San Francisco in the late 1970's by A.P Bell and M.S Weinberg showed that among white males, 28 per cent reported having had more than a thousand partners, and 75 per cent said that they had had more than a hundred partners. Not one white female reported having had a thousand partners,
and only 2 per cent had had more than a hundred.1320/ The average difference in height between men and women is about 8 per cent, slightly less than in chimpanzees. Least different are pygmies of Central Africa, in whom males are just 4.7 per cent taller than females. Most different are the Tarahumara, a tribe of American Indians who live in northern Mexico who are 11.6 per cent taller than the women.
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1321/ In 1995 a woman sued her former therapist on the grounds that three weeks on Prozac had achieved more than three years of therapy.
1322/ About 40 per cent of the current population of the United States will develop cancer at some point in their lives. Half of these people will be cured and the other half will eventually die of the disease. In the mid-1990s cancer claimed more than half a million lives every year in the US alone.
1323/ During the 1990s, one third of the cancer deaths in the US were due to the use of tobacco, largely cigarettes.
1324/ A tumour mass one centimetre in diameter may contain as many as a billion cells. At first glance, the number seems huge, but it pales next to the number of cells in the body as a whole - more than ten thousand times more. So a cancer this size is rarely life threatening. In most places in the body, it probably will not compromise
the functioning of a vital organ. Most tumours need to be far larger before they become lethal.
1325/ In 1930, the annual rate of mortality from cancer in the United States was 143 per hundred thousand of population. By 1990, the rate had increased to 190 per hundred thousand.
1326/ Peyton Rous of the Rockefeller Institute in New york discovered the first known tumour virus in 1909. It was called RSV or 'Rous's Sarcoma Virus'.
1327/ After 1909, Peyton Rous abandoned research on the virus he had discovered, convinced that it held no relevance for understanding the root causes of human
cancer. Other reserachers then picked up the baton and studied it over the next 60 years. In 1966, by then in his mid-eighties, Rous received the Nobel Prize in medicine and physiology for the work he had done more than half a century earlier.
1328/ The first systematic study of mating genetics was carried out in the 1860s by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who hybridized different strains of pea plants. His work was forgotton for a generation, then rediscovered in 1900. It formed the foundation of modern genetics and led to the notion that biological information is transmitted in the discrete packets that came to be called genes.
1329/ In 1964 a Harris poll found that 15 per cent of US adults were dieting. By 1992, 70 per cent of women and 50 per cent of men were dieters, as were 80 per
cent of seventh-grade girls. The dieting rate for British fifteen-year-olds is 68 per cent.
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1330/ A 1981 US report on levels of twelve basic nutrients found that dieting girls from fifteen to eighteen years old were seriously deficient in eleven of them.
1331/ Methane hydrates are found on the continental shelves. They are molecules of methane that have been locked up inside a 'cage' of frozen water so that they are trapped. Methane hydrates are very common in the ocean: it is estimated that over a trillion tones of carbon are buried as methane hydrate. The amount of methane hydrate off the coast of Florida and Georgia alone is enough to satisfy the energy needs of the United States for the next 200 years.
1332/ A Harvard University study of 40,000 nurses found that the 20 per cent with the lowest fat intake had the highest rate of cancer.
1333/ There are over six billion humans who collectively account for over 300 million tons of biomass. By contrast there are fewer than a thousand mountain gorillas
in the world (most authorities reckon the number at about 600) and even before we started slaughtering them and eroding their habitat there may not have been more than ten times that number. Help by Adopting a Gorilla here
1334/ Genetic fingerprinting in crime detection has come along way recently. In Britain alone, by mid-1998 320,000 samples of DNA had been collected by the Forensic Science Service and used to link 28,000 people to crime scenes. Nearly twice as many samples have been used to exonerate innocent people though.
1335/ Nearly four times as many potential jurors will convict if told that a DNA match has a chance probability of 0.1 per cent than if told one in a thousand match
the DNA - yet they are the same facts.
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1336/ Roughly forty per cent of Europeans have type O blood, forty per cent have type A blood, fifteen per cent have type B blood and five per cent have type AB blood. The proportions are similar in other continents, with the marked exception of the Americas, where the Native American population was almost exclusively type O, save for some Canadian tribes, who were very often type A, and Eskimos, who were sometimes type AB or B.
1337/ In fruit flies, Michael Rose has been selecting for longevity for twenty-two years: that is, in each generation he breeds from the flies that live the longest. His 'Methuselah' flies now live for 120 days, or twice as long as wild fruit flies, and start breeding at an age when wild fruit flies usually die. They show no signs of reaching a limit.
1338/ Ernest Rutherford, while working with Frederick Soddy at McGill University, Montreal in 1902, proposed the theory of radioactive decay. Radioactive decay is the process by which radioactive elements can transform into other elements by the loss of energy in the form of particles or rays.
1339/ It was Frederick Soddy who coined the term 'isotopes' (which means 'the same place' in Greek) because, by being chemically identical, these previously unknown radioactive substances occupied the same place on the periodic table.
1340/ Rock magnetism and changes in magnetic polarity were observed as early as 1853 by the Italian scientist Melloni, who showed that the direction of magnetisation of some ancient lavas from Mt Vesuvius was the same as the direction of the Earth's magnetic field.
1341/ A survey in the UK in 1989 showed that if a man spent more than 80 per cent of his time with his partner between sexual acts, she was almost never unfaithful to him. Less time than that though, and the chances of her infidelity increased significantly, rising to over 10 per cent if he spent less than 10 per cent of his time with her.
1342/ Studies of families in Canada and Britain show that a man in a blended family (households in which some of the children are the man's genetic offspring and some are his stepchildren) is seven times more likely to abuse his stepchildren than his genetic children - and a massive 100 times more likely to kill them.
