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Wednesday, October 22, 2014

Amazing Facts That Will Blow Your Mind


# Our eyes remain the same size from birth onward, but our nose and ears never stop growing.
# The Barbie doll’s full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
# The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.
# Ants never sleep!
# When the moon is directly overhead, you will weigh slightly less.
# Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never called his wife or mother because they were both deaf.
# An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain.
# “I Am” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.
# Babies are born without knee caps – actually, they’re made of cartilage and the bone hardens between the ages of 2 and 6 years.
# Happy Birthday (the song) is copyrighted.
# Butterflies taste with their feet.
# A “jiffy” is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
# It is impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.
# Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.
# Minus 40 degrees Celsius is exactly the same as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit.
# No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
# Shakespeare invented the words “assassination” and “bump.”
# Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.
# Elephants are the only animals that cannot jump.
# The names of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.
# The sentence, “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every letter in the English language.
# The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.
# The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.
# The word “lethologica” describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.
# Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from the blowing desert sand.
# TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.
# You can’t kill yourself by holding your breath.
# Money isn’t made out of paper. It’s made out of cotton.
# Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
# The dot over the letter “i” is called a tittle.
# A duck’s quack doesn’t echo. No one knows why!
# The “spot” on the 7-Up comes from its inventor who had red eyes – he was an albino. ‘7’ was because the original containers were 7 ounces and ‘UP’ indicated the direction of the bubbles.
# Chocolate can kill dogs, as it contains theobromine, which affects their heart and nervous system.
# Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of plaster.
# There are only two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: “abstemious” and “facetious.”
# If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
# Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow film down so you could see his moves.
# The original name for butterfly was flutterby.
# By raising your legs slowly and laying on your back, you cannot sink into quicksand.
# Dogs and cats, like humans, are either right or left handed.
# Charlie Chaplin once won the third prize in a Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest.
# Sherlock Holmes NEVER said “Elementary, my dear Watson”.
# The Guinness Book of Records holds the record for being the book most often stolen from Public Libraries.
# Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
# The shortest English word that contains the letters A, B, C, D, E, and F is “feedback.”
# All Polar bears are left-handed.
# In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.
# “Dreamt” is the only English word that ends in the letters “mt.”
# Almonds are a member of the peach family, and apples belong to the rose family.
# Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
# The only 15 letter word that can be spelled without repeating a letter is “uncopyrightable”.
# In most advertisements, the time displayed on a watch is 10:10
# Tigers have striped skin, not just striped fur.
# Alfred Nobel, in whose name the Nobel prizes are instituted, was the inventor of dynamite.
# The planet Venus does not tilt, so consequently, it has no seasons. It is the only planet that rotates clock-wise.
# Honey is the only food that doesn’t spoil.
# The word “set” has more definitions than any other word in the English language.
# Molecularly speaking, water is actually much drier than sand.
# Human tonsils can bounce higher than a rubber ball of similar weight and size, but only for the first 30 minutes after they’ve been removed.
# US President John F. Kennedy was an accomplished ventriloquist.
# Coca-Cola was originally green.
# Moths are unable to fly during an earthquake.
# Contrary to popular belief, the white is not the healthiest part of an egg. It’s actually the shell.
# Nearly three percent of the ice in Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine.
# Hot water will turn into ice faster then cold water.
# “Rhythm” is the longest English word without a vowel.
# Like fingerprints, every person’s tongue print is different.
# No piece of normal-size paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
# The tongue is the only muscle that is attached from one end only.
# Pumice is the only rock that floats in water.
# Camel’s milk does not curdle.
# Your foot is the same length as your forearm, and your thumb is the same length as your nose. Also, the length of your lips is the same as the index finger.
# Natural pearls melt in vinegar.
# Buttermilk does not contain any butter.
# The human brain is 80% water.
# Men’s shirts have the buttons on the right while women’s shirts have the buttons on the left.
# Human fingernails grow nearly 4 times faster than toenails.
# The Great Pyramid at Giza in Egypt holds a constant temperature of 68 degrees Fahrenheit.
# The liquid inside young coconuts can be used as a substitute for blood plasma.
# Oak trees do not produce acorns until they are fifty years of age.
# It takes approximately 2 million flowers for a bee to make 1 pound of honey.
# Human saliva has a boiling point three times that of regular water.
# It is physically impossible to urinate and give blood at the same time.
# The letter J does not appear anywhere in the periodic table of the elements.
# The right lung of a human is larger than the left one. This is because of the space and placement of the heart.
# Watermelons, which are 92% water, originated from the Kalahari Desert in Africa.
# The hair of some cancer patients treated with chemotherapy can grow back in a different colour, and sometimes even be curly or straight.
# The markings that are found on dice are called “pips.”
# 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
# The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
# Leonardo Da Vinci never signed or dated his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa.
# The ampersand (&) was the last letter of the Latin alphabet.
# The palms of your hands and the soles of your feet cannot tan, or grow hair.
# Dolphins can swim and sleep at the same time, as they sleep with one eye open.
# Each nostril of a human being registers smell in a different way. Those by the right nostril are more pleasant than the left.
# The longest single-syllable word in the English language is “screeched.”
# The word “Checkmate” in chess comes from the Persian phrase “Shah-Mat,” which means “the king is dead”.
# Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history:  Spades – King David, Clubs – Alexander the Great, Hearts – Charlemagne, and Diamonds – Julius Caesar.
# In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift described the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, giving their exact size and speeds of rotation. He did this more than 100 years before either moon was discovered!
# If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

