| 1281/
When two Guatemalen villages were given ad-lib protein supplements
for several years, the IQ of children, measured ten years
later, had risen markedly.
1282/ A New Zealand based
political scientist, James Flynn, noticed in the 1980s that
IQ is increasing in all countries all the time, at an average
rate of about three IQ points per decade.
1283/ Originally made
for the New York World's Fair of 1964-65, the worlds
largest cheese weighed 17.25 tons and used more than 170,000
quarts of milk. On display in Neillsville, Wisconsin is a
replica of the original, which was devoured in Eau Claire,
Wisconsin in 1966.
1284/ A team of Canadian
paleontologists working along Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba
has discovered the world's largest recorded complete fossil
of a trilobite,
a many-legged, sea-dwelling animal that lived 445 million
years ago. The giant creature is more than 70 cm long (about
28 inches), 70 percent larger than the previous record holder.
1285/ In a massive, long-term
study of 17,000 civil servants in the UK, the surprising
conclusion emerged that the status of a person's job was better
able to predict their likelyhood of a heart attack than obesity,
smoking or high blood pressure. Somebody in a low-grade job
in Whitehall, such as a janitor, was nearly four times as
likely to have a heart attack as a permanent secretary at
the top of the heap. Indeed, even if the permanent secretary
was fat, hypertensive or a smoker, he was still less likely
to suffer a heart attack at a given age than a thin, non-smoking,
low-blood-pressure janitor. Exactly the same result emerged
from a similar study of a million employees of the Bell Telephone
Company in the 1960s.
1286/ In a study investigating
pain tolerance, it was found that the same pain was perceived
as being almost twice as bad during certain times of the day,
most notably in the morning. Just after lunchtime, the pain
seemed to be far more bearable.
1287/ If people are woken
up when their EEG shows that they are in REM sleep, and thus
probably dreaming, they try and compensate the following night:
the amount of REM sleep that they undergo increases. In one
experiment, people were woken up to ten times on the first
night, but by the sixth night they were woken up as many as
thirty-three times as their brains tried time and again, in
vain, to plunge into the dream world.
1288/ Flattened out,
the rat cortex would be the size of a postage stamp, that
of the chimp would be the size of a piece of standard typing
paper, while the human brain would be four times greater still!
1289/ The first recorded
Olympic
Games were held in 776 BC and were a purely local affair
that lasted only one day. By 650 BC the games had grown much
larger. Citizens of many cities came to compete, including
some from Italy and Asia. In 393 AD, the Roman emperor Theodosius
I, a Christian, abolished the Games because of their pagan
influences. The very first modern
Olympic Games opened in the first week of April 1896.
1290/ The GPS (Global
Positioning System) is a constellation of twenty-four satellites
(Plus two spares - making twenty six in total), in twelve-hour
orbits at an altitude of 12,543 miles. Each satellite carries
an atomic clock for precise determination of time, while ground-based
tracking permits each one to know its position with similar
accuracy. It was initially a US military project; but President
Ronald Reagan ordered the GPS signals to be made available
internationally. The complete GPS system became fully operational
in March 1994. Also there is no longer any encryption encoded
error built into the system (as there was originally), as
it was taken out under President Clinton's orders during the
late 1990's.
1291/ When growing at
the maximum weight at around thirty-two to thirty-four weeks
of pregnancy, normal human babies are increasing their weight
by nearly 250 grams (over half a pound) a week.
1292/ Premature birth
occurs in about 10 percent of all pregnancies, but is the
cause of 75 percent of infant deaths that occur during labour
or in the first month of life.
1293/ Volcanic activity
since 1700 A.D. has killed more than 260,000 people.
1294/ The total number
of planets detected around stars outside our solar system
has now topped 100, with more being discovered all the time.
1295/ Cirrus clouds are
high, cold clouds composed of ice crystals. In the tropics,
cirrus clouds form at altitudes of about 30,000 to 60,000
feet (9-18 km).
1296/ Charles Darwin
came tenth (out of 178 people) in his Divinity BA Degree in
1831.
1297/ The word 'muppets'
was invented by Jim Henson by combining the words marionettes
and puppets.
1298/ 50 percent or more
of individuals in Western society are overweight.
1299/ The now extinct
woolly
mammoth of Northern Europe and Russia have been found
in ever increasing numbers deep frozen in remarkable condition.
Some of these bodies flesh, many of which have lain undesturbed
for tens of thousands of years, are still said to be edible!
1300/ Whereas English
books are written in words of variable length using twenty
six letters, genomes are written entirely in three-letter
words using only four letters: A, C, G and T (which stand
for adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine). And instead of
being written on flat pages, they are written on long chains
of sugar and phosphate called DNA molecules.
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