1343/ Studies of the forest-dwelling Ache people in Paraguay showed that 9 per cent of children raised by a mother and stepfather were killed before their fifteenth birthday compared with less than 1 per cent of those raised by two genetic parents.
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1344/ In Australia, Canada and the United States, over 50 per cent of children in lone-mother families are living below the poverty line. Countries such as Denmark, Finland and Sweden have a high percentage of children in lone-mother families, yet fewer than 10 per cent live below the poverty line, thanks to the mitigating effect of government support.
1345/ By early 1998, the US national database contained DNA samples from 260,000 people, all with criminal records, with 1000 or more being added each
month. Police try to match DNA patterns of blood, hair or semen stains found at the scene of a crime to past offenders. The database achieves between 300 to 500
matches a week, and 80 per cent of these matches result in guilty pleas.
1346/ A woman becomes pregnant most easily at the age of eighteen or nineteen, with little real change until the mid twenties. There is then a slow decline to age thirty-five, a sharper decline to age forty-five and a very rapid decline as the women nears menopause.
1347/ Only one in three fertile couples manage conception in the very first month of a campaign and, on average, a healthy, fertile couple will take four or five months to conceive.
1348/ A worldwide study of human infertility carried out by the World Health Organization and published in 1990 concluded that about 15 per cent of humans are infertile. In industrial countries the figure is nearer 10 per cent and is roughly equal for men and women. The result is that about one in six couples find it impossible, or at least extremely difficult, to conceive. Out of every 100 cases of infertility, about 40 can be traced to problems in the female, forty to problems in the male, and the remainder to conditions in each partner that interact to cause sterility.
1349/ In non-industrial cultures all women breast-feed their children for an average of 2.8 years (but up to five years in some cultures). In contrast, the majority of women in industrial societies nowadays avoid breast feeding. In Britain in 1990, for example, although 60 per cent or so of new mothers made some attempt to breast-feed, within a fortnight the figure was down to 50 per cent and after six weeks was down to 40 per cent. Only one in ten women breast-fed past nine months.
1350/ Roughly 10 per cent of men - which in the US translates into a total of over 10 million men - are suffering from impotence at any one time.
1351/ The rate of manufacture of sperm in a man's testes is about 300 million a day during the years of peak production between the ages of twenty and thirty. That means that well over 1000 sperm are matured with every beat of the man's heart. This does not mean though, that each sperm is quickly made. In fact it takes about seventy-two days - over two months - from first cell division to a sperm being ejaculated.
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1352/ According to a survey of American men by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey in the 1940's, nearly one in five of those raised on farms claimed that at least once in their lives they had copulated with livestock.
1353/ The risk of Down's Syndrome (an extra chromosome 21) rises with age. Studies suggest that over the age of thirty-five, about one-third of a woman's eggs are chromosomally abnormal. At age twenty-five, the risk of Down's is 1 in 1500; by forty it is 1 in a 100, and at forty-five, one in thirty.
1354/ The humble condom gets its name from the personal physician to King Charles II, the Earl of Condom, who recommended its use to the king as an aid to
prevent the contraction of syphilis.
1355/ When sperm were first seen down a microscope about 300 years ago, scientists really thought they could see tiny whole humans in human sperm, donkeys in donkey sperm, and so on. The entities were hence named spermatozoa, which means 'seed animals'.
1356/ In Europe and the US less then 1 per cent of men are exclusively homosexual; with another 5 per cent being bisexual. In women the figures are far less than 1 per cent exclusively lesbians, and another 2 percent bisexual.
1357/ In the UK in the 1990s, 10 per cent of men had paid for sex at least once in their lives by the time they were fifty.
1358/ Currently, about 40 per cent of women in their fifties and early sixties in the US and about 33 per cent of such women in Britain now take hormones every day (ie HRT - Hormone Replacement Therapy)
1359/ The probability of a viable pregnancy is approximately 20 per cent with one IVF (in vitro fertilization) cycle.
1360/ Pregnancy in humans lasts on average about 270 days (from conception to birth).
1361/ The computers running the SETI@Home screensaver have put in a total of over 350,000 years worth of computer time. These machines are collecting the equivalent of a computer operating at around ten million million calculations a second, about ten times faster than any conventional supercomputer. You can help in the search for extraterrestial life by downloading the screensaver here
1362/ In a study by Dr Thomas Zentall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, he trained pigeons to tap on a small button if they wanted a snack. Sometimes
the pigeon had to tap only once; upon which the button would turn red and some grain appear. Other times though the pigeon would have to tap up to 20 times to get
the grain, before the light turned green and the grain was delivered. The pigeons soon learned that the red button meant one thing and the green another. You would
assume that given the free choice the pigeons would choose the red button ie less work, same reward. However, Zentall found that the pigeons actually chose the
green button twice as often as the red. The effort seemed, according to Dr Zentall, to make the grain more valuable.
1363/ According to Jens Rydell and Winston Lancaster at Gothenburg University in Sweden, the majority of Scandinavian moths have tiny ears tuned to the
ultrasonic pulses that bats emit as they give chase (and hence hopefully avoid being the bats lunch!). But 4% of the moths they studied lacked such ears and were
reckoned to be deaf. To compensate however, they found that deaf moths were able to fly faster then their hearing counterparts.
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1364/ Scientists have found that the Chinese brake fern has an almost insatiable appetite for arsenic. When planted on sites contaminated with copper arsenate, Lana
Ma of the University of Florida found that the fronds from the fern had accumulated as much as five grams of arsenic for each kilogram of the fern's foliage. In theory,
a contaminated site could have much of its arsenic sucked out of it over the course of a few years by planting it with Chinese brake.
