Wied Facts 2

Link to p.1 of Wierd Facts

o Psychologists from the University of Toronto and Harvard University have identified one of the biological bases of creativity. The study in the September issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology says the brains of creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Other people's brains might shut out this same information through a process called "latent inhibition" - defined as an animal's unconscious capacity to ignore stimuli that experience has shown are irrelevant to its needs. Through psychological testing, the researchers showed that creative individuals are much more likely to have low levels of latent inhibition. // "This means that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment," says co-author and U of T psychology professor Jordan Peterson. "The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it, even though that object is much more complex and interesting than he or she thinks. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities." // Revealingly enough, the inability to properly "filter" incoming or internal stimuli and information sources has been linked to psychosis. It may be that when linked to a reasonably stable personality, high intelligence and a flexible approach to problem solving, the same processes that lead to madness in some, may result in extraordinary creativity and inventiveness in others.
o The U.S. spends an estimated $422 billion a year as a result of youth delinquency, binge drinking, dropping out of school, high-risk sexual behaviour, and other problems. Research shows that parents and others can make a difference by:
- Using praise and rewards to build children's good habits.
- Monitoring their child's activities.
- Setting clear rules and consequences, and consistently enforcing them.
- Sharing ideas, values, and concerns, and listening.
- Getting involved in their children's lives.
o To enable the efficient exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide from the blood to the atmosphere, the lungs contain the largest surface area of any part of the body - in a normal adult, about the same area as a tennis court if stretched out fully!
o Staphylococcus aureus (commonly known as "staph") is a very common bacteria that normally lives harmlessly on your skin. However, under the right conditions, it can cause a surprising array of diseases and conditions, including food poisoning (which can occur when the concentration of S. aureus in food reaches 100,000 bacteria per gram or more), boils (caused by infection at the root of hair follicles), follicilitis (shallow hair follicle infections), sties, impetigo, abcesses of various kinds, "toxic shock syndrome", blood poisoning, pneumonia, bone infections such as osteomyellitis (try the dictionary for a definition of this one!), mastitis in nursing mothers, and infections inside the heart. In normal, healthy people, S. aureus rarely leads to anything serious, but in people with weakened immune systems (for any of a wide variety of reasons), it can cause serious, life-threatening illnesses. In hospitals, strains of this nasty critter often become immune to virtually all antibiotics, even the powerful, last-chance methicillin. These are the so-called "super bugs" which make the news every now and then - never in a good way!!
o Of the 530,000 or so soldiers killed during the American Civil War, an estimated 315,000 died of disease. The most common fatal maladies included dysentery, diarrhea, typhoid, chicken pox and malaria. Another 500,000 soldiers were badly wounded, yet somehow managed to survive the shocking sanitary conditions which prevailed, and the primitive medical services - doctors did not yet know about antiseptics, medicines were largely ineffective, and the usual response to a bad fracture was to amputate the limb: a procedure which usually took about 7 minutes. In field hospitals (barns, houses, churches...), the chopped off limbs were often just thrown out the nearest window.
o Each weekend, about 54 million Americans mow their lawns, using 800 million gallons of gas per year.
o Contrary to popular mythology, the American Civil War was not fought over the issue of slavery: the main bone of contention was "states' rights" - the nature and extent of the rights individual states would have, and whether or not individual states or groups of states had the right to leave the union if they wished to. Slavery was indeed a major flashpoint, but it was only "the tallest tree" in a forest of unresolved matters.
o Commercial airlines (as opposed to small, privately owned planes!) are an extraordinarily safe method of travel. Each year, over a billion passengers fly on almost 20 million flights, with about 20 fatal crashes: literally one in a million! So, if you went on 1,000,000 commercial flights, you would have a 50/50 or "even money" chance of being involved in a fatal accident. Fewer people have died in commercial airplane accidents in the USA over the past 60 years than are killed in U.S. auto accidents in a typical three-month period. In fact, donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes.
o The average human produces 25,000 quarts of saliva in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.
o Studies with high-speed cameras show that most lightning flashes are multiple events, consisting of as many as 42 main "strokes," each of which is preceded by a "leader" stroke coming from the ground. Each stroke is a powerful stream of electricity which follows the ionized path created by the leader. (Ions are atoms stripped of their electrons - this happens when they get caught in a powerful electrical current.) The average interval between these strokes is 0.02 sec and the average flash lasts 0.25 sec (one quarter of a second). The duration of each powerful stroke is no more than 0.0002 sec (i.e., 2 ten thousandths of a second!), so the intervals between strokes account for most of the duration of a lightning "flash." Thus, we see that each stroke of lightning is mostly "empty" time, much the same way that "solid" matter is mostly empty space!!
o Anne Boleyn had six fingernails on one hand , but only five fingers on that hand. She had a small extra nail on the side of her finger that she kept hidden with long sleeves.
o King Hezikiah of Israel built a tunnel to bring water into the city of Jerusalem which helped Judah fend off the siege of the city by the Assyrians in 701 B.C. It is now called the Siloam Tunnel, and is one of the oldest human structures still in use today. In Sept. 2003, it became the first structure mentioned in the Bible (II Chronicles 32: 3, 4 and II Kings 20:20) to be confirmed conclusively by archaeologists. The tunnel has been dated by the carbon-14 method to 700 B. C., using organic material in the plaster used to construct it (which is holding up rather well after nearly 3000 years, it should be noted!!).
o Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.
o Each square inch (6.5 cm squared) of human skin consists of 19 million cells, 60 hairs, 90 oil glands, 19 feet of blood vessels, 625 sweat glands, 19,000 sensory cells - and is normally inhabited by about anywhere from 10,000 (on the forearm) to a million bacteria (the vast majority of which are beneficial or harmless), depending upon how moist it is: the moister the more thickly inhabited!
o Most mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. They block the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.
o Some hairy facts: There are between 100,000 and 150,000 hairs on the average person's head, and nearly 400,000 on your complete body. Babies have about 1,100 hair per square inch (6.5 cm2 ), but by age 50, this drops to around 250 per square inch. Each hair follicle will grow an average of 20 new hairs in a lifetime, at an average rate of a centimeter (there are 2.54 cm per inch) per month - so if you lived to be 100 years old and had just one hair that never fell out, it would be 12 meters (about 40 feet) long. Although humans may appear "naked" by the standards of other primates, we have more hair follicles per square inch than most other mammals.
o While Edinburgh, Scotland, may boast about its 300+ pubs, Singapore may hold the record for places of eating and refreshment: there are over 6,500 restaurants and 11,500 street-side food stands within its city limits.
o The largest organ of the body is the skin, which in a normal adult weighs around 4 kg (10 lb.) and covers an area of 2 square meters (6,241 square inches - meaning it consists of about 120 billion cells!!). Healthy skin regenerates itself about once every month.
o The gene responsible for determining sex in bees, is called the complementary sex determiner (csd). Csd has in 19 alternative versions, called alleles. Female bees have two copies of csd which are always different alleles. Males have only one copy. About one-fifth of animal species including all ants, bees, and wasps, use a similar system of sex determination, but the actual genes and mechanisms involved are not well understood.
o Toe and fingernails are made of the same stuff that hair is - a hard yet flexible protein called keratin. This is the same material that a deer's antlers, a horse's hoofs and a bird's feathers are made of!! Fingernails grow four times as fast as toe nails, and the nail of the middle finger grows fastest of all. A toenail takes about 6 months to grow back completely. Finger and toenails can tell a lot about what a person has eaten, or what kind of metals and chemicals they have been exposed to - including drugs and heavy metals such as mercury or lead - they are like a "history" of a person's exposure for the past 6 months.
o Male bees have an easy life in some respects: they do no work at all and just hang out around the hive being fed by the many worker bees, which are all female. On the other hand, they have no father, since they are "half clones" of the queen bee, and are killed at the end of the season, since they serve no useful purpose except to mate with queens in their epic mating flight: the queen flies higher than all but one of the aspiring mates that wish to satisfy her needs, then gives in to this strongest flier. It should be noted that a male bee cannot compromise the honour of its mother: once a queen bee has acquired a supply of sperm, she uses it to fertilize all of her eggs at the same time, so she has enough to last for the rest of her life.
o In the days of British rule, tigers were so numerous in Burma they were shot as pests ? 1,382 of them from 1928-32, according to historical records. Today, A landmark report by the New York based Wildlife Conservation Society has calculated there could be fewer than 150 left in this country, although jungles still cover one-third of its surface. The culprits are depressingly familiar to naturalists everywhere: illegal wildlife traders and their gangs of hired poachers. Tiger parts are highly prized in China and Thailand by makers of traditional medicines, and Myanmar sits on the border of both countries.
o Toilet seats are usually one of the cleanest surfaces around the home or office, probably because they are frequently cleaned. Phones, computer keyboards, desktops, sink faucets and doorknobs are commonly inhabited by 10,000 to up to 100,000 bacteria per square inch.
o A new class of lightning has been discovered, consisting of at least three types of lightning associated with severe thunderstorms. All three confirmed types occur far above the loud layer, jumping from the tops of the clouds into the stratosphere and lower ionosphere, and are much rarer than normal lightning. The first type, called a red sprite, is a dim, reddish-colored burst that lasts only a few thousandths of a second and can be many kilometres wide. Red sprites appear suddenly, usually in clusters of two or more, and rise to heights of about 50 to 100 km (30 to 50 mi) above the cloud layer. They travel at up to a tenth of the speed of light - 67 million miles (107 million km) per hour! The second type, a blue jet, is a cone-shaped burst, brighter and far more powerful than a red sprite. Blue jets erupt from the center of a thunderstorm at up to 6000 km/h (3300 mph), rising to heights of about 20 to 50 km (10 to 30 mi) above the cloud layer. Red sprites and blue jets were first photographed in 1989 in Minnesota by American physicist John R. Wincklyer, and continue to be intensely studied. A third type of cloud-to-stratosphere lightning, called Elves, was announced in 1995. Elves are saucer - or doughnut- shaped bursts of light about 400 km (about 250 mi) wide that occur about 100 km (about 60 mi) above the cloud tops. They are thought to be greenish, but they last such a short time (less than a thousandth of a second) that scientists have not yet determined their color. A forth variety, not surprisingly called "trolls", is still poorly understood.
o By analyzing crater patterns on Venus, as found by the interplanetary probe Magellen in 1990, scientists have decided that the entire surface of the planet is the same age - about 500 million years old. It seems that, instead of giant crustal plates being pushed around on the surface of the planet, as found on Earth, the crust of Venus is very quiet for long periods of time, after which pressures built up by its mantle (the semi-fluid layer of rock between the crust and the core) completely destroy and re-create the entire surface of the planet all at the same time.
o August 25, 2003: At 09:51 universal time (UT) on August 27th, Earth makes its closest approach to Mars in nearly 60,000 years. The two worlds, center-to-center, will be just 56 million kilometres apart--a short distance on the scale of the solar system. The last people to come so close to Mars were Neanderthals. The Islands of French Polynesia (Tahiti and the gang) were closest to Mars at the moment of conjunction, while the Nubian Desert of Sudan was farthest away.
o Fiber optics - strands of pure silica (glass) the thickness of a human hair, permit the transmission of large amounts of information - in the form of digital pulses of light - over long distances with much greater efficiency than copper wires. The man-made versions, however, are not nearly as suitable for this task as the silica skeleton of the "Venus flower basket" sponge (Euplectella spp), which creates a glassy "cage" where tiny shrimp can breed in safety (i don't know what the sponge gets out of this commensal relationship - perhaps leftovers from the shrimp's meals?). The sponge's glassy fibers are a) more flexible and stronger than their man-made counterparts, having internal braces which greatly enhance their structural properties, and b) clearer, hence better able to transmit light with minimal losses over long distances. Once again, nature did it first and better!!!
o Simple dental treatment may reduce a woman s risk of giving birth prematurely, research suggests. A recent study showed treating severe gum disease with scaling and root care cut premature births by 84 per cent. Professor Marjorie Jeffcoat, of the University of Alabama at Birmingham school of dentistry, who led the research, said, I recommend that all women who are thinking of becoming pregnant or who are pregnant receive a full periodontal exam and diagnosis. Doctors have already established that severe gum infections cause an increase in the production of prostaglandin and tumour necrosis factor, chemicals which induce labour.
o The hottest temperature life is known to exist at, is 120 to 130 C (about 250 F: at normal atmospheric pressure, water boils at 100 C or 212 F). The new record holder is a tiny bacteria-like creature known so far only as "Strain 121", after the temperature it was discovered at. It is a member of the kingdom Archaea (Latin for "ancient"), which many biologists believe are the most primitive forms of life on earth. Today, many species of Archaea live in the super-heated waters of hydrothermal vents, which can reach temperatures of 400 C (750 F) at their source. They use iron instead of oxygen to obtain the energy needed to sustain life: essentially, they reduce a higher-energy form of iron (ferrous) to a lower-energy form (ferric) via controlled electron transfer, then deposit it as magnetite around the vents (called "black smokers") which continuously spew forth iron and sulphur-rich streams of water at depths of around 2 km (1.5 miles). Archaea usually live today under conditions of extreme heat, cold, pressure, salinity, alkalinity, and/or acidity.
o The average office worker uses about 10,000 sheets of paper each year. Annual copy paper use in the U.S. consumes enough wood to build nearly 1 million average homes, and releases pollution equal to over 2 million cars. So much for the much-ballyhooed "paperless office".......
o The American Dietary Association has recently estimated that there is enough food grown in the world in an average year, to provide every human with a very substantial 2700 calories. This conclusion has been supported by many who have analyzed the problems of hunger and malnutrition over the past decade or so. The reasons why a billion people go to bed hungry or malnourished most nights include wars and other political disputes and problems, corruption of various sorts, lack of access to land, and outright poverty - combined with poor food storage facilities and practices (and inadequate means of keeping food fresh during transportation) in many parts of the world, which result in the spoiling of up to a third of all food produced in some countries such as India.
o You have probably heard someone say "He's not the man he used to be.". This is literally true!! Except for the minerals in the enamel of teeth, every molecule in the human body is, on the average, replaced once every 7 years.
o The average human gut (everything between the mouth and the other end) is home to a vast community of perhaps 100 trillion bacteria of 500 to 1000 different species. This "inner world" is extremely important in everything from digestion of complex carbohydrates, to the metabolism of drugs - and is very poorly studied or understood!!
o The average human body is composed of between 10 and 100 trillion cells - depending upon which expert you ask.
o An estimated 3 million Italians will pretend, for social reasons (such as "keeping up appearances"), to take an exotic vacation each year, when in fact they are staying with friends or family in a nearby town, or even hiding in their basement for two weeks, and getting artificial tans!!
o All of the 10s of thousands of proteins (these are the active molecules in living creatures - they perform all the duties of life, such as transporting oxygen and CO2 (haemoglobin), digesting food (amylase for carbohydrates, protease for proteins, lipase for fats and oils), and destroying toxic organic molecules so they don't damage cells (cytochromes)) are built using only 20 amino acids. They are the "alphabet" that protein words are constructed from. Interestingly enough, ALL amino acids found in living beings on our planet, are left-handed - right handed amino acids are never used to make proteins in any known species!!!
o When i mentioned the increasing gap between the super-rich and the rest of us mere mortals, a conservative-leaning friend of mine flipped off the remark that this was to be expected - in a capitalistic system, the rich will tend to accumulate ever-larger pieces of the pie, so why worry about it? This was not always the case, however, at least in the USA. From World War II up to 1979, incomes increased at about the same rate in all brackets. But from 1979 to 1997, the average annual income of the top 1% (after taxes) increased by 157%, or $414,000 in 1997 dollars. Over the same period, the average income of the poorest 20% fell by $100. To my mind, this is not a sustainable trend.....
o Bacteria often coat themselves with right-handed amino acids. Since living creatures on earth use only left-handed amino acids to make their proteins, this unusual covering allows bacteria to survive digestion by most things that eats them. Right-handed amino acids are not used by other forms of life, so they are not digested, and the bacteria are therefore safe!
o Scientists have for the first time (July, 2003) harnessed the sun s energy to kill cancer cells, using little more than a parabolic mirror and fibre-optic cable. In much the same way as lasers are relied upon to destroy certain tumours, sunshine surgery has been shown to destroy living tissue with pinpoint accuracy. The scientists from Israel s Ben-Gurion University estimate that the equipment needed for performing surgery by sunlight would be hundreds of times cheaper than a comparable laser device. (The Independent 31/07/03; p.5)
o South Africa has the most AIDS cases of any country in the world, at about 5 million, nearly all of whom will die in the next 10- 15 years. However, some smaller African countries have up to 20% of their population infected by the HIV virus. Oddly enough, most people in the "first" world have little idea of the magnitude of the problem - it is the largest pandemic since the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1919.
o Superman can jump over tall buildings. It turns out he has a counterpart in the insect world! The English spittlebug, Philaenus spumarius, can jump 700 mm (27.5 in.) straight into the air - considering its 6 mm length, that's 117 times its body length, which would be the equivalent of a man jumping over a 70 story building!! The bug accomplishes this feat by locking its rear legs under its thorax, and storing up energy in massive leg muscles that take up 11% of its total weight. When sufficient tension is generated (takes a small fraction of a second), it is released like a spring being sprung, and the little nimrod can escape almost any predator easily.
o In the human species (us!), the average male produces about 50,000 sperm per minute - 72 million per day. These little swimmers take 84 days to mature, and live for a month or so. There can be up to 800 million of them in a single ejaculation (average is 150 to 200 million, or two day's worth of production), and they normally motor along at a rate of 1 to 4 millimeters (6 mm is one quarter inch) per minute. Inside females, they normally remain potent for 1 to 2 days. Outside of the body they only last two minutes.
o Brain injuries -- accidental (mainly from falls) and inflicted (i.e., from abuse) -- hospitalize or kill an estimated 150,000 children annually in the U.S. Traumatic brain injury is the most common cause of death in childhood, and child abuse is believed to be responsible for at least half of infant brain injuries.
o Most jellyfish stings can be quickly taken care of with meat tenderizer (or in a pinch, urine - which is normally 100% sterile (no bacteria) by the way, contrary to popular opinion!!), which breaks down the protein that is injected. Oddly enough, green papaya will also do the trick.
o Music lessons, even for as little as a year, improve the verbal memory of children, according to
psychologists in Hong Kong. They believe that learning music encourages the development of the
left temporal lobe of the brain, which is responsible for remembering words. Visual memory, which uses the right temporal lobe, shows no improvement. (The Times 28/07/03; p.7) This latest study backs up long-standing research that has found music education has benefits that carry over to mathematical skills - music is after all, a language that is mostly mathematical!
o The ocean quahog Arctica islandica L. , can live to be 220 years old in sub-arctic waters. Animals in colder water live the longest, since their metabolism is slower.
o Scientists don't know what 90% of the matter in the universe is made of. All the stars in the universe (i.e., all the "luminous" mass) add up to only 0.5% of the total mass, and another 10% or so can be accounted for by adding up the estimated matter of known mass-containing material such as planets, cosmic dust, photons, neutrinos, neutron stars, brown dwarfs (burned out stars), and even black holes. The most widely accepted cosmological models indicate that another 15% is most likely made of ordinary matter - neutrons, electrons, protons, etc. - in some form or the other. The other composition of the remaining 75% is completely unknown, although many candidates have been proposed, from a variety of "WIMPs" (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) to whimsical chaps going by the name of neutralinos, photinos and gravitinos. For more information on this mysterious 90% of the universe, go here for a good variety of articles on all levels of complexity.
