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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)

 
 

1261/ The term 'scientist' was invented by a Victorian Vicar called William Whewell. He was Master at Trinity College Cambridge, and also held chairs in mineralogy and moral philosophy. He introduced the word 'scientist' in the Quarterly Review for March 1834. The word immediately caught on in the USA, but took about another 60 years to gain general acceptance in Britain. As well as the word 'scientist' he is also credited with inventing numerous other science words such as, 'physicist', 'anode' and 'cathode'.

1262/ The ancient library at Alexandria at the time of Alexander the Great (around 320BC) was called 'the temple of the muses'. It contained about 400,000 books and it is from this that we get the modern word 'museum'.

1263/ The plague in Zurich killed 3,700 of the cities 6,000 inhabitants in 1567.

1264/ The Black Death (bubonic plague) killed one quarter of Europe's population between 1346 and 1352, with death tolls ranging up to 70 per cent in some cities.

1265/ The discover of oxygen was Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) in 1774.

1266/ In 1905, over a year after their first short flight, the Wright Brothers offered their invention to the US War Department. They were turned down.

1267/ The mass of the Earth is roughly 6,700 million, million, million tons.

1268/ Copernicus' great book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in the year of his death, 1543. The book put foward the then scandalous idea that the Sun is at the centre of the Universe, not the Earth, and that the Earth along with the other planets revolves around it. He is said to have been handed a copy of his book as he lay on his death bed. In 1616 it was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books by the Catholic Church and wasn't removed until 1835.

1269/ The Index of Forbidden Books ceased its publication in 1966 when Cardinal Ottaviani, Head of the Sacred Congregation of the Faith, declared that there would be no further editions of the Index. (The last edition was in 1948.) More

1270/ The Flat Earth Society has been around since 1547 and apparently is still going strong. To join go here.

1271/ On a clear night in the Northern Hemisphere the naked eye can discern some 5000 stars.

1272/ The fossil record commences in pre-Cambrian times with organisms resembling bacteria and blue-green algae in deposits 3 billion years old.

1273/ The world's largest open-pit copper mine can be found near Antofagasta in the North of Chile.

1274/ The first newspaper article on crack cocaine appeared in the Los Angeles Times in November 1984.

1275/ By the mid 1990s, up to two thirds of clubbers in the city of Amsterdam were using Ecstasy.

1276/ The Sumerians, who inhabited an area in what is now Southern Iraq, from around 5000 to 2000 BC appear to have been active Opium users. This is suggested by the fact that they have an ideogram for it which has been translated as "hul", meaning joy or rejoicing.

1277/ The total number of human genes is estimated at 30,000 to 35,000 much lower than previous estimates of 80,000 to 140,000 that had been based on extrapolations from gene-rich areas as opposed to a composite of gene-rich and gene-poor areas. This new figure comes as a direct result of the human genome project. You can read all about it here.

1278/ In 1969 Brent Berlin and Paul Kay published their investigation of twenty different languages, and how each language performed the coding of experience into sound. They found experimentally that a basic set of eleven colour categories were common to all the languages studied - white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange and grey. Interestingly, they also investigated 78 other languages via scientific literature, and found that those that encoded fewer then 11 colour categories still seemed to follow strict rules as to which categories they would encode. So that 1/ All languages contain terms for black and white 2/ If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red 3/ If a language contains three terms then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both) 4/ If a language contains five terms then it contains terms for both green and yellow 5/ If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue 6/ If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown 7/ If a language contains eight or more terms then it contains a term for purple, pink, orange and grey. Paul Kays homepage can be found here - Other information can be found here - or here - Plus take a colour survey here.

1279/ After the conversion of the Emperor Constantine to Christianity in AD 313, it was made a punishable offence in the Roman Empire for a father to kill his child in 318, and in 331 Constantine decreed that those who raised exposed children could legally adopt them.

1280/ In the 1970s, Peter Sturrock sent questionnaires to 2,611 members of the American Astronomical Society. Replies were received from 79 percent of the members (2062). Of these 62 respondents had either personally observed a UFO or had detailed knowledge of a sighting. Two respondents reported something like a searchlight playing on a cloud when there were no clouds in the sky, 11 described disklike objects, 3 objects that seemed to emit sparks, and in 2 cases sightings were accompanied by problems with car electrical systems.

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