Weird Facts 3

* About 22% of the earth's original forest coverage remains. Western Europe has lost 98% or so of its primary forests; Asia 94%; Africa 92%; Oceania 78%; North America 66%, and South America 54%. Approximately 45% of the world's tropical forests, originally covering 1.4 billion hectares, have disappeared in the last few decades. (taken from a Greenpeace website, but the figures are accurate to the best of my knowledge)

* In 1950, rain forests covered about 14% of the earth's land surface. By 2001, this had diminished to 6%. Approximately half of the world's estimated 10 million species of life are believed to be found only in rain forests. The Amazon constitutes about 40% of the remaining rain forests, but it is disappearing at the rate of 7 football fields per minute - that's 20,000 km2 (7700 mi2) per year and increasing. From 1970 to 2000, an area the size of France or Texas was deforested by ranchers, farmers, loggers (mostly illegal), miners and developments of various kinds. The population of the Amazon is now over 20 million and rapidly increasing, since there is great poverty in Brazil, and the forest is seen as a vast area of land to be cleared and occupied.

* The density of a Neutron Star, which is formed by the gravitational collapse of stars 1.5 to 3 times the sun's mass, is a mind-twisting 100 million tonnes per cubic centimeter (about the size of a sugar cube). They are about 100 km in diameter (estimates range from 20 to 300 km), which means you'd have to be traveling at half the speed of light (300,000 km/second (186,000 miles/sec)) in order to escape their gravitational force of 100 billion times that of the earth. They are over 150 times as hot as the sun, and can rotate 1000 times per second! For a great summary of these weird denizens of our universe, see: http://www-astronomy.mps.ohio-state.edu/~ryden/ast162_5/notes21.html

* The male seahorse is the only husband in the world that carries the babies until they are ready to be born. In an interesting reversal of roles, the female deposits her eggs into the male's body and then retires from the family scene. After giving birth to live sea-horse babies, a male is ready to start all over again the very same day.

* Bacteria weigh about one trillionth of a gram ( about 400 trillion bacteria per pound). Viruses are typically 1000 times lighter still!!

* Desert animals have developed many fascinating ways of living in extremely harsh conditions. Of the most interesting of these belongs to the desert grouse of the Nabib desert, in SW Africa: the male uses a sponge-like mat of fluffy breast feathers to soak up water which it carries many miles each day to its chicks, who for safety reasons live nowhere near the water hole. The chicks simply lick the water off their father's breast-feather water-carrier!

* The world's fastest computer is the Japanese World Simulation Supercomputer, built to handle the huge amount of number crunching needed to handle climate change models. It zips along at over 35 "Terraflops" (trillion calculations per second) - 7 times faster than the fastest American machines.

* Dogs cannot perspire. To cool themselves off in hot weather or after exercise, they pant - i.e. they evaporate water from their tongue. Since this method is less efficient than perspiring all over, dogs can become overheated more easily - so it's not a smart idea to leave your dog in the car when you go shopping on a warm day!!

* Cats have been domesticated for thousands of years. In that time, their voices have become less harsh - more pleasing to the humans who serve them. A recent careful study which compared the mews, snarls and hisses of house cats with the sounds that wild cats of similar sizes make, found that the house cats made noises considerably more pleasant to the human ear. Although they can make most of their wishes known to their human house-mates, they cannot in any sense of the word "talk", contrary to the claims of many ardent cat fanciers.....

* A good way to restore the sound of scratched CDs is to coat them with a thin layer of wax or silicone: the data is still present no matter how many scratches there are, but they interfere with the ability of the laser to read the discs. The wax, silicone or other clear coating fills up the scratches, making it possible for the laser to do its job again.

* Until just a few years ago, data transmission on the Internet was so slow it was often called the "World Wide Wait". With a good 56k modem, rates of 10k (ie, 10 thousand "bytes" (a bite is the equivalent of one letter or number)) per second are to be expected, and with a LAN or T-1 connection, speeds of 200k are not uncommon. However, a company in Japan is working towards commercial speeds of up to 2.5 GIGAbytes per second (ie, about 10,000 times the top speed most WWW users can hope for today!). To date, they have achieved 800 megabytes per second - still not too shabby (that's more than twice the complete encyclopedia Britannica each second, by the way)!

* The school bus might be the safest method of travel ever invented. In the USA, where almost a thousand children are killed on their way to and from school each year, on the average only 5 die while traveling in school buses. The most dangerous way to get to or from school is inside a car driven by teenage classmates (no surprise there!!).

* One in 5 children in the world have never seen the inside of a school room - but the "developed" world doesn't exactly come off smelling like roses either, when the chips are counted up: in places such as Canada and other "g-7" countries, 40% or more of the adult population is "functionally illiterate" - i.e., they can read a cereal box, street sign or parking ticket, but give them a copy of "Great Expectations" and they would be as lost as Jaques Cousteau on Mars. (Force them to read a couple of pages of "Ulysses" and their heads would most likely explode......)

* A recent (released June 2002) research project has found organic farming to be a viable alternative to the high-tech farming methods of most of the "developed" world. On the average, yields were only 20% less (worst for potatoes at 38%, best for corn grown in a legume rotation, at only a few %) than chemical-based methods, and the amount of energy used is FAR less. In regions where there is surplus labor, organic methods would in many cases much more economical and sustainable.

* Figures released by Great Britain's Office of National Statistics show that in 2000, one in six people aged over 16 was caring for a sick or elderly person and that one in five households had a carer. This is a problem worldwide that will get worse as the "baby boom" generation grows older.

* The Romany (also called "gypsies") (Europe's largest minority, despite systematic persecution) appear to have originated as a branch or branches of the Dom tribal group of Northern India, which were displaced by the invasion of the Aryans about 1500 B.C. They left India around 500 A.D.. One branch migrated to Syria, while another settled in Byzantium about 900 A.D., and arrived in Europe in the 13th to 15th centuries. Long regarded in ill favor by the firmly settled peoples of Europe, they have a rich culture and language, with an extensive body of oral history and legends that rivals any of their persecutors. See http://www.paulpolansky.nstemp.com/gypsies.htmfor some interesting background.

* The Aryan peoples, lauded as the "master race" by Nazis and their modern offshoots, were in fact a barbarian destroyer of civilizations in their early history. For example, the Indus Valley civilization, perhaps the most brilliant of its time, was destroyed by a massive Aryan invasion around 1500 B.C. Although this invasion is disputed by Hindu nationalists in India, there is ample evidence supporting it. They spread out from an area in what is now northern Iran, and most of the languages from Europe to northern India belong to the "Indo-European" language family.