o One of the multitude of modern myths that clutter up the internet, is that the flag flying on top of the parliament buildings on the Canadian $2 and $10 bills is actually an American flag. In fact, it is the Canadian Ensign - the old Canadian flag that was used until 1963 or 4. At a glance, however, it does bear some resemblance to "Old Glory", so like most myths it does indeed have some basis and wasn't just made up out of thin air!!
o Photons (what light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation (radio waves, x-rays, gamma rays, cosmic rays, microwave radiation....) are made of), are emitted whenever an electron changes its energy level. They are indestructable, so they accumulate over time. At present, there are about 2 billion photons for every proton or neutron in the universe, and their "mass equivalent" (protons do not have mass, yet they interract gravitationally with other objects) is about one trillionth that of a proton, so the total mass equivalent of all of these photons is about 500 times less than that of the nuclei of all the atoms in the universe.
o In strictly financial terms, the so-called "war on drugs" (ie, those nasty illegal ones, not the nice, friendly alchol that can be purchased at corner stores in many countries...) is surprisingly costly. A conservative estimate of this activity in the US of A, is around $40 billion per year, when the costs of law enforcement (police, federal agents, legal aid, judges, prison systems, parole officers.....), coast guard, military operations directed against drugs, drug-control componants of foreign aid, and other factors are added up. This doesn't include the estimated $5+ billion in goods stolen to pay for addictions, and all the costs associated with this side of the drug "scene". When the dust settles, this "war" probably costs American governments over $50 billion per year.
o While i can't seem to find completely up to date figures (2002/3), it seems likely that the total economic costs to society of alcohol and drug use and abuse in the USA are pushing $300 billion per year. Alcohol accounts for about 60% of the total.
o The world's fastest known computer is still the human brain, which has been estimated to be capable of about 10 quadrillion (10 million billion) calculations per second. In the world of machines, the current champion is most likely the Japanese NEC corporation's "Earth Simulator", which was designed to create a realistic model of the earth's atmoshere in order to study climate and weather patterns. It clips along at a brisk 40 trillion calculations per second - 40 "teraflops", in Geek Speak. This speed is achieved by wiring 5,120 processing units similar to a fast desk top computer to work together. Sometime in 2003 or 2004, it will likely be overtaken by IBM's "ASCI Purple" machine, which will have a top speed of 100 teraflops (100 trillion calculations per second - still about 100 times slower than the speed of the human brain.)
o The world's smallest motor has recently been built at the Berkley camplus of the University of California. It is all of 500 nm (millionths of a meter) across - 300 of them could line up on the stump left when you cut a hair. The rotor (the part of the motor that rotates), is between 100 and 300 nm. There are still smaller motor-like structures in nature, but we are catching up fast!! (July, 2003)
o The Martian atmosphere is thin--about 1% as dense as Earth's at sea level--only the smallest dust grains hang in theair. Airborne dust on Mars is about as fine as cigarette smoke.
o Storms on Mars can be amazingly intense, developing winds approaching the speed of sound!!! Since the 1870s, huge dust storms that circled the entire planet have been seen from earth about 10 times. These "world storms" can easily be seen by back yard astronomers with small telescopes, since their ultra-fine dust particles reflect a lot more sunlight than the Martian soils and rocks.
o THE FIRST SHOT OF WWII was fired from the German battleship 'Schleswig Holstein' which was on an official visit to Poland and berthed in Danzig harbour. At 4.30 am on September 1, 1939, the ship moved slowly down the Port Canal and took up position opposite the WESTERPLATTE (area containing Polish troop barracks and workshops). At 4.47 am, the order to 'Fire' was given. World War II had begun. Seven days later the Westerplatte Garrison surrendered.
o THE INCIDENT which triggered the Second World War was the simulated attack by the Germans on their own radio station near Gleiwitz on the Polish border. To make it appear that the attacking force consisted of Poles, prisoners from a nearby concentration camp were dressed in Polish uniforms then shot and their bodies placed in strategic positions around the radio station. A Polish speaking German then did a broadcast from the station to make it appear that Poland had attacked first. This was the excuse Hitler needed to invade Poland on September 1st. 1939.
o In 2000, 46.5 percent of the 1,579,566 total arrests in the USA for drug abuse violations were for marijuana -- a total of 734,497. Of those, 646,042 people were arrested for possession alone. Although over a third of the population of that country has tried cannabis and perhaps 10% are regular, frequent users, only about 1% of its inhabitants have permanant criminal records for it, mostly for what is called "simple possesion" of small amounts intended for personal mind-altering activities.
o It takes strong flight muscles and a keen sense of direction for birds to migrate long distances to and from their breeding grounds. It also takes guts, according to recent research by University of Rhode Island researcher and physiological ecologist Scott McWilliams. He found that the gut of migratory birds expands tremendously in the days before the big flight, permitting them to eat enough to see them through the long haul. Then, in order to save on in-flight energy, they re-absorb much of their gut tissues, since the digestive system is one of the most dynamically active parts of the body and requires a tremendous amount of energy simply to maintain. It has long been known that migratory birds do not immediately start to gain weight when the stop at a resting place along the way, and the reason why, is now apparent: they must regrow their gut first, before they can start digesting food and packing on the ounces again!! Another consequence of this state of affairs is that they require protein at their stopovers, not just fruit or other protein-poor foods, in order to re-build their digestive tract.
o The chilliest corners of intergalactic space are surprisingly warm: about 3 C (4.5 F) above absolute zero (i.e. 3 Kelvin - on the Kelvin scale, zero is absolute: the coldest temperature possible). This is though by cosmologists to be residual energy in the microwave range, left over from the "Big Bang" which they believe to have been the birth of the universe.
o Those ads that are always telling us about the perils of "second hand smoke" have now been found to be only half-right. Ciggie smoke is still regarded as the root of a multitude of evils, but recent besearch by Britain's Department of Health reveals that 85 per cent of air pollution in a room comes from the burning tip of a cigarette, rather than the amount actually exhaled by smokers. (The Birmingham Post 07/07/03; p.5)
o The most abundant source of hydrocarbon fuel on earth is a frozen form of methane found in the deep, cold water of the world's oceans, and under the vast tundra plains of the far north. Methane hydrate is a crystal structure of methane gas surrounded by water molecules, held together by freezing temperature and crushing pressure. Separating the two yields the methane, or common natural gas. Knowledge of the substance dates to the 1890s. But it never caught on as an energy source because it is found in hard-to-access Arctic permafrost and deep ocean sediments. Worldwide resources are massive: an estimated 25,000 trillion cubic meters (a third of the total is found in the waters of the USA) (875,000 trillion cubic feet), according to current estimates. That contains about twice the energy as the Earth's coal, oil, and gas resources combined. There are many difficulties in mining it, however, and since methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, if it is ever used as a major energy source, any presently concievable extraction methods, and the occasional large-scale release of large amounts of methane could REALLY turn up the heat on the global warming scene!!
o The United States dropped three times the quantity of explosives on Cambodia between 1970 and 1973 than it had dropped on Japan for the duration of World War II. Between 1969 and 1973, 539,129 tons of high explosives rained down on Cambodia - more than one billion pounds (about 400 million kg). This is equivalent to some 15,400 pounds (6,063 kg) of explosives for every square mile of Cambodian territory. Considering that probably less than 25 percent of the total area of Cambodia was bombed at one time or another, the actual explosive force per area would be at least four times this level. Source: "The Rise and Demise of Democractic Kampuchea", by Craig Etcheson. The CIA officially estimated that 600,000 Cambodians were killed directly by the bombing campaigns. Not to suggest that history books have been "sanitized" in any way (heaven forbid!!! What society would ever lie to its children like that??), but it would be very difficult to find a grade-school textbook anywhere in the Western World, let along the USA, that gives accurate accounts of the Cambodian branch of the war in SE Asia.
o Couples who abstain from sex to save sperm until the woman is most fertile are wasting their time, a new study suggests. The research provides the strongest evidence yet that not only is abstaining of no benefit to couples with normal fertility, it can *damage* the chance of successful conception among couples seeking fertility treatment. A team at Soroka University Medical Centre in Israel found that if men had low sperm counts, their sperm steadily became less mobile after an average of one day s abstinence. But the sperm of men with normal sperm count showed little change in mobility. (The Guardian 30/06/03; p.7)
o The average North American teenager drinks an average of 6+ glasses or cans of carbonated beverages ("soft drinks") each day, over half of them of the caffinated cola variety.
o Researchers believe the Chinese need both sides of the brain to grapple with challenges of Mandarin, but English speakers listen with only half their minds on the job. Sophie Scott, a psychologist at the Wellcome Trust, and colleagues performed brain scans on volunteers as they listened to their native languages. When English speakers heard their language, their left temporal lobes lit up on screen. With Mandarin Chinese speakers, both temporal lobes showed activity. The left temporal lobe is normally associated with piecing sounds together into words; the right with processing melody and intonation. (The Guardian 30/06/03; p.5)
o Worldwide, an estimated 7 million people (a rate of 110 per 100,000, vs a murder rate of about 8 per 100,000) are killed each year by substance abuse. The top killer is of course tobacco, accounting for almost 5,000,000 people meeting their Maker prematurely. Second place and rising, especially in Asian countries where rising incomes make it easier to afford, is alcohol, with nearly 2 million. Ilegal drug use (prescription drug abuse mostly, with a dash of "controlled" substance consumption thrown in for good measure) accounts for about 220,000 fatalities - about 3% of all drug-related deaths.
o Once a squirrel abandons a nut storage depository, it does not return to it to when foraging for further supplies. For example, the furry critter that visits my house often, gathered up all the nuts he or she could find lying around and carried them to several spots such as a new pair of shoes i had to empty out one Sabbath morning in my preparation for church. It also used a large gym bag hanging on my bathroom wall. One day, for reasons i have yet to discover, it switched its main nut storage locality to a pile of boxes in a corner of the living room (my abode is squirrel heaven!!), and never again retrieved any of its former treasure, which i re-offer as an encore treat from time to time, when i desire to view some fluffy-tailed rodent antics during supper - as a "floor show".
o Oil is BIG business, representing in one way or another, over a trillion dollars of business worldwide each year. The world's largest oil consumer, the USA (surprise!!), annually consumes 7.3 billion barrels (1.16 trillion litres or 306 billion gallons) of oil, over half of it for transportation. Domestic peaked in 1970 at 10.5 million barrels per day, and has declined at about 2% per year, despite an astonishing $750 billion of exploration and development expenditure since then. The US has about 3% of the world's proven and probable oil reserves, and uses 25% of the world's production. Considering the fact that oil exploration and production industry in that country is the oldest and the most vigorously exploited in the world, there is almost no chance that major petrocarbon reserves could be added even by the most ruthless methods conceivable. This means that by 2020, the year that many people expect worlwide oil production to peak, American oil imports will comprise over 70% of consumption - a geopolitical nightmare considering that much of the world's reserves reside in Islamic countries, and when production DOES peak, a whole series of nasty consequences are likely to follow!! The case for sensible, clean, sustainable energy production (wind, solar, geothermal, "low head" hydro, innovative forms of tidal and wave power, offshore temperature gradient power stations, and sooner or later fusion power) combined with common-sense conservation measures, is becoming more compelling by the day.
o It is now possible to cool an assemblage of atoms suspended in a magnetic containment field, down to a mere 150 billionths of a degree above absolute zero - the temperature at which all motion completely stops: see http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-07/nios-um063003.php for details.
o NOT that i in ANY way shape or form condone or seek to encourage their use, (only to mimimize the damage associated with them) but contrary to the opinions of many people with lots of guns and "the Law" on their side, illegal drugs kill relatively fewer people, and represent a rather minor public health problem by comparison with legal addictive substances. In the USA, less than 20,000 fatalities were attributed to "controlled" substances in 2002, mostly related to heroin and to adulterants in the drugs used (such as the addition of strychnine to LSD, to increase the percieved "high"). By comparison, about 400,000 deaths per year can be attributed to tobacco abuse. In second place, alcohol killed about 120,000 Americans in 2002, while abuse of prescription drugs took an estimated 106,000 lives.// It may be argued that "controlled" substances contribute to a lot of crime and gang-related problems. This is, however, largely a function of the prohibition-based approach to substances not deemed to be "appropriate" for the general populace to consume - recall alcohol prohibition and Al Capone and the boyz!! In general, prohibition has, in Western countries at least, never been an effective or efficient method for limiting the consumption of any particular substance. (ok, this may not look like a "fact", but i invite rebuttal on this point. Also, consider that the use of marjuana is over 50% less in the Netherlands than in North America or Britain - see http://www.drugwarfacts.org/thenethe.htm.)
o In school you probably learned that matter comes in three states: liquid, solid and gas. Think again: plasma, the fourth-discovered state of matter has been known for many years: it is a state where all the atoms have their electrons torn off by extremely high temperatures, and the result is a high-energy mixture of electically charged particles - nuclei of atoms, and the electrons stripped from them. There is also a fifth state of matter called a Boise-Einstein condensate, which is at the opposite end of the scale: when you cool matter down to a couple of millionths of a degree (Centigrade or Farenheight make little difference at this temperature!!), all the atoms fall to the lowest energy state possible, and they act as a "super-molecule": all the atoms in a single-element Boise-Einstein condensate are indistinguishable from each other, which means they will act in an identical manner to any external stimuli. (a sixth state of matter would be "neutronium", which is the most compact form of matter possible and is found in neurtron stars - covered in other articles so i won't repeat here).
o Worldwide energy consumption is currently mostly satisfied by fossil feuls: petroleum 40%, natural gas 22%, and coal 25% (nulear fission comes next at 6%), and is growing at a fair clip: it has doubled since 1970, and is expected to increase by another 60% in the next two decades.
o On an average day, American drivers eat up nearly 7 billion miles of pavement ? roughly the distance to Pluto and back ? getting where they want to be. In the process, they consume enough oil to fill more than 150 supertankers.
o The key to giving up smoking may be more a question of genetics than willpower, according to scientists is Japan. They say the gene also appears to protect against emphysema, a smoking-related illness. Researchers at Keio University in Tokyo, have found that a gene named "CYP2A6del" hinders the breaking down of nicotine in the body. The prolonged presence of nicotine in the circulation may inhibit people with this defective allele [gene variant] from withdrawing their dependence on nicotine when they try to quit smoking. (The Independent Online 01/07/03)
o Despite their reputation for liking nuts, squirrels (ok, at least the one that lives at my place!) also love soft fruit such as grapes and apples - but they don't eat the skin! If my little guy could talk, he'd probably be saying "Hey human, peel me a grape!!".
o Scientists have found convincing evidence of 8 major extinctions in the history of the world, at least 5 of them connected to sudden changes in climate. Recent research has linked four of these "extinction events" to sudden releases of vast amounts of methane into the ocean and atmosphere. The most likely source is from the vast frozen deposits of methane hydrates (also called clathrates) that form over millions of years, as rotting organic matter releases methane that then combines with water in the cold, deep parts of the ocean, and freezes. It seems that periodically, conditions change in the world-ocean so that the gas hydrate deposits become unstable and melt, releasing huge amounts of methane, which is 25 times more potent a greenhouse gas as CO2, into the atmosphere. The resulting sudden 5 to 8 degree C (9 to 14.5 F) in worldwide average temperature would lead to vast numbers of extinctions, such as the one at the end of the Permian period, some 250 million years ago, in which an estimated 95% of all life-forms on the earth were killed off.
o Men: the next time you are having a bad day, consider that your lot is a LOT better than that of males of the yellow garden spider (Argiope aurantia) of eastern North America. Researchers found that for the guys of this species, which are far smaller than the females, completing copulation leads to certain death, and the deceased suitor's corpse is actually trapped in the female genitalia!! This may be a strategy to prevent other males from subsequently mating with the female, say the scientists. "I was stunned that his happened with every single male," says Matthias Foellmer, of Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, who conducted the study with Daphne Fairbairn of the University of California, Riverside. "Spiders are known for their bizarre mating, but even so this was surprising." Male spiders are often the losers of the dating game. The females of many species are cannibals, literally combining dinner and a date. Some males do their best to escape their mate's post coital appetite while others, like the red back spider, accept their fate by somersaulting into the female's fangs [the "total surrender" approach to marriage!!!].
o About 400 quadrillion (4 followed by 17 zeros!) British Thermal Units (BTU) of energy were used in 2002 by the world's 6 billion people. This is the equivalant of 117 trillion Kilowatt hours, or the amout of work that could be done by about 54 billion horses working 8 hour shifts each day.
o An average United States inhabitant consumes about 180,000 calories' worth of energy per day - twice as much energy as the average European or Japanese, 155 times as much as someone who lives in Nepal, and approximately the same energy requirement as a 50 ton sperm whale. (i shouln't point fingers, though - Canada isn't far behind!!)
o One of the most successful song composers of all time, was Irving Berlin, a Jewish immigrant to the USA who penned some 812 songs from about 1920 to 1953. Over 450 of these made the hit parades of their day!! His most successful creation was White Christmas, which has been recorded by hundreds of artists, and as sung by Bing Cosby sold over 100 million records, making it the undisputed #1 holiday song of the modern era. Amazingly enough, Bing recorded it in only one take.
o 56% of children aged 8 to 16 in the USA, have a television in their bedrooms - the old standby punishmenf of "Go to your room!" just isn't the same these days......
o The average child in the UK or the US, spends more time in front of the TV than in school: 900 hours in school, and over 1000 of Idiot Box - and that's not even including computer games!!
o The world's best telescopic arrays now have a resolving power of about 0.1 milliarcseconds - in other words, if 13 billion points of light were to form a continous circle around the earth, they could see each point separately. To put this into perspective, a telescope this powerful would be able to distinguish 2 lines only 1 mm apart (there are 25.4 mm to the inch), from 2600km (1600 miles) away. They would be able to see features on the moon as close together as 6 inches (150 mm)!! Another way to think of this remarkable feat is this: if two stars with sufficient brightness at the same distance from each other as the sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri, at 4.2 light years away) were 9 billion light years away, or almost three quarters of the way to the edge of the universe, the world's best telescopic methods could view them as two separate points.
o Many of the details we associate with Santa Claus were invented for a Coca Cola advertising campaign around 1890. (sorry Virginia!)
o Japan is the country most dependant upon energy imports in the world. It imports 99.8% of its oil, mostly from the Middle East. Overall, it imports 80% of its total energy consumption.
o As early as the 1960s, urban legends have told us that spy satellites could read the headlines on a newspaper, or the numbers and letters on a license plate. The truth is more prosaic: according to the most reliable non-military sources, the best space-based satellites - known in the spy trade as Keyhole-class satellites - have a resolution of 5 to 6 inches, meaning they can distinguish an object that small, but no smaller, on the ground. Therefore, while satellites cannot read license plates, they can tell if a car has one. While they cannot tell a mullah by the length of his beard, they can enable analysts figure out how many people are chanting along with him at a street demonstration. This is approaching the theoretical limit of satellite-based optical resolution, so don't expect these numbers to change much in the future.
