Thursday, July 29, 2010
Amazing Facts..
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
A crocodile cannot stick out its tongue.
A dragonfly has a life span of 24 hours.
A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds.
A "jiffy" is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
A snail can sleep for three years.
Al Capo ne's business card said he was a used furniture dealer.
All 50 states are listed across the top of the Lincoln Memorial on the
back of the $5 bill.
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.
Babies are born without kneecaps; they don't appear until the child
reaches 2 to 6 years of age.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds. Dogs only have about 10.
"Dreamt" is the only English word that ends in the letters "mt".
February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full
moon.
In the last 4,000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.
If the population of China walked past you, in single file, the line
would never end because of the rate of reproduction.
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.
Maine is the only state whose name is just one syllable.
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 die! sel
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 the same whether they are
read left to right or right to left (palindromes).
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 Chewable 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.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
Amazing Earth Facts 1
1. What is the hottest place on Earth?
Count one wrong if you guessed Death Valley in California. True enough on many days. But El Azizia in Libya recorded a temperature of 136 degrees Fahrenheit (57.8 Celsius) on Sept. 13, 1922 — the hottest ever measured. In Death Valley, it got up to 134 Fahrenheit on July 10, 1913.
2. And the coldest place around here?
Far and away, the coldest temperature ever measured on Earth was -129 Fahrenheit (-89 Celsius) at Vostok, Antarctica, on July 21, 1983.
3. What makes thunder?
If you thought, “Lightning!” then hats off to you. But I had a more illuminating answer in mind. The air around a lightning bolt is superheated to about five times the temperature of the Sun. This sudden heating causes the air to expand faster than the speed of sound, which compresses the air and forms a shock wave; we hear it as thunder.
4. Can rocks float?
In a volcanic eruption, the violent separation of gas from lava produces a “frothy” rock called pumice, loaded with gas bubbles. Some of it can float, geologists say. I’ve never seen this happen, and I’m thankful for that.
5. Can rocks grow?
Yes, but observing the process is less interesting than watching paint dry. Rocks called iron-manganese crusts grow on mountains under the sea. The crusts precipitate material slowly from seawater, growing about 1 millimeter every million years. Your fingernails grow about the same amount every two weeks.
6. How much space dust falls to Earth each year?
Estimates vary, but the USGS says at least 1,000 million grams, or roughly 1,000 tons of material enters the atmosphere every year and makes its way to Earths surface. One group of scientists claims microbes rain down from space, too, and that extraterrestrial organisms are responsible for flu epidemics. There’s been no proof of this, and I’m not holding my breath.
7. How far does regular dust blow in the wind?
A 1999 study showed that African dust finds its way to Florida and can help push parts of the state over the prescribed air quality limit for particulate matter set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The dust is kicked up by high winds in North Africa and carried as high as 20,000 feet (6,100 meters), where it’s caught up in the trade winds and carried across the sea. Dust from China makes its way to North America, too.
8. Where is the worlds highest waterfall?
The water of Angel Falls in Venezuela drops 3,212 feet (979 meters).
9. What two great American cities are destined to merge?
The San Andreas fault, which runs north-south, is slipping at a rate of about 2 inches (5 centimeters) per year, causing Los Angeles to move towards San Francisco. Scientists forecast LA will be a suburb of the City by the Bay in about 15 million years.
10. Is Earth a sphere?
Because the planet rotates and is more flexible than you might imagine, it bulges at the midsection, creating a sort of pumpkin shape. The bulge was lessening for centuries but now, suddenly, it is growing, a recent study showed. Accelerated melting of Earth’s glaciers is taking the blame for the gain in equatorial girth.