1365/ Microsoft's Office Assistant, an irritating paper-clip that tries to help the user; uses Bayesian statistical methods to analyse recent actions in order to try to work
out what the user is trying to do. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century Presbyterian minister and mathematician who published a paper in 1763 explaining his approach.
The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide mathematical rules that explain how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. read
more here
1366/ It was not until about 600 million years ago that we find fossils that are recognizably animals, plants, or fungi.
1367/ A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
1368/ The world's most fertile woman had sixty-nine children, at least sixty-seven of which survived infancy.
1369/ The 'Silverback' gorilla is 30 per cent taller and almost twice as heavy as the females in the group he dominates.
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1370/ Man has by far the largest penis of any primate. Chimps also have a relatively large penis which is decorated on its underside with a broad white stripe.
1371/ The number of atoms of carbon in a 60 carat diamond (the Koh-I-Noor weighs 109 carats) is about 6 x 10 to the power of 23.
1372/ The isolated island of Tristan da Cunha has three hundred inhabitants, of whom over twenty percent suffer from asthma.
1373/ The average man in the UK has 11 per cent body fat at age twenty and 26 per cent at age sixty.
1374/ Huntington's disease, which became notorious when it killed the folk singer Woody Guthrie in 1967, was first diagnosed by a doctor, George Huntington, in
1872 on the Eastern tip of Long Island.
1375/ Cancer risk has been found to vary dramatically between countries. Liver cancer is eighteen times more frequent in certain parts of Africa than in Great Britain.
Stomach cancer strikes the Japanese eleven times more frequently than Americans. Colon cancer is ten to twenty times more common in the US than in certain
regions of Africa. These dramatic differences were not due to differences in inherited susceptibility. When individuals migrated from one part of the world to another,
their children soon assumed the cancer risks typical of their new locations.
1376/ The term 'G-Spot' was coined by Ernest Grafenberg in 1950.
1377/ In humans, most multiple births involve twins - about once in every eighty-nine births. By contrast, triplets naturally occur about once in every 7900 births and
quadruplets about once in every 705,000 births.
1378/ A female egg has a volume that is over 30,000 times greater than a man's sperm.
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1379/ The first attempt to create an artificial womb took place in France in 1969, when a sheep foetus was kept alive in one for two days.
1380/ A mid-1990s survey of fertility clinics in the United States and Canada revealed that sperm samples are routinely taken from dead men at the request of their
partners and families.
1381/ In one study by educational psychologist, Sandra Scarr, she located people who had been adopted in the 1950s when they were just two years old. She
measured the IQs of the adoptees when they were eighteen years old. If the effects of family and schooling were important in determining IQ, then such influences
would show up after the first eighteen years of life. What she found was that the IQs of the people she tested bore no relation to the IQs of the families in which they
were brought up.
1382/ In another study, sixty eight year old identical twins Caroline and Margaret Chang, separated at birth, had IQ test scores that were as similar to each other as
the same person tested twice.
1383/ Admiral Lord Nelson experienced vivid phantom limb pain after losing his arm in an attack on Tenerife in 1797. Nelson is reported to have said that the
phantom sensation gave him direct evidence of the existence of the soul.
1384/ The adult spinal cord is normally between 40 and 50 centimtres (16 to 20 inches) long, and runs between your head and a point about level with your navel.
1385/ Every year in the UK, twenty people are electrocuted by their bedside lamp or alarm clock. Another twenty die as they fall getting out of bed. Thirty people
die from drowning in their morning bath, and sixty are seriously injured putting on their socks. 600 also die each year from falling down stairs (almost two a day!).
1386/ The risk of dying in an aeroplane crash over a period of one year is about 0.000002, or one in 500,000.
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1387/ For every person murdered today, it is thought that ten were murdered in the Middle Ages. The murder rate has halved in the past two hundred years.
1388/ For every death from an infectious disease in the twenty-first century, there was probably at least a hundred in the Middle Ages.
1389/ From 1985 to 2000 there were fewer then a hundred Ecstasy related deaths in the UK, while estimates of deaths related to either long-term or short-term
abuse of alcohol numbered around thirty thousand each year. One poisons expert, Professor John Henry of St Mary's Hospital in London, said that in his hospital,
cases of Ecstasy toxicity were rare, but that 40% of all emergency cases were directly related to alcohol.
1390/ For every six successful summits of Mount Everest, one person dies.
1391/ Oxygen becomes a liquid if cooled to below minus 183 degrees centigrade (minus 297 F). The resulting liquid is pale blue. Cool it still further, to minus 218
degrees centigrade (minus 361 F), and it becomes a bright red solid.
1392/ The amount of haemoglobin present in the blood changes with altitude: the body increases the rate at which it manufactures haemoglobin carrying red blood
cells as a result of acclimatization to high altitudes. If you were placed from sea level on to the summit of Mount Everest, giving the body no chance to acclimatise, you
would quickly die.
1393/ Between 1895 and 1905, India's total population declined for ten years as a result of economic depression, repeated famines and plague.
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1394/ In 1982-1983 the Galapagos Islands received 2,770 millimeters of rain, almost six times the normal amount. The number of flightless cormorants fell by 45
percent, while 78 percent of the rare Galapagos penguins perished. On some islands, 70 percent of the marine iguanas starved because red algae, nourished by the
much warmer water, replaced the green algae that forms the lizards staple diet.
1395/ In 13,000 BC, the world's hunter-gatherer population was approaching eight and a half million.
1396/ The longest ruling Pharoah in Ancient Egypt was Pepi II who ascended the throne in 2278 BC at the age of six and ruled for 94 years. This was at a time when
typical life expectancy was 25 to 35 years.
1397/ Europe enjoyed five and a half centuries of warmer temperatures and ample rainfall, commonly called the Medieval Warm Period (very roughly spanning 850
to 1400 AD). Average temperatues in the British Isles between 1140 and 1300 were up to 0.8 degrees centigrade higher than those of 1900 to 1950. Only now are
some temperatures reaching Medieval Warm Period levels.