o Ever wonder why the concept "military intelligence" is a complete oxymoron? Here's a sample of the type of horrorshow that modern technology and the military mindset are combining to create these days: A recently-developed "Low Frequency Active Sonar" (LFA sonar for short) system the US military are fighting hard to get approved, would subject 75% of the world's oceans to sound that is 235 decibels at its source - strong enough to kill any marine mammal with miles almost instantly, and to disrupt feeding and normal living for cetaceans, who depend upon hearing for almost all aspects of their lives - communication, feeding, navigation - at 40 to 50 miles (65 to 80 km). 235 decibels produces an almost unimaginable intensity of sound wave pressure: normal conversation is about 60 decibels. A jet plane taking off, is about 130 db - 10 million times the volume of conversation. The human eardrum bursts instantly at around 160 db - 1000 times the intensity of a jet take-off. 230 decibels is 7 orders of magnitude above this level - that's 10 million times louder than the intensity of sound required to literally pop your ears out, or 10,000 trillion times more intense than normal sound levels that we encounter in our daily lives. (Sound levels in the natural ocean are about 80 to 90 db, although a blue whale's full-strength mating call is 190 db - still 14,000 times weaker than the navy sonar that some "military genius" came up with as a device they claim would cause "minimal" damage to marine mammals.)
o Children are at risk of severe allergic reactions when they eat kiwi fruit, according to UK research. The two-year survey at Southampton General Hospital showed that children under five were particularly at risk, prompting the Food Standards Agency to issue an alert urging caution to parents. Two thirds of children in the study became ill the first time they ate the fruit. Reactions included tingling and itching in the mouth or throat and swelling of the tongue, while some children under five suffered wheezing and collapse. (The Times 18/06/03; p.1)
o As of mid-2003, unsolicited email ("Spam") has reached epidemic proportions. For example, of the 2.5 billion messages received daily by Hotmail users, over 80% are pure Spam.
o Ironically enough, the cheapest seashells in the world today are two cowries that were once used as currency - Cypraea moneta L. and Cypraea annulata L. In parts of Micronesia, you could cover the bride-payment of a wife for about 100 bags of the former - now you can buy a kg of them (that's LOTS, by the way!) for about $1.50 USD. The most expensive shell-beast these days is probably a strange black and white Ovulid-type thingie (Chimaeria incomparabilis Briano, 1993) found in deep water off Ethiopia. A nice one of these could probably sell for $40,000 USD - admittedly not in the range of a rare coin or stamp, but still a fair amount for a shell!!
o Americans spend over 4.5 billion hours each year stuck in traffic that's going nowhere in any particular hurry.
o Twenty percent of all road accidents in Sweden involve a moose. By contrast, only 0.3% of Canada's motor accidents have anything to do with this particular beast. (except in Newfoundland, i.e...... (Canadian in-joke! :--0))
o Common sense energy conservation measures such as walking to the corner store instead of driving, and turning the thermostat down a bit, can save about one third of your energy consumption - and expenses!!! There are zillions of good websites that you how to save energy. One of the best is found here.
o A normal person's height can change as much as 2.5 cm (1 inch) during the course of the day. When we are sitting or standing, gravity causes the spinal column to be compressed - which means we all shrink as the morning becomes night, to a point beyond which the spine will not compact any further. In the night, while the body is lying down, the spine rebounds to its natural length, so our height in the morning is greater than when we retired the night before. As we grow older, the amplitude of the daily change becomes less - even before other changes in the spine cause a gradual loss of height due to calcium depletion and disk deterioration. This combination of changes means that if a person is measured in the evening every time, they will appear to grow taller in the years prior to the date they start to shrink. To use myself as an example, 5 years ago i measured an average of 73.25 inches (186.05 cm) in the morning, and 72.50 inches (184.15 cm) in the evening. Now, i tally only 73.15" (185.8 cm) upon awakening, and 72.65" (184.5) before bed-time. So, although my average height remains the same, if i had only measured in the evening i would appear to be growing taller - at age 47!
o It is widely reported that the first discovery of commercial quantities of petroleum in the USA, was in 1859 by the colorful Col. Drake. in Pennsylvania. The truth is, however, that lesser known folks in Vermont wre producing oil a full 15 years earlier. They were more interested in money than fame, and sold out for a tidy profit before the first oil glut and resulting price crash occurred in 1863. In the early days of fossil oil, before electric power and the motor car ensured an almost insatiable demand, it was mostly used for illumination, competing in that market with whale and vegetable oils. Petroleum proved cheaper than whale oil, and this probably helped save many whale species from extinction, since the oil from their body fat was the most valuable whale-related product.
o Individual atoms of all but two elements can now be seen more or less directly: innovative microscopy methods have lowered the resolution of the best microscopes to 0.8 angstroms, which means that lithium atoms, with an average diameter of 1 angstrom, can be plainly seen. Only hydrogen and helium currently remain hidden from our view!!
o Canada has more donut shops per-capita than any other country in the world. It is also the largest importer of American cars. It is not known if these two factoids are related.
o The guillotine, a "humane" execution device which neatly slices off the heads of those deemed worthy of such treatment by the machine's owner, was most recently used in France on 10th of September, 1977, to punish a soul by the name of Hamida Djandoubi. Although the modern incarnation of this horror show was developed to forward the cause of the French Revolution (Its namesake was assemblyman Dr Guillotin, who proposed that beheading, without any torture involved, was the best way to get rid of "enemies of the state" and all others the newly-formed Republic of France wished to bid a permanent farewell to.), similar devices can be found all the way back to at least 14th century Ireland: the earliest known mechanical beheading by a guillotine-like device, was of one Murcod Ballagh , who lived near the town of Merton, in 1307.
o Achernar, a blue dwarf star that's the 9th brightest in the sky at magnitude +0.5, has the distinction of being the flattest star ever measured. It has a colossal bulge around its equator, where it is 50% wider than its pole-to-pole diameter (i.e., if it was 100 km from the north to the south pole, it would be 150 km wide at the equator). This has scientists stumped - by the most "advanced" calculations, given its spin of 225 km (140 mi) per second, it should only be 20 to 30% fatter!
o It used to be illegal to ride a street car on Sunday if have been eating garlic in Toronto, Ontario, Canada (and you thought YOUR town's laws were insane.....)
o The world's most popular cartoon just might be something called "Dragonball". There are nearly 2 million pages on the internet that mention things pertaining to this anime creation (Anime is a style of Japanese animation whose eerily similar characters all bear sharp, angular features) and it's myriad spin-offs - movies, comic books, merchandise, fan-fiction (including at least one novelette that's several orders of quality above the level of the original, i might add!!) and general chatter and admiration. By comparison, Spiderman gets 841,000 hits and poor old Superman, a mere 327,000.
o Ever wonder what the words "15 amps" mean on those fuses in your fuse box? An ampere is defined as one coulomb of electricity moving past a point in one second. Enlightened now? A coulomb is defined as 6.242 x 1018 electrons - a VERY large number - 6 1/4 billion billion in fact! So, a 15 amp fuse will permit about 100 billion billion electrons to pass into your lights and household appliances every second.
o Survival rates for cases of cardiac arrest (where the heart stops beating suddenly) can be dramatically improved by chilling the patient's core body temperature to 33 C (91.5 F) for several hours, beginning soon after the event, according to research carried out in 2002 and 2003 at the department of emergency medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Even more surprising, brain damage normally associated with cardiac arrest is severely limited and often even reversed by this unorthodox treatment.
o Just as the orbit of our planet around the sun is not a circle but an ellipse (a "flattened" circle), the earth is not completely round: the distance from the earth's surface to its center is 40 km more at the equator than at the poles. This is because it is spinning, so that it flattens out around the middle - not because it is middle-aged!! On consequence of this 0.3% difference in diameter is that a 150 lb (70 kg) person would weigh almost a half pound more at the equator than at the north or south pole. So, the easiest way for a person at the equator to lose a half pound, would be to hop on a plane and fly to the north pole.
o The city Halifax, Nova Scotia has more bars per capita then any other city in North America. Canada beat Denmark 47-0 at the 1949 world hockey championships. These factoids are not known to be connected. (Hey, it's past 5:30 in the a.m. - and no i didn't get up early!)
o Pregnant women tend to eat more if they are carrying a baby boy, according to US research. Scientists from the Harvard School of Public Health suggest that a male foetus may secrete a chemical from its developing testicles that stimulates its mother to step up her energy intake. Lead researcher Professor Dimitrios Trichopoulos says, For [various] reasons - such as having to compete among themselves to gain the favours of women - males have to be bigger than females and this phenomenon has its origins in the womb. (BBC News Online 06/06/03)
o The 32 richest nations will spend over a trillion ($1,000,000,000,000.00 - 1000 billion) US dollars on "defense" (it's interesting to note that no country these days will admit to having an offensive military force.... I personally find tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, unbelievably powerful sonar arrays capable of blasting marine mammals to kingdom come with 235 decibels of sound, monstrous stockpiles of landmines, cluster bombs and uranium-tipped missiles to be VERY offensive!!) in 2003, with one particular country accounting (when the Iraq war is included) for about 40% of the world total. By comparison, less than $500 million is required to finish the job of eradicating Polio from the entire planet - but it can't be found for some strange reason....... just like the $10 billion (1% of military expenses) that would be required to protect about three quarters of the world's biological diversity, is still just a pipe dream. It would seem that just as Thomas Jefferson was prophetically correct in his assesment of the dangers of "monied corporations", Eisenhower was absolutely right about the "military-industrial complex"! (ok ok this might not be a legitimate fact...... but this is MY list and i get to be both commentator AND compiler!)
o Sirius is the brightest star in the night sky. However, it is a dwarf star and not particularly luminous in absolute terms - it appears brilliant because it is less than nine light years away. By comparison, the star Deneb in Cygnus appears much fainter than Sirius in the sky, but actually a supergiant thousands of times more luminous than Sirius - it appears fainter because it is more than three thousand light years away.
o Head lice are harmless and there is little evidence that cleaning clothing and bedding with insecticide is a useful enterprise, a US report says today (06/06/03). Research clearly shows that lice seen on pillows, hats or furniture are dead, sick or elderly and can extremely seldom infect another person. Treatment should not be started for nits unless live lice are found on the head, the specialists say. The report also found that itching only occurs in a minority of cases and most children have no symptoms. (The Daily Telegraph 06/06/03; p.5)
o The next time you're strolling down the beach, thank an emperor for your right to do so - unless you're in Maine or Massachusetts: then blame the colonial authorities for giving away this gift of the emperor. In 530 A.D., the Byzantinian (Eastern Roman Empire) Emperor Justinian gathered together his top legal scholars and ordered them to put in writing all of the laws of the Empire. Thus, the "Institutes of Justinian," the ultimate codification of Roman civil law, were written. Tucked away in these numerous volumes covering every aspect of Roman life and commerce, was the provision that "By the law of nature these things are common to all mankind; the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shores of the sea." No one, therefore, was forbidden to approach the seashore. Over the next millennium, Rome fell and the western European countries rose. But the civil code of Rome, the "Institutes", formed the basis of law for many European countries. Most important from an North American perspective, the law of England adopted much Roman civil law, consequently recognizing the public nature of tidelands and waters, and giving them protection in the name of the King for the use of all English subjects. // In Maine and parts of Massachusetts there are many tidal flats that required long wharves in order to provide access to the ocean at all times of the day. But, the early colonial government could not afford to build them - so they gave property owners ownership of the shoreline down to the low water mark, so they - and not the state - would be responsible for building the wharves. However, even here, the public has access to the shore for the purposes of "fishing, fowling and navigation". So, as long as you carry a fishing pole, you can venture anwhere in North America below the high tide mark with perfect impunity.....
o Mental illness in England (which is not any more prone to them as a nation than any others, so it may be considered a good representative of Western nations in general) costs more than £77 billion last year (2002), according to a study by the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health. Its full economic and social costs are thus greater than the annual cost of crime, and this fact "should" put pressure on governments to allocate more resources to mental health services. Matt Muijen, chief executive of the centre, says, Discrimination and stigma, not an inability to work, are often the causes of worklessness for those with mental health problems. (Guardian Unlimited 04/06/03 - modifies slightly)
o The leading sector for pollution in the developed world, is hard rock mining. In 2000, mining operations in the USA emitted over 3 billion pounds (1.4 billion kilos) of toxins, including over 200 million pounds of cyanide, into the air and water of that country. Agriculture would be a candidate for second place, although manufacturing and the military would also be in the running. Toxic emissions from military sources are particularly difficult to find data about, for obvious reasons.
o Epaulet sharks, which live in the shallows around coral reefs, can survive without oxygen, and even without water, for extended periods of time. Researchers at Griffith University in Australia are studying the sharks to try to understand the mechanisms that allow them to do this. The research may have many applications for treating medical conditions in humans.
o 90% of all the oceans large fish have already been removed from the seas, a comprehensive 10 year study by German and Canadian scientists has revealed. The study - see Nature, May 15 - shows that every time industrial fishing has moved into unfitted areas, the biomass of the larger marine predators has been rapidly reduced to less than one tenth its original size. All available fisheries data from around the world was examined: this is fact, not theory. It compared the biomass and composition of large predatory fishes in four continental shelves and nine oceanic systems from the beginning of exploitation to the present.
o For anyone interested in astronomy, a fantastic site is the "electronic sky" (http://www.glyphweb.com/esky/default.htm) - you can find information on everything from minor crators on the moon, to every named star in the sky, to entire galaxies. A truly fabulous site.
o The world's smallest known species of seahorse, mistaken in the past for the offspring of another species of seahorse, has now been identified as a unique species. Adults of the new species, a pygmy seahorse known as Hippocampus denise, are typically just 16 millimeters (5/8 of an inch) long---smaller than most fingernails. There are already 32 other known species of seahorses. Marine biologist Sara Lourie, a member of the Project Seahorse marine conservation team based at the University of British Columbia, is the scientist responsible for finding the new species in the deep corals of the Flores Sea off the coast of Indonesia. For more information, go to:
http://ens-news.com/ens/may2003/2003-05-12-03.asp
http://www.seahorse.mcgill.ca/news.htm
o The most expensive item in most grocery stores is the delicate spice saffron, which often sells for $7 + tax for a jar containing a 1g pouch of the stuff. That's $7000 (plus tax) per kg, or about half the price of pure gold. Dried chives in similar jars come in a distant second place, at a mere pre-tax $1200 or so per kg (a kg is 2.54 lbs).
o Strong negative emotions such as anxiety and depression depress the immune system: this is an established fact now. This means that worrying about getting cancer or any other disease, can actually make it more likely that the worry-wort will catch the disease - or whatever else is going around at the time!!
o Every day, an estimated 16,000 people worldwide become infected with HIV, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. Approximately 50 percent of the 38.6 million adults living with HIV/AIDS worldwide are women, while 3.2 million are children younger than 15 years old. More than two thirds of the cases are in Africa, where the disease is likely to remain a certain death sentence for the foreseeable future.
o In the United States, an estimated 900,000 people are living with HIV. New infections occur at a rate of 40,000 a year. Young people under the age of 25 account for half of all new HIV infections in the USA, and the rate of new infections is now nearly the same for women as for men.
o Green tea - a less processed version of the ubiquitous black tea, with far less caffeine and more healthful properties - has long been known for its immune system benefits and anti-oxidant powers. Now, US scientists say drinking green tea may also help to prevent tooth decay and bad breath. It appears that chemicals in tea can destroy bacteria and viruses, and it is possible that adding tea extracts to toothpaste and mouthwash could make them more effective. Microbiologist Milton Schiffenbauer, from Pace University in New York, says, Our research shows tea extracts can destroy the organism that causes disease. If we can stimulate the immune system and at the same time destroy the organisms, then it makes sense to drink more [green] tea.
o Geckos can climb even the smoothest of surfaces, such as mirrors or polished steel. Their secret is millions of minuscule hairs only a few tenths of a micrometer across, which sprout of thousands of tiny hairs on their feet. The micro-hairs (called setae) have broad, flexible tips, so they can conform to the microscopic irregularities in any natural and almost any man-made surface. The stickiness comes about because of very weak intermolecular bonds called Van der Waals forces, which cumulatively add up to make geckos the Kings of Cling!
o The first "modern" computer (i.e., general-purpose and program-controlled) was built in 1941 by Konrad Zuse. Since there was a war going on, he applied to the German government for funding to build his machines for military use, but was turned down because the German government did not expect the war to last beyond Christmas.
o Vikings, contrary to popular opinion and Wagenerian operatic caricatures, did not wear horns on their helmets: these would have been impractical in battle, since they would have made it much easier for opponents to knock the helmet off the wearer's head!! They were indeed fierce warriors and engaged in most of the raping and pillaging they are accredited with, but many groups were also peaceful farmers and settlers, and some Viking tribes were noted for their savvy trading and diplomatic skills.
o The Norsemen or Vikings were a northern offshoot of the Aryan invasion of Europe that took place in waves beginning around 5,000 B.C. . Always superb mariners and aggressive warriors, they gained a huge advantage over most other European cultures around 750 A.D. when they added excellent sails to their already very ocean-worthy vessels. This enabled them to easily and quickly travel to all parts of the post-Roman world, to engage in activities ranging from raping, pillaging and sacking, to trading and even outright invasions, as with the Danish take-over of England in 793. For more information about these fascinating peoples that dramatically altered the course of European history and colonized North America for 300 years from c. 1000 to 1300 A.D., see http://www.geocities.com/~asanca/About-Blood.htm.
o "Those that live by the sword, get shot."........ If you keep a gun in your home, you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine. "Keeping guns at home is dangerous for adults regardless of age, sex, or race," said Douglas J. Wiebe, PhD, Instructor of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and a fellow at Penn's Firearm Injury Center. Wiebe led the study by the Violence Prevention Research Group at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) before moving to Penn. Wiebe's study found that people with a gun in their home were almost twice as likely to die in a gun-related homicide, and 16 times more likely to use a gun to commit suicide, than people without a gun in their home.
o According to many scientists, some 20 percent of the meteorites landing on Earth today are remnants of a very large asteroid that planetary scientists refer to as the "L-chondrite parent body." This asteroid apparently broke apart around 500 million years ago in what is believed to be the largest collision that occurred in "more recent" solar system history. Massively increased incidence of meteorite impact density may have been a factor in the mass extinctions and subsequent explosion in speciation (ie, development of new species) which occurred around the Cambrian/Pre-Cambrian boundary.
o The search engine Google, widely acknowledged to be one of the very best on the web, has nearly 10 billion web pages indexed in its database (as of mid-2005), which amounts to approximately 4+ petabytes of memory - that's 4 million gigabytes, or about 100,000 times the memory capacity of the average PC.
o Computer memory has come a LONG way in the past 20 years. In 1983, the Commodore 64 (64 kilobytes of memory) was still a hot item. By 2003, IBM had developed a palm-sized device that could store a terabyte (ie, 1,000 Gigabytes) of data in easily-accessible form.
o Children of working mothers are as happy and emotionally stable as those of stay-at-home parents, a long-term study has concluded. Researchers from Bristol University found that childcare could have positive effects and rejected claims that children looked after by child minders would lag behind. (The Independent 13/05/03; p.8) A number of studies in the USA and Europe in the past decade also conclude that preschool children cared for by qualified and conscientious caregivers in various settings, are not at any disadvantage compared to children looked after by an at-home parent. The quality of the relationship between children and parents seems to be far more important: a child who grows up in a caring, love-filled home, with age-appropriate discipline, boundaries and responsibilities are the most likely to develop well in all aspects of their lives - social, interpersonal, emotional and intellectual (as well as spiritual, but this is a bit more subjective) - irrespective of whether they experienced daycare or other non-parental caretaking at an early age.