* The graffiti in ancient Pompey, which was preserved very nicely by being buried in ash from the volcano Vesuvius in 79 A.D., included graphic pornographic poetry.

* While global warming will cause desertification in many parts of the world, it may also cause much of Europe to become so cold it would be uninhabitable. Northern Europe is currently warmed by the North Atlantic Drift - the continuation of the Gulf Stream, which wraps around Ireland and Scandinavia. This current is fed by heavy, high-salinity water sinking in the arctic, because of the freezing of sea water to form ice in the winter (when salt water freezes, the salt ions are forced out, which is why sea ice melts into fresh water!). If more sea ice melts due to higher average temperatures, the salinity of the surface water will be raised to the point where it will no longer sink, and thus no longer feed the Gulf Stram/North Atlantic Drift. If this occurs, Europe will no longer be indirectly warmed by the heat of the Caribbean sun, and it will be chilled to the point where another ice age is possible in the northern parts of the

* An adult of the smallest humming bird in the world weighs less than a penny.

* Although the water which reaches Antarctica is warming up, causing some of the major ice shelfs to become unstable and shrink, the air over that continent is actually cooling, due to the famous "hole" (actually only a thinning) in the ozone layer: less ultraviolet light is absorbed in the upper atmosphere by the ozone (when it is, the result is warming), which means more is simply reflected back into space after bouncing off of the polar ice. The net result is a cooling of the atmosphere that extends from the stratosphere all the way down to the surface - due to vertical mixing of the air caused by the "polar vortex" winds.

* Many of the tools we use are designed for right-handed people. Every year, thousands of left-handed people die in accidents resulting from problems involving right-handed tools!

* One ragweed plant can release as many as a billion grains of pollen per year.

* The hearts of many mammals (such as us!) beat approximately 3 billion times during their owner's lifetime.

* The average human body contains over 100,000 km (60,000 miles) of arteries, veins and capillaries.

* One of the fastest production cars around, is a certain brand of Lamburghini which i can't recall the name of, which can zip along at 330+ kph. It has 580 horses under the bonnet, can go from 0 to 100 in 3.5 seconds, and costs less than half a million dollars (but that's USD...). The debate over which is REALLY the fastest production car (ie, one that is produced for anyone to buy, according to a standard plan, as opposed to vehicles that are either custom-built or modified from their original factory condition), is amazinly complex - i won't bore you with the technical details, but suffice it to say that consensus has NOT been reached in this matter yet!!!

* Famines in many countries in Africa have been made considerably worse by the insistence of countries that lend them money, that they reduce agricultural subsidies to subsistence farmers, as well as cut back on strategic grain reserves. This is especially ironic in light of a certain superpower's recent massive increase in subsidies to giant agri-businessess, in an apparent bid to protect domestic food producers from the competition from counties such as those in Africa which are now suffering from bad advice to do the opposite!! (hey, this one may be a bit political, but it is still a "wierd fact", even if it isn't very funny!)

* The universe appears to be expanding at an ever-faster rate (i.e., there will be no "big crunch" at the end of the universe!). This seems to be due to a force Einstein called the "cosmological constant" - a repulsive force that operates primarily at huge scales, in opposition to normal gravity. Interestingly enough, the theory of a speeding-up universe was first supported (in 1999) by observations made by scientists at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem - that Einstein himself helped found!!

* Nuclear pasta (G. Watanabe, K. Sato, K. Yasuoka, T. Ebisuzaki): The formation of neutron stars from collapsing supernovae includes some of the most dramatic processes in stellar evolution. In a neutron star, high densities cause matter to form a uniform liquid of neutrons, but just before that happens, nuclei form rod-like and slab-like structures and bubbles, termed nuclear “pasta”. The existence of pasta phases change the dynamics of neutron stars and how they behave astrophysically. New detailed simulations have shown how hot nucleic matter can form the various pasta phases as it cools. The matter seems to pass through a series of phases starting from uniform matter and heading through spherical, cylinder-like, slab-like phases and then as more uniform matter with holes that are cylindrical and then spherical before the whole lot becomes uniform again at a lower temperature.

* Until the 16th century, carrots were black, green, red and purple - until a Dutch horticulturist discovered some mutant yellow seeds that produced a freaky orange color that caught on big, worldwide!!

* Scientists estimate that there are at least 3 x 10E16 stars in the universe - that's 15 million stars for every man woman and child on our crowded little planet!!

* Some species of buzzard attract mates by eating cow dung, which contains a yellow pigment that turns the area around their eyes into a yellow mask! Scientists postulate that to a female buzzard, a bright yellow mask proves that her mate is healthy enough to overcome the multitudes of parasites present in such malodorous fare (or perhaps its just the "macho" thing for buzzards to do...?).

* The world's biggest shrimp, a 14-inch specimen of a deep-water species that dwells in the Gulf of Mexico, is proudly displayed at the Old Spanish Fort Museum in Pascagoula, Mississippi.

* Bacteria have been found from 40 miles up in the stratosphere to 7km below the ocean's bottom. According to recent research done at the University of Georgia, there are perhaps 5 x 10E30 (i.e., 5 followed by 30 zeros!!) individual bacteria on Earth. To put this into perspective, if each of them were to grow to the size of a period (.) and they were to be lined up, they would reach over 50 billion light years, or nearly twice the diameter of the known universe.

* Several lizards, such as the green anole, use their lungs to help them hear: they can detect vibrations though the air in their lungs when full.

* One of the funniest pages on the internet, especially if a) you are at least halfway to becoming a "computer geek", and b) can overlook a couple of naughty articles mixed in with the good ones, is to be found at http://www.klawitter.de/enhumor.html#100bugs.

* The average cost of a wedding in the USA is pushing $20,000, with half of that related to the reception (average attendance: 175 people) Even relatively small items such as the bridesmaids' corsages can run nearly $200 each! See http://www.theknot.com/pl_budgetavg.shtml for the gory details.

* The average cost of dying in North America has tripled in the past 15 years: the average funeral now runs almost $6000. This makes the going price for scattering your ashes into outer space (a paltry $4800) look like a bargain! (of course, while you get perpetual care at a cemetery, your orbiting ashes are burned up upon re-entry after only 6 years.....)

* Tiger eye, a semi-precious gem known for its changeable colors when tilted , comes in 4 colors: red, blue, green (the most uncommon), and yellow - the color that inspired its name.