1398/ The Medieval Warm Period was then followed by what has been called the Little Ice Age; which began about 1400 and only ended about 150 or so years
ago. At its height, between AD 1550 and 1700, mean temperatures worldwide were 1.2 to 1.4 degrees celsius below those of the Medieval Warm Period.
1399/ Between April and June 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia, erupted massively. The explosion was heard in Sumatra,
sixteen hundred kilometres away. Only twenty-six of the island's twelve thousand people survived.
1400/ By 1500 European summers were about seven degrees celsius cooler than they had been during the Medieval Warm Period. The growing season in England
was shortened by about three weeks, and by as much as five by the seventeenth century.
1401/ The word 'autism' - meaning aloneness - was first used in 1912 by Swiss psychologist Eugene Bleuler to refer to the inner world of schizophrenics. It was
chosen as the name for the disorder that we know as autism by the scientist who first identified the condition in 1943 - Leo Kanner at the John Hopkins Children's
Psychiatric Clinic in Baltimore, USA.
1402/ Most neuroscientists estimate that some form of autism is found in every five or six hundred people. This means that in the UK more than a hundred thousand
people have autism, and almost six hundred thousand in the US.
1403/ Researchers at the University of Chicago investigated eighty-six children with autism and found that all of them had an abnormal version of a gene that is
responsible for the transportation of serotonin around the body.
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1404/ About five percent of the fathers of non-autistic children are employed in some kind of engineering, compared with about twelve percent of the fathers of
children with autism.
1405/ It is estimated that the global damage wrought by the 1982-1983 El Nino and related climactic anomalies cost over $13 billion. The cost of the 1997-1998 El
Nino is much more.
1406/ The storm of October 16th 1997 in Britain (the worst since 1703) toppled over 15 million trees in southeast Enland alone.
1407/ The average human brain consumes just 12 Watts of power - one-tenth of what it takes to burn an ordinary light bulb.
1408/ The human retina is made up of about 120 million rod cells.
1409/ A single second of video tape contains about 22 megabytes of data, the very rough equivalent of about thirty copies of a 200 page book.
1410/ There are roughly 3500 hair cells and 30,000 nerve fibres found in the cochlea, a bony structure shaped like a snail's shell that's located deep within the inner
ear.
1411/ Artificial speech became more fluent around 1835 with the Euphonia - or the Amazing Talking Machine, as it was also known - made by Joseph Faber, a
German immigrant to the United States. The Euphonia sported a tongue and a throat whose shape could be altered to produce different sounds. The apparatus was
controlled via a keyboard, while the bellows was operated by a foot pedal. This talking machine was truly amazing because it could not only speak several European
languages, but also sing, once treating astonished listeners in London to a rendition of 'God Save the Queen'.
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1412/ Talking machines really hit the commercial mainstream in 1978, when Texas Instruments released Speak and Spell, the first device in which the human voice
was electronically duplicated on a single chip.
1413/ Of the roughly 6500 languages now spoken, up to half are already endangered or on the brink of extinction. Linguists estimate that a language dies somewhere
in the world every two weeks.
1414/ It is estimated that three-quarters of the world's mail and up to 80 percent of e-mail is currently (2002) written in English. How long this will remain true with
the rise of Chinese use of the internet is open to debate.
1415/ In the 1950's, Swiss professor Hans Laube invented Smell-O-Vision, a machine installed in movie theatres that emitted puffs of specific odours in
synchronisation with the action on the screen. These aromas were pumped into the theatre through a network of hidden plastic tubes attached underneath each seat.
The problem was that the smells lingered, and the cinemas would end up smelling of a disgusting cocktail of apples, garlic, gunsmoke, cheese etc; and so it never
really caught on. A company in Germany called Aerome is however currently trying to resurrect the idea with the benefit of more subtle delivery mechanisms. So
watch out! It could soon be coming to a cinema near you!
1416/ The average person is able to detect and distinguish between about 10,000 different smells, using approximately 400 receptors.
1417/ Smell and taste are both intimately related. More than 90 per cent of a meal's flavour - apart from the four basic tastes of sweet, sour, bitter and salty - is
actually fragrance, which rises up from food during chewing and is forced across the olfactory epithelium through the nasopharynx at the back of the throat.
1418/ There is a medical condition called Anosmia, where the sufferers have no sense of smell at all. They can still sense sweet, sour, bitter and salty tastes; but
flavour, which is virtually all smell, is totally gone. So that for example they would not be able to savour fine wine, or enjoy lemon meringue pie. Hell indeed!
1419/ The average cup of coffee contains more than 1000 different chemical components, none of which is tasted in isolation but only as part of the overall flavour.
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1420/ About one in every 2000 people automatically sees colours when hearing words, letters or numbers The vast majority (roughly 90 per cent) are female. Other
forms of synaesthesia (derived from the Greek word syn - together - and aisthesis - to perceive) eg associating both taste and touch, are much rarer; maybe 1 in
15,000 for this particular case. Interestingly, in some cultures, such as the Dogon people of Mali, synaesthesia seems to be more common.
1421/ Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer still uses a 56k modem to access the internet at home. Despite living only 6 minutes from downtown Seattle, the ultra-rich
suburb that Ballmer lives in does not have access to a regular broadband connection. (Ever heard of Satellite Broadband Steve?)
1422/ It has been demonstrated that humans are able to control their body temperatures to an amazing degree. In one experiment involving skilled yoga practitioners,
the yogi was able to change the temperature of two areas of skin just two inches apart by a difference of ten degrees fahrenheit.