o When mother cormorants feel their offspring are ready to leave the nest, they make sure that this is exactly what happens, by destroying the nest completely!!
o Mother's Day began in 1872 as a call by women to end war. Following the tremendous losses of the Civil War, Julia Ward Howe sent out a proclamation, declaring: "Arise, then women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts, whether our baptism be that of water or of tears! We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience." It sounded like a good idea at the time, but never really caught on.....
o Rabbits do not chew the cud, but most of their food is nonetheless digested twice: they produce two types of pellets - soft, moist ones that are eaten again, to extract more nutrients the second time through, and hard, dry ones that are left for people and other animals seeking "rabbit sign".
o As of 2003, exactly 1,201 people from 63 countries are known to have climbed Mount Everest over 1600 times. When Hillary and Norgay stepped on to the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, the two climbers did not think anybody would follow in their footsteps again. "Both Tenzing and I thought once we'd climbed the mountain, it was unlikely anyone would ever make another attempt," Hillary told National Geographic Adventure magazine.
o Isaac Newton, one of the most brilliant intellects of all time, was also very strange person: he often forgot to eat while working on a challenging problem, had very few close friends, and often did things such as giving a lecture to an empty hall, if nobody showed up for class on a particular day (although how this is known, is unclear....).
o Sir Isaac Newton (1642 to 1733) was one of the most insightful and influential scientists of the past 2000 years. He clarified and systematized many aspects of modern Physics and mathematics single-handedly, and firmly established the "scientific method" as the way the modern world looks at the Universe in general. For all this, however, science occupied less than half of his productive life. He published his pivotal 3-volume tome The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or The Principia as it came to be commonly known, in 1687, and immediately afterwards turned his attentions to Biblical scholarship - specifically the systematic interpretation of the prophecies of Daniel and the Revelation from a Protestant viewpoint. His 1,300,000 published words of Scriptural analyses helped shape the basis of most Protestant prophetic interpretation for the next 200 years.
o Parrots seem to be the longest-lived members of the Bird clan: reliable reports have them living to over 150 years, but the oldest currently-verified parrot is only 102 years old as of 2003.
o More than 13,000 Russian villages are inhabited only by ghosts. Nobody lives in them any more, according to preliminary results of the 2002 census. Nearly 35,000 villages have no more than 10 inhabitants, according to the census results, which were posted on the State Statistics Committee's web site late last week. Between 1959 and 1989, Russia's population grew by 10 million people for every decade, from 117 million to 147 million, despite a migration of Russians to other Soviet republics. But in 1992, deaths began to outnumber births so dramatically that even an influx of 11 million immigrants could not prevent a population decline. The 2002 census, conducted in October, counted 145.2 million people, down 1.3 percent from the last census in 1989. Some of the causes of the unprecedented decline in rural population include: near-disintegration of rural health care systems, deforestation, over-exploitaton of natural resources, severe economic declines in resource-based industries, collapse of the fur markets, depletion of many fish stocks, mechanization of forestry (which requires fewer workers), and the natural course of urbanization that is occurring in all corners of the globe. (The Moscow Times, April 30, 2003)
o The Norsemen ("Vikings") and their descendants formed or heavily influenced several European countries. England, for instance, is large the product of three invasions of Northern tribes: the Angles, Saxons and Jutes displaced and absorbed much of the culture of the original Britons (despite the rear-guard actions of King Arthur and the boys....) in the 5th Century. Then in 793, the Danes took over the joint, and finally in 1066, the Normans (see next entry, below) invaded and left an indelible influence upon English culture, language, blood-lines and laws. They were also largely absorbed into the native Anglo-Saxon culture within a couple of centuries.
o NORMANDY: Because Norse ships could easily travel rivers, places like Paris became easy targets. By 886, Vikings had besieged and plundered Paris to such an extent that a French king decided to buy them off with an enormous amount of treasure as well as a large, bountiful and breathtakingly beautiful territory in northern France. In droves, Danes settled its interior, and Norwegians its coast. These Northmen were called "Normans" and the territory "Normandy". Although they were politically, militarily and probably numerically dominant, they soon become "French." Two centuries later in 1066, these francophone Vikings conquered England at the Battle of Hastings. That would become history s last major Viking invasion.
o A Manx shearwater captured on a little island off north Wales could be oldest bird in the wild ever recorded. The venerable bird (Puffinus puffinus) was first captured and ringed in May 1957, when it was between four and six years old. But Steve Stansfield, warden of the Bardsey island Bird Observatory, caught the seabird again in mid-April, 2003. Until now, the world's oldest ringed bird was a US albatross estimated to be over 50. But the shearwater's possible age of 52 years could make it the record holder. Experts at the British Trust for Ornithology say the bird must have flown at least five million miles (eight million kilometres) during its long life. That is the equivalent of circumnavigating the globe 200 times. The bird clocked up about half a million miles on annual migrations to and from its winter grounds in South America, says the BTO's Mark Grantham. Its frequent 600-mile flights out to sea to feed [sure makes a trip to the supermarket seem trivial!!!] make up the rest. The shearwater had been caught previously in 1961, 1978 and 2002.
o Isaac Newton, famed scientist and Biblical scholar, was extremely reluctant to publish his epoch-defining works. His main scientific theories and mathematical methodology were set forth in rigorous precision in his 3-volume Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which he had to be coaxed into publishing by astronomer Edmund Halley (as in the comet), who financed the project. His massive tomes on biblical prophecy were not published until after his death: he apparently had no plans at all to present them to the public at large!
o One pound of fat equals about 4000 calories. So, if you chose chewing gum as your means of exercise, at 11 calories per hour over resting metabolic output, it would take you 15 days to burn off an extra pound. If you chose cycling at a brisk 18 miles (28 km) per hour, you could burn off the same amount in about 5 hours if you are an average-sized man.
o The tomato is the world's most popular fruit. And yes, just like eggplants and squash, botanically speaking it is a fruit, not a vegetable. More than 60 million tons of tomatoes are produced per year, 16 million tons more than the second most popular fruit, the banana. Apples are the third most popular (36 million tons), then oranges (34 million tons) and watermelons (22 million tons)
o "Depleted" uranium has been used in the past decade by "western" military powers, as an anti-tank weapon, since it is much times denser than lead, and penetrates heavy armor like butter via oxidizing as it powers (and combusts!) its way through the lighter metal: in effect, it burns up as it penetrates into an armored vehicle, turning into a fine powder of extremely small particles of the radioactive material which is the residue from nuclear reactors: much of the more radioactive U238 isotope of natually-occuring uranium is consumed in the energy-producing fission reactions of nuclear power plants. What remains is a mixture which contains much less of the heavier, more unstable form of uranium, and relatively more of the lighter, less radioactive U235 variety. It is indeed less radioactive, but when inhaled into the lungs, the small but heavy particles stick there and it is absorbed into the blood stream - where its effects are still very poorly understood. It also contains some of the more radioactive end-procucts of uranium fission, such as radioactive thorium. To complicate matters, uranium itself is a toxic substance - irrespective of how radioactive it is or isn't. That said, military authorities have seemingly taken a "innocent until proven guilty" attitude towards this toxic substance, using an estimated 500 tons of it during the wars of the past decade or so. The subsequent "fallout" (pun intended) may be more dangerous and long-lasting than anyone suspected when they unleashed it on a large scale, upon many millions of citizens of various and sundry "liberated" countries.
o Tomatoes were first cultivated in 700 AD by Aztecs and Incas. Explorers returning from Mexico introduced the tomato into Europe, where it was first mentioned in 1556. The French called it "the apple of love," the Germans "the apple of paradise." However, in much of English speaking North America, it was long considered to be quite poisonous!! This notion was dispelled once and for all when a brave soul whose name completely escapes me and whom i am too lazy to look up, ate an entire basket full of them in public - much to the horror or doctors present, who expected him to drop dead on the spot. Fortunately, he didn't and we can now enjoy our salsa without fear!!
o The CN Tower in Toronto is the world's tallest free standing structure: it stretches At a height of 113 stories, 553.33 metres (1,815 feet, 5 inches) above the skyline of Canada's largest city, and is visited by over 2 million tourists per year. It contains 1776 steps (oddly familiar number that....) which cover a vertical height of 342 meters (1,122 feet). On October 29, 1989, Brendan Keenoy set the world record for the fastest CN Tower climb with the time of seven minutes and 52 seconds. That's what i call a REAL stair master!
o Immunization has proven to be an extremely effective method of reducing deaths from communicable diseases. For example, in southern Africa (Mozambique, S. Africa, Namibia, etc.), a thorough campaign of measles immunization has nearly eradicated this disease, while in sub-Saharan Africa, over 600,000 children still die every year from measles, due to inadequate immunization coverage. Worldwide, an estimated 3 million deaths could be prevented by immunization. Oddly enough, funds available for immunization programs are surprisingly minuscule, especially when compared to such laudable - ok, when compared to almost anything one can name. This pattern is repeated with virtually every major cause of death and disability in the developing world: to pick a problem out of the air, malaria affects 300 million people per year, yet its control is largely left to non-profit non-governmental organizations. Strange world, no?
o During a brief period in 2000, at the solar maximum (which occurs every 11 years), the sun's magnetic field completely re-organized itself and for a while the sun actually had 2 north magnetic poles!!! This sounds impossible, but the sun's interior is far more complicated than previously thought. (The magnetic south pole never vanished during that period, it just shifted to the sun's equator).
o This is a WEIRD fact indeed: In Oregon it is against the law for bears to tear bark off of trees in tree plantations owned by lumber companies - something they do in the springtime to give them access to sap, for an energy boost after their winter's hibernation. The penalty for violating this insane law (the amount of damage done is quite minor, and it is after all the bear's forest more than it is our's) is death. Last year, 113 such violations were punished by this penalty, making Texas look like a birthday party for law-breakers by comparison.
o The origin of the "countdown" (the custom of counting down to a rocket launch or other important event) can be traced to the 1929 German silent film The Girl in the Moon ("Die Frau Im Monde"), directed by Fritz Lang. To add drama to a realistic launch to the moon, technical advisor Dr. Hermann Oberth (who later worked on the 1950 American classic, "Destination Moon") incorporated a reverse countdown, with the numbers being flashed on the screen, beginning with 10. Originally 156 minutes in length, the film was reduced to 97 minutes for its initial American release in 1931. Early rocket scientists, most of whom were German, were impressed with the film and the reverse countdown, and began to use it for true-to-life blastoffs!
o Alzheimer's disease - a form of dementia that kills many elderly people slowly, by causing their brain cells (neurons) to die, has proven a very difficult mystery to unravel, but has been the subject of intense research in recent decades (as the Baby Boomers slowly grow older....) Recently, researchers at the university of Pennsylvania (see http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-04/uop-apj040803.php) have unraveled a key component: a protein called amyloid precursor protein (APP) is sometimes misdirected toward neural cells' energy producing centers, which are called mitochondria. In attempting to enter the mitochondria, APP gets jammed in their protein entry pathways because of either improper folding of this complex protein, or because of a negatively charged portion which cannot pass through normal mitochondrial protein pathways. When most of any specific neuron's mitochondria have their pores all jammed up, the neuron runs out of energy and dies. Further, this jamming process produces a toxic by-product called A-beta amygdaloid: this protein fragment breaks off of the portion of APP that sticks out of the end of the protein pathways they are jammed in and it accumulates in the cells, apparently assisting in killing them - and forming the amygdaloid plaques typically associated with Alzheimer's. Many questions remain still, but now that the basic process of cellular death in this excessively nasty condition is known, a cure or at least a way to prevent further death of neurons after the disease is diagnosed, may be much closer than many people thought until a couple of months ago.
o The longest recorded flight of a domestic chicken is 13 seconds.
o The average major league career of a baseball is 5 to 7 pitches.
o 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)
o 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.
o 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
o 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.
o Bacteria weigh about one trillionth of a gram ( about 400 trillion bacteria per pound). Viruses are typically 1000 times lighter still!!
o
* In 1947, Marilyn Monroe was chosen as the first California Artichoke Queen. (lifted from Snow's Silly Facts - a delightfully irreverent compendium of thousands of items ranging from the intensely silly (as in "In 1471, a chicken in Basel, Switzerland, was accused of being 'a devil in disguise' after laying a brightly colored egg. The chicken stood trial, was found guilty and burned at the stake. ") to sad reflections of the society we find ourselves living in today (as in The chances that a drug offense by a black juvenile (i.e., child) (in a country i will decline to name) with no prior jail time will result in imprisonment is 48 times as often as a white child in similar circumstances will be similarly punished (circa mid-1990s)). The thing i most appreciate about this site is that it meticulously references its sources - now that's what i call Quality Journalism!!!
* The Wild and sometimes Wacky world of cancer cures has produced many surprises over the years - some not so good, such as laetrile, others quite laudable indeed. In the latter category, it appears that a species of the bacterial genus Clostridium, famous in undergrad microbiology courses for grossing young students out with its incredibly malodorous fragrance, when it manages to invade the human body, can only survive and multiply in cancerous tumors: these are composed of densely-packed cells and have a low enough oxygen concentration for the stinky bacterium to live in - they prefer anoxic environments. Researchers at the University of Nottingham (and i'll refrain from this obvious opportunity for silly jokes here...) have exploited this situation by inserting a gene into the tumor-loving bug that converts a harmless chemical into a poison capable of killing the tumor cells near where the Clostridium organisms live - which will nearly all be cancerous, since they can only survive in the center of tumors!!
* There are more than 10,000 varieties of tomatoes. Their scientific name is Lycopersicon lycopersicum, which means "wolf peach." They are cousins of the eggplant, red pepper, ground cherry, potato, and the highly toxic belladonna, also known as the nightshade or solanaccae.
* [NOTE: This is most definitely NOT an anti-American sortie, but is instead anti-war in general. I most certainly do not mean to offend anyone!!!] Between 1961 and 1971 herbicide mixtures, nicknamed by the coloured identification band painted on their 208-litre storage barrels, were used to defoliate forests and mangroves, to clear perimeters of military installations and to destroy 'unfriendly' crops as a tactic for decreasing enemy food supplies. The best-known mixture was Agent Orange. About 65% of the herbicides contained 2,4,5-T: (2,4,5-trichlorophenoxyacetic acid), which was contaminated with varying levels of dioxins - highly toxic organic compounds of chlorine and benzene which cause a variety of nasty mutations. Over thirty years later, the devastating effects of the gross negligence and lack of foresight represented by this extended period of chemical warfare (and remember Napalm also??) is just being discovered: congenital malformations, spontaneous abortions and numerous other health problems are much more common in areas targeted by these compounds. Interestingly enough, it seems that the amount of Agent Orange used in this military misadventure was under-reported to the tune of between 7 and 9.4 million liters ( see this Nature page for details: i hope they keep it in the public domain for a while!). I could close this entry with exhortations directed towards those that value warfare as a means of achieving political ends, but what would that accomplish? The undeniable fact that war, by its very nature, inevitably produces both tragedy and atrocities (through negligence, poor planning, or deliberately) and encourages others to solve their own problems in similar fashion, does not seem to have diminished its continuing popularity.
* The word "weird" is mis-spelled as "wierd" on almost 200,000 publically-available web pages on the Internet. Phonically, it makes more sense to spell it this way, since "i.e." is pronounced as "ee" in Germanic languages, of which English is an example.
* If you live in the United States, chances are you can get away with cheating on your taxes much more easily now than at any time since the introduction of income tax during the first world war. Due to systematic and perhaps deliberate underfunding of the IRS, successful prosecutions for tax fraud are less than half of what they were 10 years ago, and total prosecutions are down by about two thirds. There is no indication that people are trying to cheat the government less now than they did a decade ago (for obvious reasons, obtaining accurate stats on this matter is not easy....), so this must mean that it is at least twice as easy now for Americans to fudge the figures on their tax returns with impunity.
* Recent research has shown that what is often called "luck" is often the result of psychological attitudes and behavioral tendencies that enhance a person's chances of recognizing, creating, and taking advantage of opportunities for success. For an elaboration on this, see Luck.html, which i have copied from a website, lest it vanish as so many websites have a tendency of doing!
* Our society is quite freely "lubricated" by the consumption of the ethanol variety of alcohol - undoubtedly the most frequently deliberately-consumed poison in the world. The hardest-drinking countries in the world today are in Europe (The good folk of Spain, for example, consume about 13 liters (about 4.2 US gallons) of absolute ethanol per capita per year), as well as Thailand, where sales of "sprits" have spiked considerably since 1998 - and the current "champion" drinkers live in the Bahamas, where each adult consumes an average of 15 liters of Joy-Juice per year (a related Weird Fact is that Barbadians, right next door, drink less than half that!!). The all-time record, however, would appear to belong to France - where a whopping 26 liters per capita per annum was guzzled in 1963. In Argentina, the figures hovered around 20 liters from 1963 to 1980, then declined to less than half of that for some reason. By comparison, the USA sloshes back about 10 liters per adult per year (oddly enough, this figure has remained remarkably constant since the early 1970s, after climbing from about 6 liters in 1960.). The very civilized little country of Iceland is the most sober of all "Western" nations, at less than 6 liters. Not surprisingly, the reported alcoholic consumption in Islamic countries is almost zero.
* In 1976, the wealthiest 1% of Americans owned about 10% of the nation's wealth. By the year 2000, that figure had increased to 40%. Their increase in goodies is partly due to the numerous tax breaks they somehow seem to luck into - in 2001, they paid about 25% of their income in federal taxes, and 5.3% in total state and local taxes. By comparison, the average taxpayer also pays 25% in federal taxes, but they pay 9.6% in state and local taxes, and those earning less than $15,000 pay an average of 11.4% - almost twice the amount that those earning over $1,000,000.00 per year. Crime may not pay, but it seems being in the "top" tax bracket certainly does.....
* The birth of a black hole is caused by the implosion of an aging star at least 10 times the mass of our sun, and occurs when the outward force of its nuclear fires can no longer counter the inward force of gravity: the matter of the star collapses with enough momentum to form a "singularity" - an object of such incredible density that not even light can escape its gravitational pull. This event is called a Supernova. An intense burst of energy across a huge swath of the electromagnetic spectrum is released at the moment of the final "crunch", including an astonishingly intense gamma ray burst that lasts only a minute or two. The light emitted from a strong supernova can be over 10 trillion (1013) times the strength of light coming from our sun, and it can be seen with the naked eye up to a billion light years away or more.
* While walking is indeed a wonderful form of exercise, it may not do as much for the heart as some studies have led us to believe. Moderate exercise such as half an hour of brisk walking five times a week is unlikely to prevent an early death from heart disease, researchers said yesterday (14/04/03). Only vigorous exercise such as jogging and hiking [and of course cycling!!] seems to reduce the risk, according to the study in the journal Heart. The 10-year study involved almost 2,000 men in Wales.

