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9 Feb 2010
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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.
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Admiral Lord Nelson experienced vivid phantom limb pain after losing his arm in an attack on Tenerife in 1797. Nelson is reported to have said that the phantom sensation gave him direct evidence of the existence of the soul.
A coat hanger is 44 inches long if straightened.
In 1885 Karl Benz built the first car powered by an internal combustion engine.
During the US Civil War, telegraph wires were strung to follow and report on the action on the battlefield. But there was no telegraph office in the White House, so President Lincoln trekked across the street to the War Department to get the news.
Number of human olfactory receptor cells = 40 million Number of rabbit olfactory receptor cells = 100 million Number of dog olfactory receptor cells = 1 billion
 
 

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Humans
Low-birthweight babies are 20 times more likely to die in their first month of life than normal-weight babies.
Earth
Agriculture consumes around 70% of all water withdrawn from the world's rivers, lakes and groundwater.
Machines
Steel drums are the only non-electric instrument invented in the 20th century.
Nature
The last wolf in Great Britain was killed in Scotland, in 1743. Wolves were extinct in England by 1500.
Mysteries
"Historically, when humans were unable to explain the nature of the world around them, they attributed gods, demons, monsters and more recently, extra-terrestrial invaders. "
Origins
A team of Canadian palaeontologists 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.
Big Theories
Rock magnetism and changes in magnetic polarity were observed as early as 1853 by the Italian scientist Melloni, who showed that the direction of magnetisation of some ancient lavas from Mt Vesuvius was the same as the direction of the Earth's magnetic field.
Technology
In the mid-twentieth century the US Patent Office was harassed by a flood of patent applications for perpetual motion machines - a machine that will run forever, or, better still, provide a limitless source of energy.
Space
The Irish writer Jonathan Swift described the two small moons of Mars with uncanny accuracy in his novel Gulliver's Travels - which was published 150 years before these moons were discovered…
 
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