1423/ In 1971 western journalists were invited to China to witness operations using only acupuncture techniques for anaesthesia. One of these operations involved a
patient having a needle placed in their right forearm. This apparently numbed the whole chest region and allowed a procedure to commence which involved the
removal of a tubercular lung. While the operation took place the man was fully conscious and chatted with theatre staff. After the operation the wound was closed and
the needle removed and his arm massaged. He showed no discomfort, and afterwards gave a press conference.
1424/ During the 1980's Professor Carlos Fonseka, a physiologist at the University of Columbo in Sri Lanka, attended many fire walks in his country to find a rational
solution. He discovered that most fire beds were less than 18 feet long, and walkers stepped across in just a few seconds. When he did tests on the feet of
experienced walkers he discovered that their soles were thicker than normal because they did not wear shoes, and were therefore more resistant to heat. When he
persuaded volunteers to walk across a bed of coals, those with softer feet had to move faster!
1425/ Currently, several "scientific" versions of dowsing rods which purportedly contain actual electronic circuitry, are being sold to government agencies in the USA
for very high prices, as much as $14,000. Read a sceptical opinion of dowsing here -
1426/ In 1994 Steuart Campbell published a book called The UFO Mystery - Solved! In which he proposed that UFOs are not in fact caused by little green men
flying over our heads, but rather are caused by astronomical mirages. More here.
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1427/ The use of regression hypnosis to find out if we have lived previous lives was first popularised in the 1950s by American researcher Morey Bernstein who
'discovered' a subject - socialite Virginia Tighe - speaking as if she were living in Ireland during the eighteenth century. You can read an obituary of Morey Bernstein
here. Editors note - Should any of our readers have lived previously as Rockerfeller, then please let me know. One can never have too many money making tips...
1428/ About twenty years ago Harry Jerison of the University of California, Los Angeles, developed a concept called the encephalization quotient, or EQ - a
measure of brain size relative to body size. A domestic cat has an EQ of 1.0 - it has just the right size of brain to control its body size. Dogs came in at 1:8; ie having a
bit of spare brain to play with. Chimps scored 3:0, and humans came in at a monster 7:4 encephalization quotient. Interestingly, bottle-nosed dolphins scored higher
than chimps, and second only to humans with 5:6. More
1429/ The blowfish or fugu is a highly sought after and expensive delicacy in Japan, but it can also be lethal. Its liver is deadly poisonous; it is the gourmet equivalent
of Russian roulette. Chefs have to be highly trained and licensed to serve the fish, yet despite this precaution at least a hundred people die each year, most from
ingesting unseen traces of liver tissue. Click here for a calming view on eating blowfish.
1430/ According to recent studies, the blowfish poison, tetrodotoxin, acts as a pheromone that induces male blowfish to fertilize spawned eggs. Moreover it has been
shown to have anticancer effects from which new medicines to combat cancer are being developed.
1431/ Humans are not the only species to murder. Jane Goodall, an acclaimed primatologist, studied chimpanzees in the Gombe National Park in Tanzania starting in
the mid 1960s. At first the chimps were in one large group, and seemed content and happy. Over time however she noticed them splitting into two seperate groups;
and shortly thereafter the battered and beaten body of an adult female chimp was found. A short time after there was another killing, with one of Goodalls field
assistants actually witnessing eight chimps surround an isolated male from the other group; and then proceed to beat him to death with their fists, and one even used a
stone. Subsequent murders of chimps were also witnessed and described; and by 1977, just a few years later, all the members of the second breakaway group had
either been killed or were forced to rejoin the first. More here about Chimpanzee Social Structure.
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1432/ In 2000 the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, offered prizes of $1 million each for solutions to seven long standing and intractable
mathematical problems. Click Here for more information on the problems.
1433/ Jonathan Hodgkin, Professor of Genetics at Oxford University has estimated that in 1965 it cost about £1000 per base letter to sequence 5S ribosomal RNA
from bacteria (not DNA, but RNA costs are similar). By 1975 that had fallen to about £10 per letter (to sequence DNA from the virus .X174). He found no
examples for 1985. But by 1995 it cost about £1 per letter to sequence the DNA of a nematode worm, Caenorhabditis elegans. By the time the Human Genome
Project culminated around 2000, sequencing costs were about £0.10 per letter. So, that over this period, costs halved approximately every twenty-seven months.
1434/ "Moores Law" is the observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had
doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace
slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed.
Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades. Read a short interview with Moore here
1435/ The US Supreme Court has declared that the statutes containing criminal penalties for U.S. flag desecration (burning) un-Constitutional in 1989 and 1990. So
there are now no legal penalties for burning a US flag in America other than other than those which would be imposed for burning a piece of cloth in a public place.
There is however legislation that is continually going through Congress to make flag desecration a specific offence. Click here for more information or here for another
perspective
1436/ In 1991 the US Congress asked NASA to evaluate the current impact hazard and suggest ways to deal with the problem. The US House of Representatives
Science Committee wrote that - "the detection rate must be increased substantially, and the means to destroy or alter the orbits of asteroids when they do threaten
collisions should be defined and agreed upon internationally. The chances of Earth being struck by a large asteroid are extremely small, but because the consequences
of such a collision are extremely large, the Commitee believe it is only prudent to assess the nature of the threat and prepare to deal with it". You can read the
Statement on The Threat of Impact by Near-Earth Asteroids that they put out in May 1998 here.
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1437/ The Mariner series of spacecraft were interplanetary probes designed to investigate Mars, Venus, and Mercury. The program included a number of firsts,
including the first planetary flyby (Mariner 2 - 1962), the first planetary orbiter, and the first gravity assist. More
1438/ The word 'poltergeist' is German for 'noisy spirit'.
1439/ Mercury moves around the Sun every 88 Earth days at an average of 48 km per second (108,000mph) and was named by the Romans after the speedy
messenger of the Gods.