* Despite laws in most countries that prohibit the giving or selling of alcohol to children, the vast majority of young people have tasted alcohol before they become teenagers (for example, in Great Britain in 1998, 78% of boys and 74% of girls had had their first drink by the age of 12), and by the time they are old enough to legally drink, almost 60% of 18 year olds in most "western" countries are regular or semi-regular drinkers. Very few children completely resist the temptation to at least try a sip under peer pressure, or when left alone at home for too long: in Australia, for example, in 1992 only 5% of 17 year olds reported never having a drink in their lives. In most predominantly non-Muslim countries, about 10% of the general population completely abstains from alcoholic consumption, and of those that do drink, only about 2% ever give it up absolutely.

* It is estimated that in Russia, men drink between 3.8 and 4 times the amount of alcohol consumed by women (Treml 1997). A recent study (2001) found that two-thirds of Russian men die drunk, and that more than half of that number die in extreme stage of alcoholic intoxication.

* In the USA, blacks make up approximately 13 percent of drug users. However, they account for 37 percent of those arrested on drug charges, 55 percent of those convicted and 74 percent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. To me, this is a VERY wierd set of facts!

* A new mother in India is claiming to be the oldest woman to give birth, at the age of 65, beating the current record held by a 63-year-old Italian. The Indian woman, who had not had children before, had a healthy son by Caesarian section after undergoing in-vitro fertilization. Medical experts are to examine the woman to try to prove her age, as like many rural Indians she has no birth certificate but claims she was born in early 1938.
(The Times 10/04/03; p.28)

* The wealth of the richest three people on the planet - Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and the shared wealth of the Walton family, whose patriarch founded Walmart - is greater than that of 47 of the world's countries.

* The combined wealth of the world's 250 richest people, is greater than the combined wealth of the poorest 1.5 billion citizens.

* This may not be a "wierd" or "fun" fact, but smoking causes an estimated 1 in 6 premature deaths in the so-called "First World". In the USA, for example, nearly 500,000 deaths per year are attributable to the deliberate or secondary inhalation of tobacco smoke. I suppose it IS a strange thing, however, that so many people insist upon doing something that not only costs a small fortune these days, but that they also know will probably sooner or later kill them......

* Ireland and Norway will soon become the first countries to ban smoking in all public establishments. Smoking will be banned in all bars, restaurants, cafes, pubs and clubs in an effort to protect patrons and employees from the effects of passive smoking. In Norway, the law was approved by parliament on Tuesday (08/04/03), it will only come into force in spring 2004. In Ireland, which is actually the first, the law was passed in 2002 and will come into effect in Jan, 2004.
(Financial Times 10/04/03; p.7)

* It's official: frozen vegetables are often healthier than imported ìfreshî vegetables sold in supermarkets out of season, according to a new study. Researchers say some vegetables travel so far to reach our shops they lose many vitamins and minerals en route. Frozen vegetables, on the other hand, are processed within hours of being picked, preserving their nutritional content. The study, by the Austrian Consumers Association, found the vitamin content of certain frozen vegetables was significantly higher than fresh produce and had lower levels of lead, cadmium and pesticides.