* It is impossible to lick your elbow (unless you are double-jointed, or have, like Houdini, perfected the art of dislocating your joints (which he did to facilitate quick straight jacket escapes)).

* The great escape-artist Houdini could dislocate almost any joint in his body. He was immensely fit: one of his best-known escapes was when he was thrown into the Chicago River (clad only in a small bathing suit) in mid-winter in a trunk with a hidden release mechanism: things went well until he surfaced only to find he had miscalculated for the current and could not find the hole in the ice he was to emerge through. He dove back to the bottom to see if he could see the hole, with no luck. Back at the surface again he found a small pocket of air to breathe for a few seconds, after which he continued the search for the hole, which he found after nearly 10 minutes in the icy water. Most people would not last more than a few minutes under such circumstances. (if you doubt this, try it - with suitable supervision by divers in dry suits!!)

* Most lists of so-called "weird facts" on the internet contain an amusing cocktail of "urban legends", dubious anecdotes, and strange-but-untrue "facts" seemingly made up on the spot just to spice up the list. A good example is the well-known classic "A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why" - totally false, yet for some reason repeated as often as possible on the World Wide Web! Another oldie but goodie is the one about sneezing that says if you try too hard to keep your eyes open during a sneeze, they will pop out (i've tried this one personally!). I try hard to keep the offerings on this list falsehood-free, but if you see something you know to be erroneous, please let me know!

* Australian ("Esturine") crocodiles have salt glands in their tongue. This means that if they swallow too much salt, they can excrete it through their tongue. Alligators and their Caiman relatives don't have salt glands so they are mainly restricted to fresh water. The Estuarine crocodile has been found up to 1,350 kilometers out to sea. More great info on Crocs and 'gators can be found at http://www.hartleyscreek.com/facts-myths.htm

* Crocodiles can swim up to 25 km/hr when attacking, but cannot outrun people or horses, as is widely reported. A good-sized croc can only manage 10 km/hr on land, while a person being chased by one should be capable of over 3 times that speed!

* Bet you just tried to lick your elbow a few minutes ago!!

* People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because in the Dark Ages, it was thought that when you sneezed, a brief opportunity for devils to enter your mouth was created.

* When you sneeze, your heart stops for a tiny fraction of a second.

* It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.

* A pregnant goldfish is called a twit. (i'm trying to limit the number of absolutely useless facts on this list, but this was just too silly to pass up!!)

* More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.

* Rats and horses can't vomit.

* Cockroaches are an ancient (predating dinosaurs) life-form that can even withstand a nuclear holocaust because their DNA is not affected nearly as much as other species, by radiation.

* A single female German Cockroach can produce up to 100,000 progeny in a single year (for details, see http://pested.unl.edu/chapter3.htm)

* The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.

* These are extremely rare occurrences, but 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.

* Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.

* Wearing headphones can increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.

* In every episode of the television program Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.

* The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

* Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.

* An estimated 23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their buttocks.

* The glossy look to lipstick comes from fish scales, which are iridescent.

* Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.

* Estimates of the number of species presently sharing our planet with us range from 7 to 100 million (about 15 million is a pretty good bet, IMHO). Of these, only about 1.5 million are presently known to science.

* Of the 1.5 million or so species known to science, over half of them are insects - and 300,000 of these are beetles. One saucy biologist is noted for his quip that "God must have an inordinate fondness for beetles." In one 1980 study of just 19 trees in Panama, fully 80 percent of the 1,200 beetle species discovered were previously unknown to science - so we've only scratched the surface so far!

* As scientists begin investigating relatively little-known ecosystems, like the soil and the deep sea, "surprising" discoveries of undiscovered species have become commonplace. Small wonder: A single square meter of temperate forest can hold 200,000 mites and tens of thousands of other invertebrates. A similar-sized plot from tropical grasslands can hold 32 million nematodes, and one gram of the same soil might hold 90 million bacteria and other microbes.

* The song "White Christmas", as sung by Bing Crosby, has sold over 100 million records over the years, making it the most popular recording of all time.

* In Fiji, owning a specimen of one of the most famous mollusc shells, the "Golden Cowrie", was once punishable by death, unless you were a Chief: they wore them on a necklace as a symbol of their authority.

* In 350, Pope Julius I declared that Christ’s birth would be celebrated on December 25. There is little doubt that he was trying to make it as painless as possible for pagans to convert to Christianity. The new religion went down a bit easier, knowing that their feasts would not be taken away from them. The date had been celebrated in many religions and traditions, in connection with the winter solstice and the birthday of various gods and goddesses.

* The earliest record of an evergreen being decorated in a Christian celebration was in 1521 in the Alsace region of Germany.

* The largest animal ever to live on the planet is the Blue Whale, which grows up to 174 tonnes - that's 80 full-grown elephants - an entire herd! This true Leviathan is also the loudest: its calls reach 188 decibels, and carry hundreds of miles. For comparison, a jet engine, should you be standing next to it, is only 140 decibels.

* The most ancient life form on earth may be a form of slime mold found on the scorching NW coast of Australia: it forms structures called "stromatolites" that have been found in rocks estimated to be nearly 3 billion years old!

* According to astronomers' latest calculations, the universe is approximately 13 billion years old. By comparison, our species is said to be less than 100,000 years old, and our civilization, less than 5,000 years.

* When a water-based solution is diluted, the molecules of the dissolved subtance(s) do not move further apart, as might be expected. Instead, they clump together - the more dilute the solution, the larger the clumps become. This may help explain why some homeopathic treatments (it is believed by homeopaths that the more dilute a solution is, the more powerful it becomes) actually seem to work. See http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991532 for further details.

* Obsidian (volcanic glass with ultra-small crystals of quartz) tools many thousands of years old are often sharper than the sharpest steel scalpels used by today's surgeons. Incisions made with these ancient knives heal surprisingly quickly and leave almost no scar.

* Of the approximately 1.4 billion cubic Km of water on earth, only 3% is fresh water. Of this 3%, groundwater is about 20 percent, Ice & glaciers about 79 percent, and all the water in the air, soil, lakes, rivers and living creatures, only 1 percent.

* The total weight of all the bacteria on earth is estimated (according to researchers at the University of Georgia), to be about 5 x 10E14 kg, or roughly the weight of the United Kingdom.

* The height of the Eiffel Tower varies by as much as six inches, depending on the temperature.

* The leaves of the water lily Victoria regia grow as large as eight feet across.

* The annual harvest of an entire coffee tree is required to make one pound of ground coffee.