1440/ Statistics show that major depression afflicts about 15 percent of people in the developed world at one time or another during their lifetimes.
1441/ In the last statistics that have been made available by the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations - Up to the end of 2001 - they showed
an estimated 40 million people to be living with HIV/Aids (Please note - the WHO do say that unrounded numbers were given to calculate the data, and rounded
numbers to calculate the estimates, hence the rather 'liberal' difference of over 450,000 for 1999). By way of comparison up to the end of 1999 they estimate that
there were 34.3 million people living with HIV/Aids. The rough breakdown by continent was given as follows - (Up to end of 1999 first, then up to the end of 2001)
1442/ Approximately, one-third of all people infected with HIV/Aids are between the ages of 15 and 24.
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1443/ Were it not for HIV/Aids, average life expectancy in Sub-Saharan Africa would be approximately 62 years. Instead it is about 47 years.
1444/ HIV prevalence among pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in South Africa was less than 1% in 1990 (almost a decade after the first HIV diagnosis there in 1982). Yet a decade later, the country was experiencing one of the fastest growing epidemics in the world, with prevalence among pregnant women at 24.5%
by the end of 2000. As a whole about one-in-nine South Africans (or 4.7 million people) are living with HIV/Aids.
1445/ By far the largest documented outbreak of gastrointestinal illness occurred in the spring of 1993 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when an apparent failure in water
treatment caused an estimated 400,000 cases of diarrheal disease and approximately 100 deaths. The parasite Cryptosporidium was responsible for most of the
Milwaukee cases.
1446/ The cost of food-derived illnesses was estimated to be between $6.6 billion and $37.1 billion in medical and productivity costs in the US each year by
Crutchfield in 1999.
1447/ The WHO (World Health Organisation) says that more than 50% of deaths and disability from heart disease and strokes could be cut through cost effective
national programmes and individual actions. By reducing major risk factors such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity and smoking, the global epidemic of
cardiovascular disease - which kills more than 12 million people each year - could be reversed. more
1448/ The WHO also estimates that 65% of gastrointestinal infections in developing nations could be eradicated with the provision of seeminly simple amenities
available in developed nations: basic water improvements, sanitation and hygiene interventions.
1449/ UNICEF estimates that in the 10 years between 1990 and 2000, more children died from diarrheal diseases then all the people killed in armed conflicts since
World War 2.
1450/ Worldwide, about 600,000 women die of pregnancy-related causes every year. Approximately 25% of these maternal deaths are associated with the loss of
blood. Many of these lives could be saved if enough safe blood was available.
1451/ The average adult has 4.5 to 5.5 litres of blood
1452/ Developing countries have approximately 80% of the world’s population, but have access to only 20% of the safe global blood supply.
1453/ It is estimated that 5-10% of the global HIV infections are caused by unsafe blood and blood products.
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1454/ Water expands by 9% when it freezes. Frozen water (ice) is lighter than water, which is why ice floats in water.
1455/ Bones, cardiovascular systems, muscle tissue and organs all change in zero-g, and the longer an astronaut stays aloft, the more marked the changes that take
place. Physiological changes noted by long-duration crews include loss of bone mass in the form of calcium, and a weakening of the heart, which no longer has to fight
against gravity to pump blood around the body. In addition, body fluids shift upwards, causing facial puffiness and ear-nose congestion, while blood volume first
increases, but then experiences a drop.
1456/ The Proton launch vehicle that carried the Zvezda module into orbit was emblazoned with a Pizza Hut logo, which reportedly cost the US fast food chain $1
million. The company then paid the Russians an undisclosed sum to video the first space pizza delivery, although spinning the footage into a TV commercial was ruled
out by Pizza Hut officials.
1457/ In late 2001, Associated Press reported, "NASA might allow McDonald's to put its logo on the international space station galley in exchange for McDonald's
promoting space exploration to kids". Er...Mines a Big Mac Please.
1458/ The IMAX production, 'Space Station', which filmed the ISS, used 25 cosmonauts and astronauts to shoot more than 19km (12 miles) of 65mm film in space,
between December 1998 and July 2001.
1459/ When it is finaly finished in about 2006, the International Space Station will weigh 453,592 kg (about 1,000,000 lb); have an operating altitude of about 240
miles (385 km) and have the same atmospheric pressure inside as Earth ie 14.7 lb/inch squared or 1,013 mbars. It will also have a crew size of 7.
1460/ The ISS has almost an acre of Solar Panels (3,200 metres squared).
1461/ While we do not use the original Babylonian calendar today, our division of the day into 24 hours, or 24 x 60 = 1440 minutes, and 24 x 60 x 60 = 86,400
seconds, comes from Babylonia. The Babylonians employed a positional notation that is similar to the modern decimal system, but their notation was sexagesimal ie
based on powers of 60 instead of 10. Remnants of this system are still in use to this day: the circle is divided into 360 degrees, a degree into 60 minutes, and a minute
into 60 seconds.
1462/ Julius Caesar had, at the suggestion of Greek astronomers, improved the Egyptian calendar by adding a leap day every four years at the end of the Roman
calendar (ie to February). Furthermore, one day was eliminated from February, so that the two months named after Julius Caesar and Augustus could have the same
number of days, 31 each.
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1463/ The Julian calendar year has a length of 365.25 days. Since the solar year is shorter than the Julian calendar year by 0.0078 years, by the sixteenth century, an error of nearly 13 days at the beginning of the year had accumulated since Julius Caesar introduced the calendar in 46 BC.