* The world's longest street is located in Canada. Toronto's Yonge Street runs 1,900 kilometers/1,190 miles from the shores of Lake Ontario past Lake Superior.

* On March 26, 1885, George Eastman manufactured the first commercial motion-picture film at his factory in Rochester, New York.

* A great website for people who like to read about inventions and inventors, is http://web.mit.edu/invent/i-archive.html - this is an archive of "inventors of the week" that goes back to about 1996.

* George Eastman contributed more to photography than any other individual. He invented "dry" film (i.e., one not coated with a semi-liquid emulsion) in 1879, the first commercial film in 1885, and in 1888 marketed the first "Kodak" camera, which came with a 100 exposure roll of film for the price of $25 (a lot of money back then!!). He was also an amazing philanthropist, donating over $100 million to various charities during his lifetime.

* Antarctica, the world's fifth largest continent, was not sighted by Europeans until 1820. It is so cold at the south pole that the temperature never rises above -16 C (3 F).

* In all of North America (USA and Canada, ie), there are less than 150 "stranger abductions" of children per year, verses many thousands of abductions by parents and other relatives. Guess which one gets the most media attention?? For the sake of lifetime risk (from age 0 to age 16) of about one in fifty thousand, tens of millions of children are encouraged to avoid or even be afraid of almost everybody they don't personally know - even though the latter are FAR more likely to be a danger to them! (not that they should be afraid of **anybody**, mind you: fear is a good motivator, but terribly destructive and corrosive in its side-effects!!). To my mind, this is completely insane. (and yes, this is part commentary, part fact. Our "civilization" is a truly strange place to live in at times....)

* Queen Elizabeth (of England, Ireland Scotland and Wales - but not Empress of India) sent her first email in 1976. (How's THAT for a useless bit of trivia???)

* The resolving power of best light-based microscopes was until recently about 100 nm (10 millionths of a meter, or 0.4 millionths of an inch) - about the diameter of a normal sized virus. However, researchers at the University of Rochester have pushed that down to a mere 20 nm and hope to use their innovative technique to resolve structures below 10nm - meaning individual protein molecules will be plainly visible, and can be examined while interacting on the surface of a living cell. The details can be found at http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2003-03/uor-tss030303.php. A brief summary:
Novotny and Hartschuh sharpen a gold wire to a point just a few billionths of an inch across. A laser then shines against the side of the gold tip, inciting electrons inside it to oscillate. These oscillations create a tiny bubble of electromagnetic energy at the tip, which interacts with the vibrations of the atoms in the sample. This interaction, called Raman scattering, releases packets of light from the sample at specific frequencies that can be detected and used to identify the chemical composition of the material - as well as to see it by a microscope!

* In North America, there is a 1 in 3 lifetime probability of being moderately to severely injured by automobiles or other vehicles. There is a 1 in 100 lifetime probability of being killed by a motor vehicle over a lifetime. The best defenses against vehicle injury are seatbelts and good doses of common sense and caution (not to mention plain old paying attention!!).

* Although covered with ice (all but 0.4% of it, i.e.), Antarctica is the driest place on the planet, with an absolute humidity lower than the Gobi desert.

* A Google search reveals that nowhere on the more accessible portions of the Worldwide Web are the arcane rituals of the Freemasons published for public consumption, although many fragments of them are presented to provide fuel for various torches and crusades. Their blood-curdling oaths include such gems as having new members promise to be subject to some pretty scary penalties for revealing the details of Masonic lore, such as "to have his left breast ripped open and his heart torn there from to be fed to the devouring birds of the air or ravenous beasts of the field as prey." (Fellow Craft oath), "To have the throat cut and the tongue ripped out by the roots and buried in the sand where the tide ebbs and flows twice in 24 hours" (Entered Apprentice), and even "To have the skull sawn apart and the brains exposed to the scorching rays of the sun" (Knight Templar). (My apologies to any children reading this! These penalties, however, have never been known to be enforced, i should add!!)

* The most intense winds our planet knows, belong to tornados. A class 5 tornado packs a wind of over 300 mph (about 500 km/hr). The highest recorded wind speed on Earth was >318 mph in Oklahoma City on May 3, 1999. On that infamous day, at least 57 tornadoes killed 56 people and caused over US$330M worth of damage.

* Each hour, enough water flows from the mouth of the Amazon River, to fill Lake Erie - one of the "Great Lakes".

* In the "developed" countries of the world, about 28 million pregnancies occur each year. Half (50%) of them are "unplanned", and 36% of them end in abortions.

* Worldwide, there are currently about 220 million pregnancies each year. 63% result in live births, 15% or so end in miscarriages or stillbirths, while 22% are aborted deliberately.

* This is not a "wierd fact", but may be of interest nevertheless. Not surprisingly, perhaps the best astronomy site on the web belongs to Nasa. My favorite corner of their huge complex is the "Astronomy Picture of the Day" . They have an enormous archives of some of the most fantastic astronomy-related photos and images of all time, going back to June 16, 1995. A GREAT place to spend a bit of time after a busy day - sure beats 99%+ of the TV shows out there in Cableville!!

* About140 million babies are born each year to the 1.5 billion women of child-bearing age (15 - 44).

* "Minnows" (members of a sub-category of the carp family), are not necessarily small: The Colorado River squawfish (more recently designated a "pike minnow") grows to nearly 2 meters and weighs up to 45kg (100+lbs), and one species of the famous "mahaseer" minnow of India (reputed to be the best fighting fish in the world for fresh water anglers who enjoy a challenge) grows to a reported 9 feet and 100kg - now that's a LOT of minnow!!! If you used anything less than a strong rod, line and person, your minnow would be lost (minnow would be lost......).

* Some democracies on the planet operate in a very strange fashion. For example, in the 2000 USA election, George W. Bush received 544,000 votes (give or take a few hundred in Florida.....) less than his chief rival, yet somehow became President nevertheless. Oddly enough, the vast majority of citizens in that country simply accepted the result as "the way things work around here". [No anti-Bush sentiments implied - this is a page for Wierd Facts, and this one certainly qualifies!!]

* Freemasonry rituals and values have had an enormous influence upon the institutions of the United States. (NOTE: I don't agree with those that believe in **any** conspiracy involving that institution or its many off-shoots such as the Bavarian Illuminati. That said, the general and specific influence of Freemasonry in many Western societies and governments cannot be denied.) The city of Washington itself, and many of its public-sector buildings contain masonic symbols and embedded masonic themes, and the language of the oaths of most important government offices such as for the Supreme Court and the President, are based upon masonic oaths: anyone who has heard the two of them cannot help notice the many close similarities. Also, a majority of American presidents have been 33rd degree Masons.

* An estimated 100,000 km2 (over 36,000 square miles) of old-growth forest are lost each year to legal and illegal logging, slash and burn agriculture, burning for cattle ranches and other industrial farms, land clearing for development, fires that are started accidentally, and other human-related causes. In nature, such "mature" or "climax" ecosystems rarely burn by themselves - they are quite fire-resistant.

* The game of yahtzee, where 5 dice are thrown in three rounds to fill 13 different game objectives such as "three of a kind" or "long straight", has 1,279,054,096,320 different possible sequences of play (ie, a trillion and a quarter). So, for all practical purposes, no two yahtzee games are the same.

* A third of the world's parrot species are at risk of extinction in the next few decades, because of capture for the pet market.

* In the USA, domestic cats kill an estimated 1 billion wild birds each year.

* The fastest known tornado was the so-called Tri-State Tornado of March 18, 1925. It cruised along at a recorded 73 mph (117 km/hr).

* The thinnest natural thread known is produced by the middle-eastern spider Stegodyphus pacificus, which can spin a strand of silk only 10 nanometers (nm) in diameter- almost 1000 times thinner than a human hair. This spider also has the most silk-spigots on its belly ("cribrarum") - about 40, 000 of them.

* In Great Britain, the most dangerous sport is gardening!! One in five of ALL accidents there occurs in the garden, and in 2002, almost 64,000 English citizens required hospital treatment because of gardening mishaps.

* Recent innovative studies have shown that intelligence is closely related to the ability to concentrate and to pay attention to the problem at hand, without being distracted. It seems there are "bright spots" or areas of the brain in the areas associated with attention, that intelligent people use more effectively to solve difficult problems. This raises the possibility that we could raise our IQ by learning how to "focus" or pay attention better.

* The first message sent in Morse Code on May 24, 1844 was, "What hath God wrought".

* The first message sent over Graham Bell's telephone on March 10, 1876 was, "Mr. Watson, come here; I want you."

* The first words to a phonograph in 1877, by Thomas Edison were, "Mary had a little lamb."

* The first words said from the moon in 1969 were, "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

* Ray Tomlinson, an engineer who was tasked with the job of creating a method of messaging on a single multi-user machine, but later adapted his method (originally called SNDMSG (say it out loud ? ìSeNDMeSsaGeî)) and invented email. Interestingly and perhaps ironically enough, he cannot recall exactly when or exactly what he said to himself in the world's first email missive, sometime in the third quarter of 1971. He figures it probably had a content of ìQWERTYUIOPî, all in upper case! In doing so, he also invented "shouting" via email, as well as meaningless messages (now known as spam).

* People who gesticulate while talking are twice as likely to be understood, psychologists have found. A Manchester University study has found that those who use their hands to explain themselves are far more likely to be remembered than those who do not. The research shows that hand movements can convey solid images, such as the size of an object, and psychological ones, such as the emotional distance between two people.
(The Independent 13/03/03; p.10)

* The male foreskin, removed during circumcision, is made of a very special kind of skin cell that can divide many more times than normal cells. From one foreskin, enough new skin can be grown to cover 6 American sized football fields.

* A new study ( early 2003) has shown that two thirds of Russia's 31 million children under 15 are in poor health, with respiratory illnesses the most common problem, a survey has found. A decline in healthcare services and poor hygiene in schools are believed to be responsible for the rise in the number suffering poor health since the demise of the Soviet Union. (The Independent 11/03/03; p.11)

* The over-the-top purple dinosaur Barney has hit a LOT of raw nerves and sore spots over the years. A Google search of the words die and Barney yields 186,000 hits. A search for "die die die" and Barney produces 1, 780 pages either expressing or commenting upon that particular sentiment. "Kill Barney" produces 2,400 hits, while the opposing thought "Don't kill Barney" doesn't get a single Google vote.// An update on this: the census taken above, occured in late 2002. One done today (June 16, 2003, at 0458 bells) turned up a mere 151,000, 1,420, and 1,640 pages. How soon they forget..... on the other hand, a search for the titile of that ever popular movie "Death to Smoochy" (Barney's demon offspring) produces a crop of 32,000 hits. "Don't kill Barney" now turns up one page: this one.

* A recent study at Washington State University showed that almost all preschool children diagnosed with clinical depression share one thing in common: a condition called anhedonia - they often cannot derive pleasure from play and other activities which are quite pleasurable for most children. They are also far more likely to use play activities to explore themes related to death or even suicide. They also found that depressed young children were not consistently sad or unable to experience pleasure: they exhibited mood swings from happy to sad to angry to fearful, to a much greater extent than adults with clinical depression.

* Sharks have a unique method of sensing temperature changes - something that helps them locate where prey may be most abundant - they have a special gel in their noses, which generates an electrical current when the water temperature changes by as little as 0.1 C! This current stimulates sensitive nerve endings which report the info to their brain! No other animal is known to use this method of temperature sensing.

* Believe it or not, Hitler did do something useful every now and then when he wasn't out killing people he didn't like and trying to conquer the world. For example, in 1936, he opened the first factory for the production of the "People's Car," the Volkswagen, in Saxony.

* A large crocodile can close its jaws with a force of over 3,000 lbs (1,350kg). However, the muscles used for opening these same fearsome jaws are so weak that they can be held shut by a person of only average strength. So, when wrestling a "croc", the trick is to keep its mouth closed - if it gets it open, you are in BIG trouble......!

* Feb. 25, 1938 - Nylon was produced for the first time in Arlington, New Jersey; it was used for toothbrush bristles. Women's underthings were not far behind that!

* In 1967, the minimum salary for major league baseball players was $6,000, and the average annual paycheck was a big fat $19,000. By 2002, the minimum yearly payout was $200,000, but without a maximum, things had become a bit silly: the average per annum compensation for playing baseball for "the Majors" was a comfortable $1,895, 630 USD, with several teams such as the Yankees and Minnisota breaking the $3,000,000 mark. First base was the most valued position, with a $5,000,000 average, while the multitudes of relief pitchers had to eke out a living with a meager $1, 220, 412.

* One of my favorite passtimes is seeing how many people i can make smile while passing them on the street. In Halifax, this is a fairly productive exercise, but a recent study in the UK indicates that it works FAR better in some places than others. : " Bristol is one of the friendliest places in the UK according to psychology students who have spent an hour smiling at 100 strangers in 14 cities. In that friendly, relaxed city, 70 per cent of the people surveyed returned the studentsí smiles, with Glasgow coming in second. However, only 4 per cent of people in Edinburgh displayed a similar willingness to to be cheered up by a stranger with a smile on their face and science in their heart.

* One of the main obstacles standing in the way of computer "intelligence" is the number of connections between the active elements in the computing unit (technically called "fanout", but i like to think of it as "connectivity"). For the computing unit called the human brain, each neuron typically has around 10,000 connections with other neurons: it is largely this very high degree of connectivity between the elements of the human "computer" that enables it to outperform any and all the supercomputers on the planet: they have only 10 to 12 connections between transistors - a "fanout" 1000 times smaller than that of our very well designed brains.

* 1807 - Aaron Burr became the first vice president of the United States to be arrested; he was charged with treason for planning an expedition to invade Mexico for no valid reason.

* Computer "intelligence" has been an elusive target for nearly 50 years now, and will no doubt continue to evade us for a while yet. A combination of clever programming and sheer brute force (the Deep Junior program computer that tied Kasparov recently, for example, crunches over 3,000,000 potential moves per second, vs Kasparov's 2 or 3) can yield impressive results, and so-called "genetic" programs that improve themselves through large numbers of "generations" where each generation comes closer to a solution to a complex problem, can arrive at innovative answers that people might not have found. Nevertheless, computer software progresses at a far slower rate than the dizzying pace of computing speed, and machine sentience, free choice and "intuition" will probably take a lot longer to achieve than most folks thought say, 40 years ago......

* Ever wonder if there is a smallest possible unit of time? Physicists say that there in fact is: it's based upon some pretty tall mathematics which i don't pretend to understand, is called "planck time", and is defined as the time it would take light to cross a distance equal to the Planck length (the smallest possible distance in the Universe, roughly equal to 1.6 x 10-35 m or about a billionth of a billionth of the diameter of an electron). This is about 10-43seconds, and is the smallest unit of time that has any real meaning within the way we understand the universe today (of course this may change tomorrow....).) An interesting offshoot of this theory is that when the Universe was created, it was already 10-43seconds old - anything that happened before that is either irrelevant, or else it simply didn't happen in the first place......

* Several studies within the past decade have found that only 20% of the adult population of First World countries such as the USA and the UK, are "completely healthy", which is defined as having no physical or mental health problem that pose significant limitations on their day-to-day living activities on a frequent basis (so things like a mild allergy that flares up once every now and then wouldn't count - neither would colds or "the flu".). A classic 1995 study in the USA found 19% to be healthy, 19% to be unhealthy in both physical and mental ways, and 62% to have either significant physical or mental health problems. Surprisingly, the only ethnic difference of statistical significance was that "blacks" were more likely to be "resilient" - which they defined as having physical problems without concomitant mental health problems.

* The age of the universe has long been the subject of debate. Some people like the figure of 6000 years, but this is not too popular in scientific circles these days. Recent calculations by scientists studying the famous "big bang afterglow" - the background microwave radiation which permeates the universe - have settled on the figure of 13.7 billion years ± 1%, with the first stars forming a mere 200 million years after the initial spark. Check out http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/11feb_map.htm?list155435 for details: with apologies to my creationist friends, it's pretty interesting stuff!!