* In 1642, Dr. John Lightfoot wrote that man was created at 9:00 a.m., and in 1644, he wrote that the world was created on Sunday, September 12, 3928 B.C.. In 1650, the Irish Archbishop, James Ussher, published his computations that the world was created on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 B.C., beginning at sunset of the 22nd. These dates, their relationship to each other, and their methodology, are widely misquoted.

* A woodchuck breathes only 10 times per hour while hibernating. An active woodchuck breathes 2,100 times per hour.

* In an average acre of green land, you would expect to find about 50,000 spiders.

* A mosquito has 47 "teeth" that enable it to drill through your skin in a half second flat.

* When diving, the peregrine falcon can reach a speed of over 200 miles (322 km) per hour. Their numbers were drastically reduced in the late 1960s because DDT, a very toxic pesticide, accumulated in their bodies and caused their eggshells to be so fragile they broke while being incubated. When DDT was later banned, peregrine populations rebounded, but they are still not as common as they used to be.

* One square inch of the sun's surface shines with the intensity of 300,000 candles.

* Should you be so inclined, you would have to fold a piece of American currency back and forth about 4,000 times before it would easily tear.

* The roots from one plant of common oats can total a quarter mile in cumulative length. They can reach down a hundred feet to find water when the water table is low.

* During one growing season, an oak tree can give off 28,000 gallons of moisture. This "transpiration" of water by trees is an important factor in providing moisture and rain for local climates. When forests are reduced in any given region, there is less water in the air, and less rain as well - hence deforestation is a major contributor to drought. Also, deforestation leads to rapid erosion of the soil they hold in place, inhibiting the reforestation process, an contributes greatly to flooding, since instead of being absorbed into the forest floor, rain simply quickly runs off the land and into streams and rivers.

* The cheetah is the only member of the cat family that has non-retractable claws. Other cats retract their claws to keep them sharp, like carving knives kept in a sheath --the cheetah's claws are designed not for cutting but for traction. This is an animal biologically designed to run. It can tear up the turf at up to 115+ km (70 miles) per hour, but only at a cost: it is much lighter than most big cats, and its dull claws cannot rip open tough hides such as wildebeest. However, these "macho" characteristics are not necessary, since antelope-like animals such as gazelles and springbok, which are small and thin-skinned, are its main food source. No lion alive could catch one of these, except by sheer luck!

* The heart of a giraffe weighs 25 pounds, is two feet long, and has walls 3 inches thick.

* Gold is malleable enough that one ounce of it can be beaten into a thin sheet that covers 100 square feet.

* In ancient Egypt, certain baboons were mummified when they died.

* The world's strongest recorded gust of wind (not counting tornadoes) was clocked on the summit of Mount Washington by Observatory crew on April 12, 1934 at 231 miles per hour. Other observations of slightly faster speeds have been made since then, but they lack credibility because of the reliability of the instruments used.

* It was widely believed in the Middle Ages that the heart was the center of human intelligence.

* According to Aristotle, whose views were adopted by some theologians and held sway for hundreds of years, the brain's primary purpose was to cool the blood.

* Even if up to 80 percent of it is removed, the human liver will continue to function and will grow again to its original size. A healthy individual can grow a good chunk of new liver in about 3 months.

* The ancient Romans were fond of eating mice. [They also liked to eat until they threw up: any relationship between these two facts, i wonder?]

* Pain travels at a speed of 350 feet per second.

* Sunglasses were invented by the Chinese in the 13th century.

* The total weight of all insects on Earth is twelve times greater than the weight of all people.

* To ward off enemies, the horned lizard can squirt blood from its eyelids.

* Bats consume 400-500 mosquitoes an hour. [and to think that some folks STILL don't like them....]

* In a house fire, an open-framed steel - studded house will collapse faster than a wooden house will: the steel melts in the intense heat.

* One ounce of the silk that forms a spider's web could stretch 2,000 miles.

* Spider silk, by weight, is stronger than steel. Scientists are genetically engineering a breed of goat so that its milk can be turned into spider silk, then spun into ultra-strong ropes.

* There are more than 3,500 living species of cockroaches. Scientists estimate that there may be over 5 million species of insects, a surprising number of the total being beetles.

* The World Trade Centre towers were designed to collapse in a pancake-like fashion, instead of simply falling over on their sides. This design feature saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives on Sept. 11, 2001, when they were destroyed by terrorists.

* There are more caribou in Alaska than there are people. [Of course if ANWR is exploited for oil, this may change...]

* Robots in Japan pay union dues. [but they NEVER go on strike!]

* Blue whale calves do not leave their mother until they are about 13m (45 feet) long. They can drink as much as 80 kg (180 lbs) of milk each day.

* Polar bears have black skin. They appear white because their hair is colorless and hollow, and so reflects the sunlight.

* At a steady jogger's pace of six miles per hour, it would take 173 days to go around the equatorial circumference of Earth, and over five years to go around Jupiter, the largest planet.

* Botanically speaking, "true" berries include the grape, tomato, and eggplant, but not raspberries or blackberries, which are drupes (i.e., clusters of small berries).

* Many of the foods we normally call "vegetables", such as squash & pumpkin, tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and eggplant, are actually fruits. Anything that contains seeds in a pulpy matrix, is a fruit. (if the seeds are enclosed in a separate casing, they are nuts.)

* A meal of beans, corn, tomatoes, squash, green peppers, zucchini loaf, cucumbers, with pumkin pie for dessert, would contain no vegetables at all: beans are legumes, corn is a grain, and all the rest are fruits.

* The rubble from the World Trade buildings in New York totaled nearly a million tons (900,000 tonnes). The site is now contaminated by asbestos and other toxins, and will require extensive clean-up before anything else can be built there.

* Swimming at its top speed of 25 knots, an adult blue whale expends 3,400 horsepower.

* The feet of the gecko are so sticky they can hold onto a cieling upside down, from a single toe. Spiderman eat your heart out!!!

* Worldwide, about 40 square miles of land are transformed into desert each day, mainly in sub-Saheel Africa (i.e., the area just south of the Sahara desert), and in China. [NOTE: In 2002, due to changing climate patterns and successful tree-planting campaigns, this area just south of the Sahara Desert is now starting to become greener: in this part of the world at least, the desert is losing!!]

* A person living to age 75 will have slept about 220,000 hours -- or about 23 years. [About 20% of that time will be spent dreaming, which is almost 5 years' worth of dreams!!]

* Between dawn and dusk, an acre of peas can increase in weight by up to 50 percent, owing to the vegetable's high capacity for absorption. [ Don't quote me on this one.]