1464/ The 13 day error between the solar year and the Julian calendar year was finally corrected under Pope Gregory XIII by having October 15th succeed October
4th, 1582, without interrupting the normal sequence of the days of the week. The beginning of spring was defined to be March 21st. According to the new leap rule,
leap years are years whose last two digits are divisible by four. To correct for the slightly shorter length of the solar year, 3 leap years are omitted every 400 years,
and to that end, leap days are omitted in the secular years whose unit is not divisible by 4. Accordingly, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 were not leap years, but
2000 was one again. It will take 3333 years before the remaining errors will have grown to a whole day.
1465/ The mechanical geared clock was invented between 1300 and 1350.
1466/ The term 'allergy' is derived from two Greek words which mean "altered reactivity". That is, an allergy is an adverse reaction to a normally harmless substance
which may be a food or other environmental agent such as dusts, pollens or chemicals.
1467/ The Sun, the closest of all stars to the earth, is 150 million kilometres away. This distance is known as an "Astronomical Unit" or AU.
1468/ Other stellar distances are so great that a 'light year' is used to measure them. This is the distance a ray of light will travel in a year at a speed of 300,000 km
per second. Given 31 million seconds in a year, the light year contains 63,240 AU.
1469/ In the second century BC, the Greek astronomer Hipparchus divided the stars into six brightness categories called 'magnitudes'. The first magnitude stars were
the brightest, while sixth was the faintest he could see. The system, still in use today, is now placed on an exact mathematical scale, wherein five magnitudes
correspond to a factor (ratio) of 100 in actual brightness. A first magnitude star is thus 100 times brighter than a sixth magnitude star, so that each magnitude unit is
2.51... times brighter than the next one down.
1470/ The exact scaling method led to the very brightest stars to climb to magnitudes of zero, or even minus. The Sun, because it is so close to us and therefore
intensely bright, is minus 27th.
1471/ The Hubble Telescope is able to discern stars that are approaching magnitude 30 on this scale. That is stars that are 4 billion times fainter than the human eye can see alone.
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1472/ As far as we currently know, the star SGR 1900+14 in Sagittarius, carrys the strongest magnetic field in the Universe with an astonishing 100 trillion times
Earths.
1473/ The ancient Egyptians called Sirius the 'dog star', after their god Osirus, whose head in pictograms resembled that of a dog. In Egypt, Sirius shines for most of
the summer, and since it is such a bright star, the Egyptians actually believed that the additional light from this nearby star was responsible for the summer heat. This of
course is not true. However the origin of the phrase 'the dog days of summer' comes from this ancient belief - the 'dog star' being the root of this common saying!
1474/ It has been calculated that a man's sperm volume relative to his body weight is in fact twice that found in primate species which are known to be monogamous.
1475/ The three brightest stars, Sirius, Canopus and Alpha Centauri are all in the Southern Hemisphere. The Northern Hemisphere contains the next three, Arcturus,
Vega and Capella.
1476/ In a study of 79,000 pregnancies in sixteen countries around the world, 66 per cent of the women reported that they had suffered some degree of sickness
during the early stages of their pregnancy; with nearly a third reporting a strong aversion to animal products, particularly meat, fish and eggs
1477/ The reason that just dieting without exercise seldom works for long is that as you start to reduce the amount of food you consume, your body recognizes this as
a famine and immediately slows down your metabolic rate. Even a minimal weight loss of a pound (450 kg) a week will trigger this response. Hence, the moral of the
tale is to also exercise in order to boost your metabolic rate.
1478/ Almost all of the developments a human baby will experience in its first year - advances in cognition, motor skills and vision - have already taken place in a
baby chimpanzee while in the uterus.
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1479/ If a top violinist is placed into an MRI scanning machine, we can see that a much larger area of the brain - the right primary motor cortex - is devoted to his or
her left fingers when compared with a non-violinist. Two or three times as large, in fact. Violinists also have more connections between the two sides of the brainwhich
account for the better co-ordination they have between each hand compared with a non-violin player.
1480/ Ancient Greek mathematician, and general to goodness guru, Pythagoras held that there was a precise mathematical formula for the perfect face. In order for
someone to be considered 'beautiful', the ratio of the width of the mouth to the width of the nose should be 1.618 to 1. This figure should also hold for the ratio of the
width of the mouth to the width of the cheekbones. Measure the faces in a magazine for yourself. It is interesting how often the models that we hold up as 'beautiful' fit
this mathematical profile
1481/ Poison Frogs derive their name from the fact that they produce toxins that are secreted from their skin in times of stress. These chemicals serve as a defense
against predators who would eat the frogs otherwise. There are many toxins that have been isolated from the skin of frogs in the neotropics. However, four main ones
have sparked the most interest in the world of science. These four toxins are Batrachotoxin, Compound A, Compound B, and Epibatidine. Nearly all of them are
neurotoxins, or chemicals that affect and disrupt the nervous system. Of the four, the most toxic is Batrachotoxin, where a 180-pound man would be killed by .016
mg of the poison.
1482/ Approximately 20,000 bee species have been identified worldwide, most of which live in the tropics. About 5000 bee species have been found to date in the
United States. The vast majority of bees remain solitary their whole lives, with the exception of the short mating period. Only a small percentage of bees - not even 15
percent - spend their lives in some form of colony. Worldwide however, there are only 400 species of the bumblebees that we are all familiar with. And only nine
species of honeybees, only one of which, the western honey bee, can be found in the UK or US. more
1483/ The biggest ant colony was found on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido: 306 million worker ants and 1 million queens lived in 45,000 interconnected nests over
an area of 2.7 square kilometres (1,7 square miles). A worker ant will live for up to 5 years; while a Queen will live up to 25 years.
1484/ The first entire colony of a rare type of ant, dubbed the 'Dracula Ant' was found in 2000 in Madagascar. They were called this because Queen and worker
ants, when hungry, visit the colony nursery and cut holes into their own larvae to feed on the hemolymph, the equivalent of insect blood. "They chew them until they
bleed" , said Brian Fisher of the California Academy of Sciences. "We call this nondestructive cannibalism."