* Recent research has given new meaning to the term "bug breath". Insects get air to their cells via a network of channels called tracheae, which extend throughout their bodies. Until a team of Chicago researchers used high-power x-rays to probe the interior of living beetles, it was thought that air simply diffused in and out of these tubes passively, without any active help from the insect. However, the x-rays revealed minute contractions in the tracheae tubes, which means that insects actually breathe like we do!!! The trachaeal network in effect acts in the same way that our lungs do, actively breathing air in and out. This means that in order to smother a bug, you'd have to cover up all the little holes in their body through which they breathe - covering only their head would have no effect.

* Our society in general does not value the elderly as much as most previous cultures - indeed, older people who are limited in their physical or mental abilities are often regarded as a burden, to be cared for using the minimum amount of resources possible. For example, in a sample of British nursing homes it was found that more than 80 per cent of elderly people had been prescribed strong tranquilizers without proper medical justification. The drugs - administered to quieten patients with what staff call ìbehavioural problemsî - were likely to make their dementias worse and risk making them break their hips or other limbs in falls, say doctors from London teaching hospitals who conducted the study.

* The seeds of the candlenut (Aleurites molucanna) contain about 50 percent oil and burn like a candle. The ancient Polynesians brought this tree to the Hawaiian Islands where it has become naturalized. The dried nuts were cracked open and the seeds were skewered onto the midrib of a coconut frond (or slender bamboo stem) and set on fire. [Since they contain about 50 percent unsaturated oil, the seeds ignite readily.] The Polynesians used them for candles that burned for about 45 minutes.

* Ephedra, often sold as Ma Huang, is a powerful herbal stimulant often sold as a dieting aid, or to provide "more energy". A recent study, based on data from U.S. poison control centers and sales information, shows that products containing ephedra accounted for 64% of all reported adverse effects from herbs even though they represented less than 1% of total herbal product sales. 43 definite side effects and 44 "probable" ones were identified, with the most common of these including vasoconstriction (narrowing of the arteries), increases in blood pressure, heart rate, and cardiac contractile force, irregular heart rhythms, as well as the usual adverse effects associated with stimulants, such as disruption of sleep patterns.

* Professional footballers are 10 times more likely than average to develop arthritis of the hip,
according to a study at the Royal Bolton Hospital. Many ex-players suffer problems in their 30s and 40s. Orthopaedic surgeon Gordon Shepard, a co-author of the report, says, ìWhat is interesting about the hip is that, unlike the knee or ankle, players donít often have injuries to their hips, so it is more likely to be the result of wear and tear over the whole career.î
(BBC News Online 28/01/03)

* Grieving owners who want to bring back their dead pet with cloning will end up with an animal that may not act or even look like the original, according to studies of the first cloned cat. CC (for carbon copy) is just over a year old. Her birth made headlines worldwide when it was announced last February because it was the first time a household pet had been cloned. Now researchers at Texas A&M university have compared CC with her genetic mother, Rainbow, to show that cloning does not mean duplication. While Rainbow is a typical calico with splotches of brown, tan and gold on white, her clone has a striped gray coat over white. While Rainbow is reserved, CC is curious and playful. (The Daily Telegraph 23/01/03; p.3)

* The distinctive smell inside a new car, often a source of satisfaction to owners, comes from the same form of pollution that causes ìsick building syndromeî a study shows. The smell of a new car could contain up to 35 times the health limit set for volatile organic chemicals in cars in Japan, making its enjoyment akin to glue-sniffing, according to researchers from the Osaka Institute of Public Health in Japan. The chemicals found included ethyl benzene, xylene, formaldehyde and toluene used in paints and adhesives.
(The Daily Telegraph 15/01/03; p.1)

* The ordinary matter of our everyday world is overwhelmingly comprised of empty space - It is composed of molecules, with plenty of space around each of these. These are bonded together by electromagnetic forces, which makes matter appear solid. The molecules are in turn made of atoms, with lots of empty space around each atom in each molecule. Finally, atoms themselves consist of an extremely tiny core or "nucleus" that contains 99.99% of their mass but only a tiny fraction of their volume, with a cloud of tiny electrons spinning around each nucleus at a great distance from it. The nucleus takes up so little of the space in an atom that if it it was the size of an orange, the nearest electron in your average atom would be a pinprick 10km (6 miles) away!! Thus, when matter is completely collapsed into almost 100% nuclear matter, as in a neutron star, it weighs over 100 million tonnes per cubic centimeter (the size of a child's marble).

* The lure of getting "something for nothing" (or almost nothing) is ancient: lotteries were used in the entertainments of the Roman emperors and later of the feudal princes of Europe. The first state lottery is believed to have been held in 1520 in France, where lotteries became an important source of royal revenue. Private lotteries also flourished in France until 1776, when all were suppressed or merged into the royal lottery. In Italy lotteries became popular after 1530, when the city of Florence held one offering money prizes. The lottery was introduced in England in 1569 under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I. In the American colonies lotteries were authorized by the colonial legislatures to raise funds for such public purposes as the paving of streets, the construction of wharves, and the erection of churches. Lotteries to finance buildings for Yale and Harvard colleges were held in 1750 and 1772, respectively. In 1777, the Continental Congress attempted to raise funds by lottery for the revolutionary army.

* Penguins often build nests out of many small stones. The current record is held by a gentoo penguin whose Antarctic nest was constructed from over 1700 little rocks!

* Smallpox, until its eradication from the general population of the world in the 1970s, was probably the most deadly disease our species has ever faced. An estimated 500 million people were killed by smallpox in the 20th Century.

* A recent study found out that the scent of hot pumpkin pie was the #1 stimulator of blood flow to the penis in American men, followed by cinnamon buns fresh out of the oven with vanilla coming in a close third. For women the effect of scent was less pronounced, but pickles combined with licorice seemed to do the trick for some - even when they weren't "with child"!!

* Men are most physically attracted to women who have a waist diameter that is 70% of their hip size - the classical "hour glass" figure. A study showed that women with waist to hip ratios of between 0.68 and 0.72 were twice as likely to become pregnant, all other factors considered, than those very much outside that range. Women prefer men who have a waist about 90% that of their hips, but as with scent, this is not as pronounced a tendency as with men. It seems women consider a much broader number of factors when choosing a potential mate, so any particular factor carries correspondingly less weight.

* The herpes virus, which causes cold sores and other nasty but generally nuisance-like manifestations, is present in some form in almost 85% of the world's population. It "hibernates" in nerve cells, making it impossible to get rid of using any method found so far, and is activated primarily during times of stress.

* Newton thought that the speed of gravity is instantaneous - that it took no time at all to propagate. Einstein, however, assumed that gravity traveled at the speed of light, and built this into his equations, which have been the bedrock of modern physics since the early 1900s. In December, Einstein was proven right once again: Ed Fomalont of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Sergei Kopeikin of the University of Missouri in Columbia used an "occultation" (an event where one heavenly body moves in front of another, hence hiding it ("occult" means something hidden)) of a distant quasar by Jupiter, and a pile of very fancy mathematics, to indirectly clock the speed of gravity at 0.95 ± 0.25 light speed. So, if the sun were to disappear suddenly, the earth would remain in its orbit for about 8 minutes, then it would take off into space in a straight line, third star on the left and don't stop until morning!

* Many satellites designed to explore the solar system and beyond, are proving their mettle by lasting far longer than anyone expected they would. The Galileo space probe, sent off in 1989 to explore the hostile environs of the Jupiter, is an excellent example. It has just completed its final mission, passing very close to our solar system's largest planet and collecting data on its inner part of the intense electromagnetic radiation belt and the so-called "gossamer" ring which extends from the outer atmosphere to the small moon Amalthea (which acts as a "ring shepherd"). Although the recording unit was damaged by the strong radiation and it shut down in the last portion of the fly-by, scientists have managed to re-activate it (Dec. 2002) and are in the process of downloading the recorded information a few minutes' worth at at time. It has lasted 5 years longer, and has withstood 4 times as much radiation than originally designed to endure, and is due to deliberately crash into the gas giant in Sept. 2003 in one final experiment, in order to prevent possible contamination of the moon Io, whose frozen ocean is thought by some to possibly contain primitive life.

* The most expensive stamp in the world is the Sweden 1855 Three Skilling Yellow. It is a unique color error of Sweden's first stamp, orange yellow rather than the normal blue-green color of that issue. While a regular Sweden #1 catalogs $7,250, the Three Skilling Yellow sold last year at auction for $2.27 million! With that, it stole the title of the world's most expensive stamp from the Mauritius Penny Magenta, also a unique stamp. The Penny Magenta last sold in 1980 for the "measly" price of $935,000, to John E. duPont, heir to the duPont chemical fortune. DuPont was recently convicted of third-degree murder, with the jury deciding that he was mentally ill, so it's hard to tell what will happen to the Penny Magenta now...

* Cobras do not "dance" to the music of snake charmers - instead, they follow the head of the man with the strange instrument. Snake charmers are able to pat their deadly charges on the head with impunity, since cobras are incapable of moving their neck muscles to bite something over their heads.

* One third of German children are on some sort of medication and 20% have major medical problems such as diabetes or chronic asthma.

* An international organization (whose name i forget!!) that tracks reported internet "hacking" incidents (where websites or computers have been broken into by someone at a distant location), collected records on over 83 million hostile internet attacks in 2001 - war on the web!!!

* Henry VIII was a major collector of buttons. A rival king's envy over his ostentatious display of buttons at a particular meeting, is said to have been a factor in his starting a war!!

* Stamp collecting is a VERY popular hobby, and a lucrative one for the producers: many countries issue scores or even hundreds of colorful stamps per year in order to tempt collectors and earn hard currency. The tiny South American country of Guyana may hold the record for this: they issued 497 new stamps in 1995 - 4% of the nearly 13,000 stamp issues for that year!

* Polyurethane foam is said not to burn by foam salesmen, and it is true that it doesn't catch fire easily. But it is also true that once it does ignite, it explodes like gasoline and releases poisonous cyanide gas. It was definitely NOT one of the 20th century's better innovations...

* The coldest temperature ever recorded on earth was at Vostok Station at the south pole. It was -91 C (131 below 0 F). This is cold enough to shatter some forms of steel!!

* The world's warmest temperature was recorded as 136 F (57.8 C) at El Azizia, Libya, on 13 Sep 1922. Death Valley (at the famous Greenland Ranch) is close behind, at 134 F (56.7 C), recorded on 10 Jul 1913. For the sake of comparison, bath water is considered VERY hot at 120 F, and scalding water is only 46 C (125 F).

* Most bacteria and viruses do not kill their hosts outright, and those that do usually take a while to do it, giving themselves time to reproduce. Anthrax, however, takes a different approach: it kills quickly via a complex, multi-pronged attack: Upon entering the body, anthrax bacteria releases large quantities of three toxins: one, oddly enough called Protective Antigen, attaches to a protein on cell walls called the Anthrax Toxin Receptor. It forms a "door" for the other two poisons to enter the cell, and then combines with the other two proteins to finish the job of killing the host. One of the toxins - Edema Factor, causes cells to lose much of their water, which goes into the fluid between cells and causes swelling. This is particularly damaging in the lungs, where the swelling blocks off the airways and, in combination with fluid that leaks into the lungs themselves, cuts off the air supply. Lethal Factor, the other toxin, first cuts up a protein that helps cells communicate with each other, thus isolating them - which causes them to shut down their reproductive activities and become inactive. Lethal Factor (ie, when combined with Protective Antigen - alone, it is harmless) also causes the massive release of another protein which causes inflammation and the destruction of immune system cells called macrophages, rapidly causing shock and death. After the host dies, the Anthrax bacteria quickly go on a reproducing spree, essentially using the dead body as a "factory" to produce billions of extremely long-lived spores which can lie dormant in soil for hundreds of years until they are blown into the lungs of an unsuspecting mammal in the company of dust, and the cycle repeats. Don't have nightmares over this, however: although widespread in nature (especially around farms), anthrax seldom becomes concentrated enough to cause lethal infections, and scientists are very close to developing an antidote to it which would severely limit its threat as a terrorist weapon.

* There are over 400 million ways to lace a shoe which has only 7 pairs of eyelets. A team of mathematicians at the University of Melboune in Australia has just perfected a computer program that calculates what the strongest ways of lacing up shoes with any number of eyelet pairs. Turns out the most popular few are also the best, strength-wise!!

* The most successful ice hockey player of all time has to be Canada's Wayne Gretzky, who has held at least a piece of 81 NHL records, including the most points scored in one season (215 in 1983/84 - 255 including playoffs!), most 100 point seasons (15 out of 20 he played), most total points (2857 in regular season play, 3239 including playoffs), most goals (1016 - regular and playoffs (Gordie Howe ("Mr. Hockey") is second at 869 NHL goals)), most goals in a season (92, in 1981/82)...... However, the most impressive of his records is the 1963 assists in regular season play, which by comparison, is 900 more than second place Gordie Howe, at 1049. His 163 assists in the 1985/86 season also raised more than a few eyebrows. It was said that at any given time he knew almost exactly where all the his team mates were on the ice, so he could pass to them without a second thought. To top it all off, he quit while he was still one of the best players in Major-League hockey, while he still had his body intact - instead of cracked up in important places such as the lower back, which tends to suffer from the constant toll of jolts received in the extremely physical game favored by fans of the game these days. He made a LOT of loot from endorsements, and invested much of it well. These days, he owns an NHL team, coaches the Canadian Olympic team, and is known as an all-round nice guy and role model - now that's what i call a well rounded athlete!!!

* The 1955 bus boycott in Montgomery that helped kick the civil rights movement into high gear, was not quite as simple a matter as it is popularly portrayed. It had been planned since the year before, as a one-day affair - a city-wide protest but only a brief, dramatic one. The organizers, who included Martin Luther King, were waiting for the "right" person to be arrested for not giving up their seat to a white man. The first candidate was 15 year old Claudette Colvin, who was reluctantly disqualified when it was discovered she was pregnant! When Rosa Parks, a college graduate working as a seamstress because she could not find employment in her chosen field, came along, she was deemed to be perfect - no skeletons in her closet or blotches on her record, and quite symbolic of the black struggle at the time. The boycott began on Dec. 1, 1955, and by the time the dust settled, the buses of Montgomery were fully de-segregated by decree of the Supreme Court. It ended on Dec. 26 1956 - and the light at the end of the long dark tunnel of legal racism in the USA shone considerably brighter. For some further fascinating details, see http://www.watson.org/~lisa/blackhistory/civilrights-55-65/montbus.html .

* The world's fastest land non-flying animal, the cheetah, has an aerodynamically-tipped tail that helps it turn quickly while engaged in high-speed dinner-chases.

* Venus is perhaps the strangest planet in our solar system. It has been called earth's "sister planet" because of its similar size and gravity, but is VERY different: It has an atmosphere 90 times as dense as earth's, composed mostly of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, and virtually no water. At the height of about 60 km (35 miles), winds of over 400 km/hr (250 mph!) race around the planet, and this "super-rotation" is postulated to have slowed Venus' rotation to its present snail's pace - it rotates in a counter-clockwise direction, once every 150 earth days. Although estimated at over 4 billion years in age, the entire surface of Venus appears to be less than 500 million years old, indicating an extensive period of (?? - SOMETHING interesting!!) around that time.

* Hell's inspiration? The surface temperature of Venus is a scorching 800° C (450 F): zinc would be molten there!! It is thought that this is the result of either a "runaway", or a "wet" greenhouse effect (link) caused by the high proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: CO2 absorbs much of the heat radiated by a planet's surface, and re-radiates it back into the atmosphere, heating up the joint. This same "greenhouse effect" is believed by a majority of scientists to be responsible for the rapid rise in temperature on our own planet, in the past 150 years.

* The continent of Africa has become "disconnected" from the global economy in recent decades, due to a combination of war, civil unrest, lingering racism, rampant "first world" protectionism, widespread drought, unstable political situations, and AIDS. Its total exports are now only about 50% that of the tiny country of Belgium.

* Fungi (which includes mushrooms, slime and all other molds, lichens and a host of other odd stuff) are an entire kingdom of life - parallel with plants and animals. About 72,000 species of fungi have been described so far, but this is estimated to be only five percent (5%) of the total, since they are very poorly known.