* The total amount of skin covering the human body weighs six pounds, making it the body's largest organ.

* Since the moon has no atmosphere, footprints left there by astronauts should remain visible for at least ten million years.

* It was only after John F. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963 that the U.S. Congress enacted a law making it a federal crime to specifically kill, kidnap, or assault the President, Vice-President, or President-elect.

* By day 23 a human embryo has the makings of a heart, brain, and spinal cord.

* A shark can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.

* The albatross can glide on air currents for several days and can even sleep while in flight.

* Nicaragua had 396 different rulers between 1839 and 1855, their average reign lasting less than 15 days.

* The sperm whale's intestines are over 450 feet long.

* A human's small intestine is about 22 feet long.

* The brightest star in the night sky, Sirius [the "Dog Star"] gives out twenty-six times as much light as the Sun, which by the time it reaches us is still bright enough to make it our planet's second-brightest star (the sun being the brightest).

* Prior to World War II, when guards were posted at the fence, anyone could wander right up to the front door of the U.S. President's residence, the White House.

* Each of the more than 200 lashes on each eye is shed every three to five months.

* Rain has never been recorded in some parts of the Atacama Desert in Chile.

* Each year about $200 million worth of U.S. stamps go unused, finding their way into the albums of some 22 million stamp collectors (this factoid dates from around 1995)

* To keep from being separated while sleeping, sea otters tie themselves together with kelp, often drifting miles out to sea during the night [Now that's what i call a "bonding experience"!]

* The oldest national flag still in existence, that of Denmark, dates back to the 13th century.

* The sun is ninety-three million miles (about 150 million km) from Earth, yet it is two hundred seventy (270) times closer than the next nearest star.

* Just twenty seconds' worth of fuel remained when Apollo 11's lunar module landed on the moon.

* The amniotic fluid that surrounds a baby in the womb is completely replaced every three hours.

* Mailing an entire building has been illegal in the U.S. since 1916 when a man mailed a 40,000 pound brick house across Utah to avoid high freight rates.

* A bald eagle's nest can be 12 feet deep and 10 feet wide.

* The tinamou, a South American game bird resembling the quail, lays eggs having such a highly polished, glasslike surface that they reflect images like a mirror.

* The Earth is home to more than 300 million cubic miles of water. This volume could cover the United States to a depth of 100 miles (160 km).

* A solar day on Mercury, from sunrise to sunset, lasts about six Earth months.

* A horse has sixteen muscles in each ear, which allows it to rotate its ears a full 180 degrees. (and we think we're clever if we can just wiggle ours!!)

* Human skin sheds continually, and the outer layer of skin is entirely replaced every 28 days.

* The Earth travels around the sun at about 67,000 miles per hour.

* One type of mushroom, the Ganoderma Applanatum, can live for fifty years and grow to a diameter of two feet. It is also Tom Volk's Fungus of the Month for March 1999. See http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/ for a LOT of great Fungus info (Tom's a great party guest: he's a real fun gi....)

* It takes more than two tons of South African rock to produce less than an ounce of gold.

* The burrowing rate of the gopher is equivalent to a human digging a tunnel eighteen inches in diameter and seven miles long in a period of ten hours.

* An eagle's beak can close with a force of 350 pounds per square inch.

* The umbrella originated in ancient Egypt, where it was used by the royal family and nobles as a symbol of rank.

* Due to its reclining S shape, the sun rises on the Pacific Coast and sets on the Atlantic Coast in the Isthmus of Panama.

* A horse's heart is capable of pumping 200 liters (about 50 gallons) of blood per minute -- enough to fill the gas tank on a pickup truck three times faster than a gas pump would.

* Payment for English trial lawyers is considered an honorarium -- so there is no legal obligation for clients to pay them.

* The moon appears to revolve around the Earth from east to west, but it actually moves from west to east -- because the Earth's rotation is faster than the moon's revolution.

* There are locusts that have an adult life-span of only a few weeks -- after having lived in the ground as grubs for fifteen years.

* The longest non-talking film ever made was Andy Warhol's Sleep. It consists solely of a man sleeping for eight hours. Remember - this is the same guy that made a fortune from stencils of Campell's tomato soup cans.

* The quitest piece of music in the world is John Cage's 1950s piece called "4:33 (short for 4 minutes and 33 seconds", which consists of a person sitting down in front of a piano for that length of time and then leaving. His idea was that the sounds the audience made would become the "music". He also wrote the famous "Symphony for 8 short wave radios".

* A female pigeon can't lay an egg unless she sees another pigeon. If another pigeon isn't available, her own reflection in a mirror will suffice.

* When tea was first introduced in the American colonies, many people -- not knowing what to do with the stuff -- served the tea leaves with sugar or syrup and threw away the water they had been boiled in. (Heck, some folks even dressed up like Injuns and threw a bunch of it in Boston's Harbour.....)

* The people of Iceland read more books per capita than any other people in the world.

* The fastest temperature change on record is a rise of 49 degrees Fahrenheit in two minutes, from -4 degrees F to 45 degrees F. It happened in Spearfish, South Dakota, U.S.

* Sponges eat by filtering food out of the water that passes through them. In order to eat enough food to gain an ounce of body weight, they must filter one ton of water.

* The temperature in eastern Siberia can get so cold that the moisture in a person's breath can freeze in the air and fall to the ground.

* The easiest way to tell the difference between -50 F and -60 F is: When you spit at -50, it freezes with a sharp crack when it hits the ground. When you spit at -60, you hear 2 distinct cracks, the first one being the spit freezing in mid-air.

* The Egyptians trained baboons to wait on tables. We now use unemployed actors for this task.

* Up to 150 tons of meteorite fragments slam into Earth every year.

* The Amazon River pushes so much water into the Atlantic Ocean that, more than one hundred miles at sea, off the mouth of the river, one can dip fresh water out of the ocean.

* Most people, by age sixty, have lost 50 percent of their taste buds and 40 percent of their ability to smell. This accounts for the propensity of older ladies to use WAY too much perfume.....

* Kernels of popcorn have been found in the graves of pre-Columbian Indians. [i wonder if the quality of the average movie was any better then than it is now....]

* The human body consists of about 60 trillion cells. Each cell has about 10,000 times as many molecules as the Milky Way has stars. (so when someone says they love you with every molecule of their body, that's a LOT of love!!)

* Rain contains vitamin B-12. [a good thing to know if you are a strict vegetarian!]

