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Fact File


In the Fact File section we bring you a new collection of quick facts each week. (Click on the links below for more facts)

 
 

1221/ Elephants can detect the aroma of ripening fruit from over 20 kilometres away.

1222/ It takes 10 to 15 minutes for the fastest human sperm to swim the length of the cervical canal.

1223/ Salt is still used as money among the nomads of Ethiopia's Danakil Plains. At one stage Roman soldiers were also paid in salt, from which the term "salary" derives (the Latin being salarium). Also, when coins were invented, they were embossed with a hallmark (Greek for salt, hal) denoting their equivalent weight in salt.

1224/ The idea that molecules have three dimensional shapes dates back to Louis Pasteur, whose deduction in 1844 arose from the fact that solutions of two chemical compounds with identical composition could nevertheless twist a beam of light in opposite directions.

1225/ In Tanzania a male yellow baboon can expect to be seriously injured by another male approximately once every six weeks and will take about three weeks to recover from each injury.

1226/ Herons stamp and peck at mosquitoes around their feet up to three thousand times an hour. This behaviour prevents more then 80 percent of the mosquitoes from feeding on the heron's blood.

1227/ The ratio of the length of string that produces a given musical note to the length that produces its octave is 2:1. (Click here for information about the connection between music and mathematics)

1228/ Hyperinflation in Germany around the First World War developed as follows:

July 1914
January 1919
July 1919
January 1920
January 1921
July 1921
January 1922
January 1923
July 1923
November 1923
1 mark
2.6 marks etc.
3.4
12.6
14.4
14.3
100.6
2785
194,000
726,000,000,000

 

1229/ By late 1923, 300 paper mills were working at top speed and 150 printing companies had 2000 presses running day and night turning out currency in Germany.

1230/ In Ancient Greece, the Greeks would water down their wine in vast containers called Kraters. Undiluted alcohol was felt to be the preserve of the barbarian.

1231/ In 1985 a herd of 150 Asian elephants broke into an illegal still in West Bengal and drank copious amounts of moonshine. Inebriated, they rampaged across the land, killing five people, injuring a dozen, demolishing seven concrete buildings and trampling twenty village huts.

1232/ The world record for throwing a boomerang is 238 metres. This is held by a swiss thrower called Manuek Schutz who in 1999 established the record in Kloten, near Zurich.

1233/ The Nobel Prize winning biochemist, Hans Kornberg, once drew up a list of the ten most significant medical advances of the twentieth century. Seven out of the ten arose from research that had nothing to do with the eventual application.

1234/ Not far from Flagstaff, Arizona, there is a crater 1.2km (1 mile) across and 200m (650 feet) deep. It was created in an instant 50,000 years ago, when a meteorite hit the Earth. Assuming that it was travelling at an average velocity for Earth-crossing asteroids, about 17.5km (11 miles) per second, the impactor must have been about 150m (500ft) across. For an asteroid this is tiny. Yet it hit with an explosive force of about 20 megatons.

1235/ The Mobius Band, a single sided surface, was invented by the German mathematician August Mobius in 1858. To recreate one; take a strip of paper, give it a twist and join the ends together. Now it has only one side. If you start painting one side red and keep going, you cover both sides of the paper, not just one.

1236/ 'Gone' is one of the most frequent words babies use. Generally, it is not used to denote food having been eaten as many parents suspect, but rather as a general term to denote when something has gone out of view of the baby.

1237/ In 2000 the three largest US airports in Atlanta, Chicago and Los angeles, were already running at over 80 percent of maximum capacity. And that was during good weather. In bad weather, air traffic controllers had no choice but to increase the spacing between planes for safety, and under these conditions nearly half of all major US airports were operating above their maximum capacity.

1238/ During a drought period in the Pliocene era (6 million years ago), the softer grasses in North America were largely replaced by harsh grasses, which have three times as much silica content. Amongst the browsing horses, all species became extinct except those with the longest teeth.

1239/ Our Moon is tilted by roughly 5 degrees in relation to Earth's own orbit around the Sun. By contrast, most other planets in our solar system show a tilt of only 1 to 2 degrees. Researchers at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado believe that the moons odd tilt is indicative of a giant impact from a Mars-sized rock at least 4.4 billion years ago.

1240/ The oldest rocks collected on the Moon during the Apollo program were approximately 4.4 billion years old.

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