* For all Wayne Gretzky's much fame and prowess (he truly earned the appellation "The Great One"), he pales a bit by comparison to Frank McGee's regular season and Stanley Cup Playoff records, which took place pre-NHL, so don't make most of the record books: The record for most goal scoring in the Stanley Cup Playoffs is still held by Mr. McGee. He scored 63 goals in 22 games in the 1902-1906 Stanley Cup Playoffs. In the regular 1905 season, McGee scored 71 goals in 23 games. On Jan. 16, 1905, McGee scored 14 goals in a Stanley Cup game, as Ottawa trounced Dawson City 23-2. That is still a Stanley Cup record. In that game, McGee scored eight consecutive goals in eight minutes and 20 seconds. Three of these came in a span of 90 seconds and the fourth came 50 seconds later.

* Lichens are a fascinating symbiotic (ie, mutually beneficial) relationship between fungi and algae. The algae use their photosynthetic abilities to generate food from sunlight, air and the nutrients that the fungi gather, while the fungi hold fast to the substrate (which varies from rocks to earth to tree bark) and provide structure to the combination-organism.

* The lichen known as "Rock Tripe" (Umbilicaria mammulata) has been used by explorers and natives in tight spots, to sustain life for up to 6 months. It produces nasty stomach cramps and other unpleasant effects, but it can keep you alive for a long time: it gets the job done!!

* Lightning travels at over 90,000 miles (145,000 km) per second - half the speed of light! What we see as a single flash of lightning is in fact several bolts that travel up and down along the same path in rapid succession. The first strike (usually an upward one, interestingly enough!) is much weaker than the first return bolt in the opposite direction.

* Mushrooms can provide a LOT of great eating: truffles, chitake, morels and other delectable morsels are a gourmet's "raison d'être". That said, many fungi are deadly poisonous, and if one is not REALLY careful, can turn into one's Last Supper!! It is well and truly said that "There are old mushroom hunters and there are bold mushroom hunters, but there are no old, bold mushroom hunters.".

* The Amanita mushrooms are the deadliest on the planet. They include the infamous Death Angel, Destroying Angel, and Death Cap (A. phalloides: the world's #1 killer mushroom), which are found widely in Europe and North America. The protein responsible for most of the deaths associated with these sneaky killers does not cause symptoms right away: 6-24 hours after ingestion there may be an early feeling of unease, followed by violent cramps and diarrhea. On the third day, there is a remission of symptoms, but it is false. On the 4th to 5th day the enzymes increase and liver and kidneys are severely affected. Death often follows if a liver transplant or other heroic measures are not performed.

* Air pollution is estimated to be a "major contributing factor" in nearly 140,000 premature deaths per year in North America. Terrorism, by contrast, has killed about 5,000 people in North America since, say, 1900. Guess which causes the most concern and paranoia? (ok, i admit this is not a "fact", but a social commentary - our society is heavily influenced by two ugly forces which actually belong to the same coin: greed and fear. The odd thing about the fear side of the social equation is that people do not usually fear things that happen every day, all the time - automobile accidents, parental abductions, child and spousal abuse, drug overdoses, iatrogentic (ie, "medical system"-associated) errors, deaths from air and other pollution, etc. What they fear most is the unexpected - airplanes crashing into buildings, gunmen in dark alleys, stranger abductions, anthrax in the mail..... vast amounts of worry, energy, attention, paranoia and taxpayer dollars are spent trying to prevent a few unexpected events, while by contrast the vast majority of the negative forces in our world are simple accepted as "the usual" - the normal, un-newsworthy background to our lives. So, we get TRULY wierd facts such as governments ready, willing, able and eager to spend $100 billion dollars (and kill up to half a million people in the process) to prevent a so-called "rogue state" from lobbing an atom bomb they probably don't even possess at the world's only superpower, while a fund of less than a billion dollars set up to combat AIDS, the most deadly (numerically) disease our species currently faces, may run out of money in two years due to lack of interest by the same states that routinely spend a thousand times that much each year on ways of killing people (virtually always under the guise of "self defense"......).)

* The largest "rammed earth" (earth rammed down firmly, between two harder surfaces - in this case stone) structure on earth is the Great Wall of China. Interestingly enough, the second largest is an office building in Australia.

* Ever wonder what the real difference between light meat (breasts) and dark meat (legs) on a chicken is?? I finally found out the other day: the breasts are the muscles used to operate the bird's wings. A chicken uses its wings only in short, quick bursts, to get away from foxes and people seeking dinner. So, they are mostly "fast twitch" muscles which contain little fat, and hence are drier and lighter in color. The leg muscles are used all day long for walking, so they are mostly "slow twitch" muscle fiber, which needs more fat to use as fuel for sustained locomotion - so these muscles have more fat and are darker in color.

* The active ingredients in the hallucinogenic Fly Agaric mushroom (see below for details) are relatively rapidly removed from the body by the kidneys. They retain their "magical" properties, and if one drinks the urine of someone having a trip on this potentially-deadly-but-still-popular warty red-capped critter, one will soon join them in never-never land! The effect can be passed along to as many as 5 consecutive people "downstream" (pun intended!).

* Ducks have no white meat - only dark (see above item for details). This is because they use their wings for flying long distances, and their legs for swimming. So, they have a lot of slow-twich muscle fibers in their breast muscles, which makes them dark. Of course they also must have their fair share of "fast" fibers since they are quite capable of high-speed escapes when the situation calls for immediate action!

* Io, Jupiter's 2nd largest is the most volcanically active heavenly body in the solar system. Tidal stresses from the huge gravitational force of Jupiter heat up its interior and the result is gigantic eruptions that shoot magma up to 5 km high, and cover thousands of square km. Recently, the intrepid satellite Galileo photographed and sent back data from Io, capturing a gigantic eruption in progress.

* About 20 billion "used" diapers are buried in U.S. landfills every year, representing about 7 billion pounds (3.175 billion kg) of garbage. They take around 500 years to decompose. To my mind, this is a recipe for "deep doo-doo"!

* Malaria kills about a million people each year, mostly children under 5, whose immune systems are not developed enough to deal with the parasite. It would cost about $2 billion US dollars per year to control malaria and eliminate at least half of these deaths. However, this level of worldwide commitment to preventing half a million deaths per year, is not likely to be achieved any time soon, largely for political reasons and for the simple fact that most of the deaths occur in the poorest countries, who cannot pay for medicines to tackle the problem - it wouldn't pay drug companies or first-world governments to develop them.

* The Antarctic ice sheet contains 71% of the world's fresh water. Greenland has another 6% frozen up, while all the other ice fields and glaciers in the world combined hold about 2% of the fresh water supply for the earth.

* Only about 1% of a man's sperm are actually viable (ie, able to penetrate an egg and produce a baby). The purpose of the other 99% is unknown - some say the unequal ratio is the result of inefficient mass-production of millions of sperm at a time, while others speculate that they are meant to compete with other guys' swimmers, which is a sad commentary on how promiscuous "unenlightened" human nature is!

* Squirrel mothers don't need eyes in the back of their head to see what their little darlings are up to: their eyes are positioned so they can see behind them if they suspect mischief!

* Some reptiles (such as the common gekko) have eyes that operate independently of each other, so the animal can see in two different directions at the same time.

* Unexploded bombs, mines and other deadly leftovers from WWI and WWII still litter Europe and northern Africa. As an example, the still lethal residue (especially mines) from one battle - el Alamein in Egypt (1942) , has killed or seriously injured an estimated 7 to 10 thousand people in the past 20 years alone (to 2001). Mines are especially hazardous, since they are deliberately hidden in such a way as to make traveling through a given area as dangerous as possible. At least 50 million live land mines in 60 countries, pose a hazard to the general populace. They kill or maim about 20,000 people per year - far more than the total from say, terrorists, yet receive surprisingly little in the way of funding.

* Red and gray squirrels can jump about 20 feet - not bad considering their size! Their hind legs are double jointed, which helps them scamper up and down tree trunks more easily. Their back feet have 5 toes and their front feet, 4 digits. They can survive falls of up to 100 feet.

* The Gulf War of 1990 was one of the strangest wars in history. A few months before the bombing started, experts were predicting it would take 6 months and 20,000 to 50,000 USA casualties to shove Saddam and the boys out of Kuwait. When the depleted (yet still radioactive) uranium actually started to fly (about 290 tons of the deadly stuff was left behind!!), 100,000+ Iraqi soldiers, and 147 "Allied" military personnel died in battle (vs 148 who died in non-battle accidents), in addition to 25,000+ civilians. More tons of bombs were dropped than by all sides during WW II, and the direct cost was estimated at around 65 billion dollars - two thirds of a billion dollars an hour for 100 hours. However, it was not until AFTER the war that the true costs began to show up: about 100,000 Allied troops have come down with a debilitating mix of symptoms collectively dubbed "Gulf War Syndrome", and ~10,000 have died from it. It's existence is officially denied by most governments involved, but it is suspected to be the result of a) exposure to chemical warfare agents accidentally released, b) the aformentiontioned Depleted Uranium (inhaled in the form of extremely fine dust particles directly into the lungs), and c) other factors such as an untested cocktail of vaccines given to Allied troops. On the Iraqi side, strict, punitive embargoes and sanctions have been implicated in a number of deaths (largely children, women and unhealthy or weakened civilians) estimated variously at between 200,000 and 800,000, and UN studies are implicating that nasty "depleted" uranium in many cancers and congenital malformations probably due to genetic damage. A footnote to this carnage is the fact that a majority of the "Allied" countries' citizens still consider the war to have been justified and the right thing to have perpetuated.

* Hibernating arctic squirrels are the only mammal that can survive body temperatures below freezing (many fish and amphibians such as frogs can, but of the mammal clan, only the squirrels can be frozen and live!)

* Soma anyone? The Fly Agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, is totally fascinating in several senses: it is a "wart-covered" forest dweller that can be found all over the planet, and contains two powerful hallucinogens: ibotenic acid and muscimol. This item comes under the heading "don't try this at home", i must stress - nasty stuff including death can occur if one eats these beasties the wrong way!! A. muscaria has been used in many cultures for religious reasons (like many hallucinogens, people use it to "communicate with the gods") or just for the powerful buzz it produces. The ancient Vikings often consumed them prior to battle, to help them get their minds into the fearless "berzerker" state, where they killed raped and pillaged without qualm or conscience. For some good links, see: http://leda.lycaeum.org/Taxonomy/Amanita_muscaria.47.shtml

* Out-of-body experiences can be induced by stimulating a part of the brain called the right angular gyrus, Swiss researchers have discovered. They think a dysfunction in this region could account for the experience of leaving and floating above the body reported by some surgical and psychiatric patients. The right angular gyrus is close to areas involved in vision, hearing, balance and touch. It is thought that it could be responsible for integrating sensory information about the body, and that a failure to perform this task correctly could account for out of body experiences (OBEs). The angular gyrus is particularly susceptible to a drop in blood pressure, as happens during anesthesia. "It is in a frontier region between two vascular systems. If you have problems with arterial pressure this area is less nourished. Maybe that 'tickles' it - and that could be the underlying mechanism for OBEs", opines Margitta Seeck of Geneva University Hospital, who was a principle in the research. (summer 2002)

* Amorphophallus titanium, the "Titan arum", a native of Indonesia, is often called a corpse plant because of its incredibly malodorous blossom, which can be up to 3m (10') high, and over a meter in circumference. The stench, created by a sulfurous compound that the plant heats up to enhance its power, attracts flies and gnats which pollinate the plant. This remarkable process takes up so much energy that blossoms are spaced about 10 years apart!!

* "Iatrogenic", deaths are caused by accidents, errors and sometimes carelessness in the health-care system we rely upon to protect and save us from illness. They number an estimated 750,000 per year in North America - the region of the world that spends the most (by far!!!) on health care per capita, of any part of the world. This is not to say that the system is not working well, but it IS an interesting fact....

* The Crab Nebula, an enigmatic solar remnant of a huge supernova recorded by Chinese astronomers in 1054, has been shown via a combination of photos from Hubble space telescope and the Chandra X-ray observatory, to be emitting huge jets of matter and antimatter from the neutron star at its center. The forces involved are so intense that the plasma in these 5 light year-long jets is traveling at half the speed of light! (that's 150,000 km or 93,000 miles per second). (see http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2002/19sep_crabmovie.htm?list155435 for details and some GREAT links to astronomy pages!!)

* The Crab Nebula is cataloged as M1 on Charles Messier's famous list of interesting objects in the sky that were not stars, planets or comets. It has expanded to over 10 light years across since its supernova beginning in 1054, and is still growing by about 1000 km (600 miles) per second.

* The difference between the Chimpanzee genome and that of humans has recently been shown to be three times as large as previously thought - they only possess about 95% of our genetic makeup! (Sept. 2002)

* The lead concentration in chocolate produced in parts of the world where leaded gasoline is still used (such as several African countries which produce much of the world's cocoa), is several times higher than in countries where unleaded is the preferred petrol. Although it would take a LOT of chocolate to produce lead poisoning, it is theoretically possible.

* Two thirds of patients undergoing major heart operations suffer some form of mental impairment afterwards, such as a reduced ability to perform mental arithmetic or remember phone numbers. In half of these patients the problems are permanent. Most researchers think that minute fat droplets (from tissues damaged during surgery) lodging in the blood vessels of the brain are responsible. It is thought these block the supply of oxygen to tiny clusters of nerve cells at the ends of capillaries.

* In ancient Sparta, the only way women could get their names on a tombstone was to die in childbirth.

* Silver linings are everywhere! For example: Once stripped of its lethal genes the HIV virus could be used to deliver new treatments to places that other drugs could never reach such as tissues of the brain, spinal cord, liver and skeletal and heart muscle. Experts from the University of Cambridge recently found that the HIV virus is ìcompletely uniqueî in the way in which it can ìinsert genes into cells that are not dividingî. The method of delivering genes into body tissues could potentially be used in genetic therapy for diseases including haemophilia, heart disease and cystic fibrosis.

* Excess computer use, like any other excess, can be quite dangerous. A recent (Aug., 2002) study in Great Britain showed that over a third (36%) of children there aged 11 to 14, had "serious, ongoing back pains", mainly due to sitting in front of computers for long periods of time, with poor posture. They also found a high incidence of repetitive movement injuries, especially in the children's wrists and elbows.

* A shark held with no male partner at Detroit's Belle Isle Aquarium for the past six years has produced three babies in what zoo officials are calling "virgin births." (Aug., 2002). The trio of one-parent children are doing well, with no signs of Messiah complexes showing up so far.

* The average automobile in North America produces about 5 tonnes of pollution per year.

* The environmental conference in South Africa in Aug/Sept. 2002, released about 200,000 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, much of it related to transportation.

* "Crazy Glue" (Cyanoacrulate) is one of an increasing number of strong, versatile glues that are revolutionizing many fields such as construction, surgery and dentistry. It was originally designed for plastic surgery (remember "bonds skin instantly"??), where it replaces sutures, thus reducing scaring to a minimum. Since then it has become a cultural phenomenon and a parental nightmare!!

* In 1999 in Boston Mass., there was so much publicity surrounding the blossoming of a specimen of Titan Arum - Amorphophallus titanium - (often called the corpse plant because of the overpowering stench the 3m (10 foot) high flower emits), that the lineup to experience it was at one point over 2 miles (3.2km) long!!

* On average, we each have about 1500 dreams per year. The only ones we remember are the ones interrupted by awakening and then reviewed before they vanish: since dreams do not form long-term memories (to our knowledge, ie.), any dream not re-processed by the conscious mind is gone forever!!

* A Malaysian tribe called the Senoi centers much of its culture around dreams. At an early age, Senoi parents question their children closely about their dreams.

* When you KNOW you are dreaming while you are actually in a dream state, this is called Lucid Dreaming. For a good review of the various methods used to achieve this interesting condition, see Lucid.html - a page i pirated and modified from a commercial website whose owners will probably not mind too much! (besides, these pages have a nasty habit of disappearing from the web......)