* The heaviest known meteorite to fall to Earth weighed about 60 tons.

* The largest landfill in the world is in Fresh Kills, New York. More than 14,000 tons of garbage is dumped into it each day.

* Lightning strikes the earth somewhere more than seventeen million times every day, or about two hundred times every second.

* New York City's Central Park is nearly twice as big as the world's second-smallest country, Monaco.

* Bees must collect the nectar from two thousand flowers to make one tablespoonful of honey.

* Since its discovery in 1930, Pluto has had time to cover only about 20 percent of its orbit, and the last time it was in its present position was before the American Revolution.

* Sharks have a sixth sense that enables them to detect bio-electrical fields radiated by other sea creatures and to navigate by sensing changes in the earth's magnetic field.

* Seventy percent of the dust in your home consists of shed human skin particles.

* "Dust allergies" are mostly due to the doo-doo of dust mites, which feed off of the pieces of skin that dust mostly is. [Guess that one comes from the "revolting-but-true" file!!]

* In current existence there are more handwritten letters from George Washington than from John F. Kennedy.

* Rainforests cover less than 7 percent of the earth's surface, yet they receive almost half of all the rain that falls on land.

* Scientists estimate that the mighty Amazon rain forest, often called the "lungs of the planet" because of the oxygen they produce, may disappear entirely inside of 40 years, and that the point of no return may be reached within 15 years. [This, circa 2000]

* The moon is one million times drier than the Gobi Desert.

* Ten minutes of one hurricane contains enough energy to match the nuclear stockpiles of the world.

* Before 1800 there were no separately designed shoes for right and left feet.

* One cord of wood -- that's a 4x4x8 foot stack -- produces only 250 copies of the Sunday New York Times.

* The world's smallest tree is the dwarf willow, which grows to two inches tall on the tundra of Greenland.

* There are three times as many households in the United States without telephones as there are without television sets.

* The average human produces a quart of saliva a day -- about 10,000 gallons in a lifetime.

* If a bolt of lightning travels at speeds of about one hundred million feet (30 million meters) per second, or ninety million miles per hour, just imagine how fast GREASED lightning is!!

* Nerve impulses to and from the brain travel as fast as 170 miles per hour.

* The embryos of tiger sharks fight each other while in their mother's womb, the survivor being the baby shark that is born.

* If the world's total land area was divided equally among the world's people, each person would get 8.5 hectares (about 21 acres) [1997]

* A lightning bolt generates temperatures five times hotter than those found at the sun's surface.

* A dolphin's hearing is so acute that it can pick up an underwater sound from fifteen miles away.

* Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.

* An inch of snow falling evenly on one acre of ground is equivalent to about 2,715 gallons of water.

* The U.S. shreds seven thousand tons of worn-out currency each year.

* The eye of the giant squid is fifteen inches in diameter -- the size of a basketball.

* The largest volcano known is on Mars: Olympus Mons, 370 miles wide and 79,000 feet high, is almost three times higher than Mount Everest.

* Dragonflies may have as many as twenty thousand lenses in each eye.

* Each square inch of human skin contains seventy-two feet of nerves.

* The Amazon River moves 23 percent of the earth's fresh water.

* Proportionally speaking, the earth is smoother than a billiard ball.

* The human body's immune system is able to respond to as many as 10 billion different types of viruses, if there ever were to be that many species of them.

* Alaska is the northernmost, westernmost, and easternmost state in the U.S. Northernmost and westernmost are self-explanatory, but how can it be easternmost, too? The Aleutian Islands extend past the 180 degree line of longitude, putting them in the Eastern Hemisphere

* Soccer players who head the ball 10 or more times per game have an average IQ of 103. Those who head the ball once or less have an average IQ of 112. [wonder what the average footballer's IQ is, before and after their career on the field?]

* Before dolphins initiate any group action, the pod floats together just below the surface of the water and holds an impromptu "conference," during which each individual animal gets a chance to vocalize. Then a consensus is reached.

* Fingernails have a life span of three to six months. That's how long it takes them to grow from base to tip, progressing at the pace of 1.5 inches a year -- or 0.000000047 inches a second. [so be careful when swinging that hammer....]

* There are an estimated 50,000 nerve endings per square inch in your fingertips [ibid.!!]

* More than half of the coastline of the entire United States is in Alaska.

* Ralph Waldo Emerson died in 1882 from the effects of a cold caught while attending the funeral of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow [poetic injustice?]

* Traveling at the speed of the fastest elevator in the Empire State Building, it would take 30 minutes to reach the bottom of the Marianas Trench.

* In the 19th century, the British Navy attempted to dispel the superstition that Friday is an unlucky day to embark on a ship. The keel of a new ship was laid on a Friday, she was named H.M.S. Friday, commanded by a Captain Friday, and finally went to sea on a Friday. Neither the ship nor her crew were ever heard of again.

* Eating eight ounces of potato chips is like eating an eight-ounce potato with 12 to 20 teaspoons of vegetable oil added to it.

* A 1992 study found that the type of item that constitutes the largest volume of trash chucked out by Americans is grass clippings and other yard waste [and in landfill sites, it takes decades to turn to compost, as opposed to a couple of years in a pile in your yard or composter!]

* An opossum is pregnant for only thirteen days before giving birth

* Bamboo plants can grow as much as 36 inches in a 24-hour period - so fast that at top speed you can actually watch it happening!!

* The arctic tern is the natural world's greatest traveler: it breeds in the Arctic in the late spring and spends its winters 17,000 km away in the Antarctic.

* The design of a U.S. coin cannot be changed more than once in 25 years without special legislation by Congress

* The food making up a single bite for a Tyrannosaurus rex, it was speculated, would feed a human family of four for an entire month

* If space debris already circling the globe continues to increase at its current rate, the chance that a space shuttle will collide with debris will increase to 1-in-10 flights by the year 2000 [this was written in 1997: It is well and truly said that predicting things is REALLY hard, especially when it concerns the future.....(Yogi Berra, i think?)]

* Besides inventing dynamite, Alfred Nobel also created plywood and was one of the first designers of prefabricated housing

* The Amazon River has a daily flow that is three times the flow of all rivers in the United States combined

* While living in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1866-67, Thomas Edison developed a device to electrocute cockroaches [Not all of his 10,000 inventions caught on bigtime....]

* Bergy seltzer, which is the sound made by air escaping from icebergs, can be heard by sonar one hundred miles away.

* The only part of the human body that has no blood supply is the cornea in the eye. It takes in oxygen directly from the air.

