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4 Feb 2012
Fact of the day
Nostradamus wrote 942 quatrains (4 line long poems) in his lifetime which he organised into centuries. Many people believe that he could predict the future and that these poems contain cryptic information about future events.
Random Facts
The deepest point in the ocean, the Challenger Deep in the Marianas Trench is 11,000m (7.3 miles) down. At this point, the pressure is equal to one person supporting the weight of 50 jumbo jets.
Because it inhibits the growth of bacteria, salt is a popular food preservative, and the ancient Egyptians used it to mummify bodies.
Because radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second and sound waves saunter at 700 miles per hour, a broadcast voice can be heard sooner 13,000 miles away than it can be heard at the back of the room in which it originated.
The bagpipe was originally made from the whole skin of a dead sheep.
Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the first American to have plumbing installed in his house in 1840.
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Alcohol lowers the level of the sex hormone testosterone in men but increases it in women.
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In 1991 the US House of Representatives Science Committee wrote that 'the chances of Earth being struck by a large asteroid are extremely small, but because the consequences of such a collision are extremely large, the Committee believe it is only prudent to assess the nature of the threat and prepare to deal with it.'
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The first internal combustion piston engine was built by Frenchman Etienne Lenoir in 1860.
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Every man, women and child in the US "consumes" about 74 cubic ft. of wood each year. That wood comes in many forms from construction lumber to furniture to tissue paper to packaging and energy. If the 74 cubic feet were dry Douglas-fir, it would weigh over 2300 lbs.! (USDA Forest Service Gen. Tech Report FPL-GTR-116, 1999)
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Over the last 100 years, investigations of Stonehenge have shown that it was built in several stages from 2800 – 1800 BC.
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After two arduous years of research in the steamy Amazon jungle, English biologist Alfred Russel Wallace devised the theory of evolution before Charles Darwin. But Wallace's crucial evidence disappeared when the ship he was taking back to England in 1852 caught fire and sank.
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Out of every billion atoms in your body, 630 million are hydrogen – and only five are cobalt.
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Samuel Colt (1814-1862) patented the revolver named for him in 1836.
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A pulsar is a small star made up of neutrons so densely packed together that if one the size of a silver dollar landed on Earth, it would weigh approximately 100 million tons.
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