Some more amazing and unknown facts

  • If you weighed all the electrons used to store the information on the internet, they would weigh less than a chicken’s egg.
  • In 1972, Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant, fell 33,000 feet in an aircraft explosion and survived. She now holds the Guinness world record for the highest free-fall without a parachute.
  • Tsutomu Yamaguchi was the only person in the world to have survived two nuclear blasts. He was present in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki when the nukes were dropped. He died in 2010, aged 93.
  • The present 50-star American flag was designed by a 17-year-old Ohio high-school student Robert G Heft for a class project. His teacher gave him a B– for his work.
  • If you begin to count from one and spell out all the numbers as you go, you won’t get to use the letter “A” until you have reached 1,000.
  • Ice-cream headache, also called brain freeze, cold-rush or Iceberger’s syndrome, is the headache you experience after eating something extremely cold. The phenomenon has a medical name: sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia
  • When Leonardo da Vinci died, King of France, Francis I, used the Mona Lisa to decorate his bathroom.
  • When someone sleeps through winter (like bears0, it is called hibernation. When someone sleeps through summers, it is called aestivation. Many animals — both in water and land — aestivate to avoid damage from high temperatures and dehydration.
  • Marie Curie’s notebooks are still radioactive. People wishing to read them have to sign a disclaimer that they are doing so at their own risk.
  • Synesthesia is a rare condition in which the senses get cross-wired. Stimulation of one sense causes stimulation of another! If you have synesthesia, you may see colours when you hear a sound, or you can taste words!
  • Cats have three eyelids. Their sense of smell is 14 times stronger than that of humans.

OK, "blow your mind" is a bit dramatic. But 65 Amazing Facts You'll Probably Enjoy and Likely Consider Mentioning to Your Friends didn't fit.

1. Google's founders were willing to sell to Excite for under $1 million in 1999—but Excite turned them down.

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2. There was a third Apple founder. Ronald Wayne (pictured at home in 2010) sold his 10% stake for $800 in 1976.

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3. The famous Aaron Burr “Got Milk?” ad from 1993 was directed by Michael Bay.

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4. According to Amazon, the most highlighted Kindle books are the Bible, the Steve Jobs biography, and The Hunger Games.

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5. A California woman once tried to sue the makers of Cap'n Crunch because Crunch Berries contained "no berries of any kind."

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6. Wilford Brimley was Howard Hughes's bodyguard.

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7. During WWI, German measles were called "liberty measles" and dachshunds became "liberty hounds."

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8. In a 2008 survey, 58% of British teens thought Sherlock Holmes was a real guy, while 20% thought Winston Churchill was not.

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9. At one point in the 1990s, 50% of all CDs produced worldwide were for AOL.

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10. Toy companies failed to duplicate the success of Theodore Roosevelt's teddy bear with William Taft's "Billy Possum."

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11. Nutella was invented during WWII, when an Italian pastry maker mixed hazelnuts into chocolate to extend his chocolate ration.

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12. In response to The Lorax, the forest products industry published Truax to teach kids the importance of logging.

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13. Tsutomu Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima for work when the first A-bomb hit, made it home to Nagasaki for the second, and lived to be 93.

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14. A British man changed his name to Tim Pppppppppprice to make it harder for telemarketers to pronounce.

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15. J.P. Morgan once offered $100,000 to anyone who could figure out why his face was so red. No one solved the mystery.

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16. Prairie dogs say hello with kisses.

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17. In the mid-1960s, Slumber Party Barbie came with a book called "How to Lose Weight." One of the tips was "Don’t eat."

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18. A 2009 search for the Loch Ness Monster came up empty. Scientists did find over 100,000 golf balls.

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19. After OutKast sang “Shake it like a Polaroid picture,” Polaroid released a statement that said, “Shaking or waving can actually damage the image.”