* The Australian walking fish can not only survive without water, it can also climb trees to feed on insects.

* A typical lightning bolt is only two to four inches wide, but two miles long.

* The Sun converts more than four million tons of matter into energy every second.

* Both Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury (famous science and science fiction writers) refrained from airplane travel, and Bradbury would not drive a car.

* During the eighteenth century, books that were considered offensive were sometimes punished by being whipped.

* Thomas Jefferson anonymously submitted design plans for the White House. They were rejected.

* The male of one species of insect related to the praying mantis can only reproduce after the female has bitten off his head. [and you thought YOU were henpecked....]

* Abraham Lincoln was the only U.S. president ever granted a patent.

* The human brain consists of about 1,000,000,000,000 nerve cells.

* The concept of a countdown before a rocket launch originated as a tension-building device in the 1929 movie The Woman on the Moon.

* Despite being a nine-inch-tall bird (unlike in cartoons), the roadrunner can run as fast as a human sprinter.

* In seventeenth-century Massachusetts, smoking was legal only at a distance of five miles from any town. [an idea WAY ahead of its time!!]

* The date of Easter [in the Roman tradition, i.e.: the Orthodox method is different] is determined by taking the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring equinox.

* About thirty-six million phone calls are placed each day in New York City.

* The largest iceberg ever seen was 208 miles long and 60 miles wide. [Came off the Ross Ice Shelf, interestingly enough!]

* The distance from New York to Boston is about one million human steps. [so if you didn't pause at all, you could walk it in two weeks, at the rate of one step per second.]

* The largest bird egg ever laid -- that of an extinct bird native to Madagascar -- had a volume of more than 2 gallons.

* About 3,500 gallons of water are needed to produce one pound of beef.

* Because of the salt content of the Dead Sea, it is difficult to dive below its surface. [however, it is not as salty as a lake in Saskatchewan, Canada i visited once, where you can lay on the water and read a newspaper without getting it wet!!]

* More than 10 percent of all the salt produced annually in the world is used to de-ice American roads.

* The Russian Czar Alexander II sold Alaska for about $72 million to the USA, to pay off his gambling debts. At the time, most folks considered this to be a really bad deal for America.

* There are over 3 million lakes in Alaska. The largest, Lake Iliamna, is the size of Connecticut. [People in Canada like to boast about how many lakes we have, but the number is only about 3 million, which is no more than good old Alaska!! (but ours are bigger....)]

* When insurance on ships and their cargoes was introduced in 14th-century Europe, it met opposition the grounds that it was an attempt to defeat financial disasters willed by God.

* More than five thousand hummingbird eggs can fit inside one ostrich egg.

* The bacteria found on human skin is roughly the numerical equivalent of all the humans on Earth.

* Healthy human bones can withstand stresses of twenty-four thousand pounds per square inch.

* The world's smallest known primate, the hairy-eared dwarf lemur of Madagascar, is the size of a mouse and weighs just three and a half ounces.

* The world's smallest bird is the Cuban Bee Hummingbird. It is only about 60mm long (just over 2 inches), its heart beats at about 300 times per minute, and its wings can flutter at an astounding 200 times per second (that's about the A flat below the C below middle C). More hummingbird and other wildlife facts can be found at the National Wildlife website.

* Americans use over 16,000 tons of aspirin a year. [I could crack wise about this, but i suspect Canada might be almost as big a pain....]

* A cubic mile of ordinary fog contains less than a gallon of water.

* The largest animal brain belongs to the sperm whale, reaching twenty pounds. The human brain, in comparison, weighs about three pounds.

* In the Middle Ages, pepper was used for bartering, and it was often more valuable and stable in value than gold.

* The surface area of the Pacific Ocean is over three times that of Asia, the largest continent.

* The odds against a person being struck by a celestial stone -- a meteorite -- are ten trillion to one (about the same as winning a Powerball lottery?)

* Africa's Nile crocodile can measure twenty feet long and weigh two thousand pounds.

* In supporting weight, human bones are as strong as granite.

* A human fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months. At 10 weeks, it looks very much like a baby, and they start to actually think long before being born!

* An adult blue whale has a tongue the size of a car, and a heart that weighs half a ton and generates ten horsepower to pump its eight tons of blood.

* Schools of South American Humboldt squid, which reach twelve feet in length, have been known to strip five-hundred-pound marlins to the bone.

* There is enough material in the Great Wall of China to build an eight-foot wall circling the globe at the equator.

* While humans have 639 muscles, caterpillars have over four thousand.

* When the finback whale calls as it cruises near the surface searching for a mate, its voice carries for up to fifty miles. However, this is paltry compared to the blue whale, whose low frequency mating call can attract a mate from nearly 500 miles away!

* If you could drive to the sun -- at 55 miles (90 km) per hour -- it would take about 193 years.

* Saturn's atmosphere has very strong winds, sometimes with speeds exceeding 1,000 miles per hour.

* The Great Wall of China stretches over more than one-twentieth of the earth's circumference. It was the longest continuous construction project in history, built over a period of 1,700 years, and is one of the very few human structures visible to the naked eye from space (clearly visible in satellite photos, but in fact quite tricky to see with the unaided eye, although it is possible under certain conditions.)

* In South America a fish known as the payara has saber teeth that are two inches long. A common bait used to catch these freshwater fish is a small piranha.

* The U.S. Treasury Department produced $4,096 in paper currency each minute in 1996.

* If the normal one hundred thousand hairs on a head were woven into a rope, it could support a weight of more than twelve tons.

* Rainfall worldwide averages 960 million tons of water a minute.

* Each minute, an average of 88,000 faxes are transmitted in the U.S. [This was 1997, before most of the world discovered the e-mail.]

* Control of the thumb requires more of the brain's gray matter than does the control of the chest and abdomen. [and you thought hitch-hiking was easy....]

* The average meteor is no larger than a grain of sand, but is moving at nearly 30,000 miles per hour when it enters the atmosphere, so it's burn-out is bright enough to be seen as a "shooting star" here on the ground.

* During one four-year period, inventor Thomas Edison received almost three hundred patents.

* Shivering is caused by muscles contracting up to 20 times per second.

* The African elephant's ears weigh more than 100 pounds each.

* Air isn't particularly light: In a moderate-size room with enough space for twenty-five people, the air in the room weighs almost as much as the people.

* There are five counties in Texas that are larger than the state of Rhode Island.

* A single modeern (2003) computer chip the size of a postage stamp, functions more than 100 times faster than the **entire** original ENIAC computer, which weighed 30 tons, contained 18,000 vacuum tubes, and took five people to operate.