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1485/ One of the most widely accepted factors related to genetic pattern baldness is the chemical DHT (5-alpha DiHydroTestosterone is its full name). It has been found that increasing levels of DHT in hair follicles cause a reaction which reduces blood flow in that area and adversely affects the health of the follicle and the growth cycle of the hair. Over time the follicle shrinks and produces finer and shorter hairs, eventually dying and producing no hair. Areas that are 'shiny bald' no longer have
live follicles. Areas with shorter, finer hairs still have live follicles which have gradually shrunk over time.
1486/ When a rattlesnake is born he has a small rounded tip on his tail known as the pre button. Several days after his birth he will shed his skin for the first time and
lose this pre button which the button will replace. This is the first segment of his rattle. But it takes at least two rattle segments to produce any noise. He will gain this
ability with his next skin shedding. Thereafter throughout his life he will add a rattle segment with each shedding (2-4 times a year). It is unusual to find more than eight
or nine segments on a wild caught rattlesnake because of the wear and breakage of the terminal segment(s). Some captive rattlesnakes have been known to have 20
plus segments.
1487/ In the twilight of the Greek era, a singular man appeared - Diophantus, who has been called the "Father of Algebra". Of his dates, we know only that they fell
sometime between 100 and 400 AD. However, we do know precisely how long he lived - 84 years. We have this information because one of his admirers described
his life in terms of an algebraic riddle. The riddle begins:" Diophantus' youth lasted 1/6 of his life. He grew a beard after 1/12 more. After 1/7 more of his life,
Diophantus married; 5 years later he had a son. The son lived exactly 1/2 as long as his father, and Diophantus died just four years after his son. All of this adds up to
the years Diophantus lived."
1488/ The Guillotine, invented in April 1792, was originally designed as a humane way to execute prisoners condemned by the Revolutionary French National
Assembly. The guillotine was last officially used as recently as September 10th, 1977 by the French. The last public execution in France was on the 17th June 1939
when Eugene Weidmann was guillotined outside the prison of Versailles. See pictures here.
1489/ Contemporary reports of a man being guillotined in 1905 indicate that for about 30 seconds after the head has been severed from the body, there is still a level
of consciousness that meant the severed head opened its eyes twice when its name was called out. Read about it here -
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1490/ Stainless steel resists rust because it contains a high proportion of chromium to carbon. It was an English researcher named Harry Brearley who discovered
that the rusting was encouraged by the carbon in the steel and other metals. But we have to maintain a delicate balance between the two, because too little chromium
and the steel will become brittle. Brearley only discovered the optimum formula after many experiments.
1491/ Scientists, Dr. C.Y. Barlow and Dr. J. Woodhouse of Cambridge University, England were recently able to investigate the varnish and ground layers of a
number of historic instruments. Their work was carried out on fragments of authentic instruments made by Stradivari and others. Using the SEM (Scanning Electron
Microscope) they discovered a distinct particulate ground layer sandwiched in between the varnish layer and the wood on certain instruments. Using EDAX spectrum
(Energy Dispersive Analysis by X-Rays) on selected areas of the samples that were positioned under the SEM, Drs. Barlow and Woodhouse were able to further
analyze the composition of the ground layer. They determined that the ground layer on many of the early instruments was largely composed of a mineral rich mixture,
high in silica and alumina. More -
1492/ According to The Great American Chewing Gum Book by Robert Hendrickson, if all the sticks of gum chewed in America each year were laid end to end, it
would equal a stick of gum five million miles long. That's long enough to reach the moon and back ten times.
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1493/ The world's largest tea cup is located inside the Toki city JR station near the ticket gate. This tea cup (one piece in a set of three) was crafted in1985. Made
from about one ton of clay, these three pieces took 5 months to complete.
1494/ Remember the saying 'Once in a blue moon?' A 'blue moon' is the name given to the second full moon within the same month. A full moon normally appears
twice in one month every two-and-a-half year but only every 19 years does it occur in two months of the same calendar year. The last time being in 1999.
1495/ The surgeon Guido Lanfranc used violin strings to check for broken bones. Working over 500 years before the X-ray machine was invented, Lanfranc put a
string between his patient’s teeth and plucked it. The string made the skull vibrate and Lanfranc noticed he could listen to the sound of the string and skull together to
find out more about the patient. If Lanfranc heard a dull twang, he knew the patient's skull wasn't vibrating very much. This meant it was fractured. If he heard a sweet note, Lanfranc knew the skull was fine.
1496/ When doctors in Los Angeles went on strike in 1976, the daily number of deaths in the city went down. Striking for more pay, the doctors decided to stop all
work except emergency treatments. Everyone was terrified that their strike would leave people to die. But they were stunned to find that the number of deaths
actually decreased. Interestingly, the same effect has also been seen in Israel and Brazil when their Doctors went on strike. Much of this can however be attributed to the fact that operations were delayed until after the strikes were over.
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1497/ One square mile of rainforest has more types of butterflies than all of North America. And every second mankind destroys two football pitches of this precious
resource. Find out more here -
1498/ An aircraft carrier travels about 6 inches on one gallon of fuel.
1499/ If you look at a rainbow with Polaroid sunglasses and rotate the lenses around the line of sight, part of the rainbow will disappear! This is because when light is
reflected at certain angles it becomes polarized), and it has been found that the rainbow angle is close to that angle of reflection at which unpolarized light (sunlight) is almost completely polarized.
1500/ An average person exhales approximately 2.2 pounds of carbon dioxide per day. In a year this equates to 803 pounds which is 0.3584 long tons, 0.4015 short
tons or 0.3641 metric tons.
[ 本帖最后由 Danshot 于 2008-5-1 16:13 编辑 ] |
发表于 2008-5-1 10:43
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