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20. New Mexico State's first graduating class in 1893 had only one student—and he was shot and killed before graduation.

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21. In the mid-1980s, Fergie of The Black Eyed Peas was the voice of Charlie Brown's sister Sally.

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22. Jonas Salk declined to patent his polio vaccine. "There is no patent," he said. "Could you patent the sun?"

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23. Only one McDonald’s in the world has turquoise arches. Sedona, AZ thought yellow clashed with the natural red rock.

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24. The 50-star American flag was designed by an Ohio high school student for a class project. His teacher originally gave him a B–.

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25. According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the most commonly stolen vehicle in 2012 was the 1994 Honda Accord.

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26. After leaving office, Lyndon Johnson let his hair grow out.

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27. Crabs have their own version of the fist pump. Male crabs wave their claws in the air to attract females.

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28. Calvin Klein's Obsession for Men is used by researchers to attract animals to cameras in the wilderness.

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29. Sean Connery turned down the Gandalf role in Lord of the Rings. "I read the book. I read the script. I saw the movie. I still don't understand it."

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30. E.B. White of Charlotte's Web fame is the "White" of Strunk and White, who wrote The Elements of Style.

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31. Chock Full o' Nuts coffee does not contain nuts. It's named for a chain of nut stores that the founder converted into coffee shops.

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32. 12+1 = 11+2, and "twelve plus one" is an anagram of "eleven plus two."

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33. San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Harbaugh played Screech's cousin on a 1996 episode ofSaved by the Bell: The New Class.

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34. At the height of Rin Tin Tin's fame, a chef prepared him a daily steak lunch. Classical musicians played to aid his digestion.

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35. The Arkansas School for the Deaf's nickname is the Leopards. The Deaf Leopards.

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36. If your dog's feet smell like corn chips, you're not alone. The term "Frito Feet" was coined to describe the scent.

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37. A sex pheromone found in male mouse urine was named "darcin," for Jane Austen's Mr. Darcy.

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38. Barry Manilow did not write his hit "I Write the Songs."

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39. He did, however, write State Farm's "Like a Good Neighbor" jingle.

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40. And "I am stuck on Band-Aids, 'cause Band-Aid's stuck on me."

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41. Winston Churchill's mother was born in Brooklyn.

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42. Officials in Portland, Ore., drained 8 million gallons of water from a reservoir in 2011 because a buzzed 21-year-old peed in it.

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43. There's a basketball court above the Supreme Court. It's known as the Highest Court in the Land.

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44. If you start counting at one and spell out the numbers as you go, you won't use the letter "A" until you reach 1,000.

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45. On a 1999 episode of The West Wing, Nick Offerman ("Ron Swanson") played a man lobbying the White House to build a $900 million wolves-only roadway.

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46. The medical term for ice cream headaches is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia.

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47. After Leonardo da Vinci's death, King Francis I of France hung the Mona Lisa in his bathroom.

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48. Redondo Beach, CA adopted the Goodyear Blimp as the city's official bird in 1983.

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49. In 2001, Beaver College changed its name to Arcadia in part because anti-porn filters blocked access to the school's website.

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50. Peeps Lip Balm is something that exists.

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51. Quentin Tarantino played an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls.

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52. Wendy's founder Dave Thomas dropped out of high school but picked up his GED in 1993. His GED class voted him Most Likely to Succeed.

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53. Sleeping through winter is hibernation, while sleeping through summer is estivation.

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54. In Spain, Mr. Clean is known as Don Limpio.

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55. In Qaddafi's compound, Libyan rebels found a photo album filled with pictures of Condoleezza Rice.

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56. Reed Hastings was inspired to start Netflix after racking up a $40 late fee on a VHS copy of Apollo 13.

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57. Marie Curie's notebooks are still radioactive. Researchers hoping to view them must sign a disclaimer.

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58. Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins also wrote for Clarissa Explains It All.

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59. When three-letter airport codes became standard, airports that had been using two letters simply added an X.

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60. Just before the Nazis invaded Paris, H.A. and Margret Rey fled on bicycles. They were carrying the manuscript for Curious George.

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61. William McKinley was on the $500 bill, Grover Cleveland was on the $1,000, and James Madison was on the $5,000.

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62. In 1999, the U.S. government paid the Zapruder family $16 million for the film of JFK's assassination.

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63. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know. But on average, a Licking Machine made at Purdue needed 364.

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64. Janis Joplin left $2,500 in her will for her friends to "have a ball after I’m gone."

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65. Fredric Baur invented the Pringles can. When he passed away in 2008, his ashes were buried in one.

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