* The sound waves created when a consonant is spoken are more than 600 times more powerful than those created when a vowel is spoken.

* Droplets from a sneeze can remain in the air for three hours. If inhaled, they can transmit viruses quite nicely!

* A human sneeze exits the mouth at almost 300 mph - the speed of the winds in a class 5 tornado!!

* On food energy equivalent to one gallon of gasoline, a human could bicycle about 930 miles.

* Mosquitoes in the Canadian Arctic attack warm-blooded animals in such numbers that they could suck a naked human dry in four hours.

* Each year lightning causes about 10,000 fires in the U.S. alone.

* A certain kind of seal, the Weddell seal, can travel underwater for seven miles without surfacing for air.

* The sperm whale can dive to depths of a half mile, and can stay submerged for 30 minutes or more, fighting giant squid and other tough meals!

* The fastest moon in our solar system circles Jupiter once every seven hours — traveling at 70,400 miles per hour.

* One pound of bituminous coal contains as much energy as a human exerts in a full day of heavy manual labor.

* The five Great Lakes - Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior — hold almost 20 percent of the world's supply of fresh water [i.e., water on the surface in liquid form, not counting ground water or ice].

* Lake Baikal is the largest freshwater lake on Earth containing 23,000 cubic kilometers of water, or roughly 20 percent of the world's total surface fresh water. It contains as much fresh water as the Great Lakes of North America combined. It is also the deepest lake in the world (1600m - almost exactly a mile!), and at perhaps more than 25 million years old, the oldest as well. The water of Lake Baikal is so fresh that calcium carbonate does not survive in the fossil record. Despite the lake's great depth , its water is well-oxygenated throughout creating unique biological habitats.

* Some whales, when they surface, can inhale up to 530 gallons of air in two seconds.

* An elephant can smell water three miles away.

* The African lungfish can live out of water for up to four years.

* The brain in a developing fetus grows by about 250,000 cells per minute.

* Canada and Alaska have more lakes than the rest of the world combined : about 3 million each.

* The great Roman emperor Julius Caesar lost many ships when he invaded Britain -- he didn't beach them high enough because he hadn't take tides into account.

* The Japanese throne has been occupied by a member of the same family since the sixth century. The present emperor is the 125th in succession.

* Gold is so ductile that a single ounce can be drawn into a fine wire 50 miles long.

* The digestive juices of crocodiles contain so much hydrochloric acid that they have dissolved swallowed iron spearheads and six-inch steel hooks.

* Until the Middle Ages, underwater divers near the Mediterranean coastline collected golden strands from the pen shell, which used the strands to hold itself in place. The strands were woven into a luxury textile and made into ladies' gloves so fine that a pair could be packed into an empty walnut shell.

* Snails produce a colorless, sticky discharge that forms a protective carpet under them as they crawl along. The discharge is so effective that snails can crawl along the edge of a razor without cutting themselves.

* At the height of the various ice ages of the last million years, as much as 30 percent of all the land on Earth was covered with a thick layer of ice.

* Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel in 1952. (Turning it down may have been his biggest mistake!!)

* Besides inventing the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell set a world water speed record of 70 miles per hour in a hydrofoil boat [on a lake in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia!] when he was 72.

* Because of heavy traffic congestion, Julius Caesar banned all wheeled vehicles from Rome during daylight hours.

* Because he felt such an important tool should be public property, English chemist John Walker never patented his invention -- matches.

* An estimated ninety-five percent of all forms of life that have existed on Earth are now extinct.

* A fully loaded supertanker traveling at its normal speed of 16 knots needs at least 20 minutes to stop.

* At its zenith, about 200-250 A.D., the land area of the Roman Empire was roughly the size of the present-day United States.

* The Roman Empire lasted about 2150 years from beginning to end: from about 700 B.C., when legend has it that Romulus and Remus (according to legend, orphans brought up by wolves!) founded Rome, to 1453 when the Eastern, or Byzantine branch of the Empire, fell to the Turks.

* At birth a panda bear is smaller than a mouse and weighs about four ounces.

* If the population of the Earth continued to increase at its present rate indefinitely, by 3530 A.D. the total mass of human flesh and blood would equal the mass of the Earth. By 6826 A.D. it would equal the mass of the known universe. [This factoid dates from the early 1990s. Since then, population growth has declined signficantly.]

* "Red tape," the rigid application of regulations and routine that results in delay getting business done, got its name from the color of the tape that was commonly used to tie official papers. The term has been in use since at least 1658.

* The royal house of Saudi Arabia may at present have as many as 5,000 princes and an equal number of princesses. King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who ruled from 1932 until death in 1953, had 300 wives.

* The Tower of London, the home of the British Crown Jewels, has at various times since construction was begun on it in 1078 housed a zoo, an observatory, a mint, and a prison.

* A device invented as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero at about the time of the birth of Christ finds use today in a modified form, as a rotating lawn sprinkler.

* A silicon chip a quarter-inch square has the computational capacity of the famous 1949 ENIAC computer, which used 18.000 vacuum tubes, weighed over 60,000 lbs, and occupied a city block. [This was circa mid-1990s. By now (2003), we are approaching the 100 gigaflop landmark - (a "flop" is a simple calculation per second), which is a million times faster than the plodding ENIAC monster. Petaflop (1,000,000,000,000 calculations per second) computers are predicted to be commercially availale by 2008]

* Bacteria, the tiniest free-living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid contains as many as 50 million of them.

* The tautara, which lives in New Zealand, is the only survivor of the beak-headed order of reptiles, called Rhynchocephalia, that goes all the way back to the time of the dinosaurs. It has three eyes -- two in the center of its head and one on top.

* Every 24 hours a leaking water faucet with an opening the size of a pin will waste 170 gallons.

* The world's largest metal coins, in both size and standard value, were copper plates used in Alaska about 150 years ago. They were about three feet long, two feet wide, weighed ninety pounds, and were worth $2,500.

* Herons have been observed to drop insects on the water and then catch the fish that surface for the bugs.

* When Benjamin Franklin was appointed Postmaster General of the U.S. in 1775, his staff handled just 250,000 pieces of mail each year. In comparison, the U.S. Postal Service now handles 162 billion pieces per year.

* From the proclamation of her independence in 1804 until the intervention of the United States in 1915, Haiti had 24 presidents, 17 of whom mysteriously disappeared with the contents of her treasury. [gives new meaning to the concept of "cleptocracy"!]