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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)

 
 

1361/ The computers running the SETI@Home screensaver have put in a total of over 350,000 years worth of computer time. These machines are collecting the equivalent of a computer operating at around ten million million calculations a second, about ten times faster than any conventional supercomputer. You can help in the search for extraterrestial life by downloading the screensaver here.

1362/ In a study by Dr Thomas Zentall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, he trained pigeons to tap on a small button if they wanted a snack. Sometimes the pigeon had to tap only once; upon which the button would turn red and some grain appear. Other times though the pigeon would have to tap up to 20 times to get the grain, before the light turned green and the grain was delivered. The pigeons soon learned that the red button meant one thing and the green another. You would assume that given the free choice the pigeons would choose the red button ie less work, same reward. However, Zentall found that the pigeons actually chose the green button twice as often as the red. The effort seemed, according to Dr Zentall, to make the grain more valuable.

1363/ According to Jens Rydell and Winston Lancaster at Gothenburg University in Sweden, the majority of Scandinavian moths have tiny ears tuned to the ultrasonic pulses that bats emit as they give chase (and hence hopefully avoid being the bats lunch!). But 4% of the moths they studied lacked such ears and were reckoned to be deaf. To compensate however, they found that deaf moths were able to fly faster then their hearing counterparts.

1364/ Scientists have found that the Chinese brake fern has an almost insatiable appetite for arsenic. When planted on sites contaminated with copper arsenate, Lana Ma of the University of Florida found that the fronds from the fern had accumulated as much as five grams of arsenic for each kilogram of the fern's foliage. In theory, a contaminated site could have much of its arsenic sucked out of it over the course of a few years by planting it with Chinese brake.

1365/ Microsoft's Office Assistant, an irritating paper-clip that tries to help the user; uses Bayesian statistical methods to analyse recent actions in order to try to work out what the user is trying to do. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century Presbyterian minister and mathematician who published a paper in 1763 explaining his approach. The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide mathematical rules that explain how you should change your existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. read more here

1366/ It was not until about 600 million years ago that we find fossils that are recognizably animals, plants, or fungi.

1367/ A female oyster over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.

1368/ The world's most fertile woman had sixty-nine children, at least sixty-seven of which survived infancy.

1369/ The 'Silverback' gorilla is 30 per cent taller and almost twice as heavy as the females in the group he dominates.

1370/ Man has by far the largest penis of any primate. Chimps also have a relatively large penis which is decorated on its underside with a broad white stripe.

1371/ The number of atoms of carbon in a 60 carat diamond (the Koh-I-Noor weighs 109 carats) is about 6 x 10 to the power of 23.

1372/ The isolated island of Tristan da Cunha has three hundred inhabitants, of whom over twenty percent suffer from asthma.

1373/ The average man in the UK has 11 per cent body fat at age twenty and 26 per cent at age sixty.

1374/ Huntington's disease, which became notorious when it killed the folk singer Woody Guthrie in 1967, was first diagnosed by a doctor, George Huntington, in 1872 on the Eastern tip of Long Island.

1375/ Cancer risk has been found to vary dramatically between countries. Liver cancer is eighteen times more frequent in certain parts of Africa than in Great Britain. Stomach cancer strikes the Japanese eleven times more frequently than Americans. Colon cancer is ten to twenty times more common in the US than in certain regions of Africa. These dramatic differences were not due to differences in inherited susceptibility. When individuals migrated from one part of the world to another, their children soon assumed the cancer risks typical of their new locations.

1376/ The term 'G-Spot' was coined by Ernest Grafenberg in 1950.

1377/ In humans, most multiple births involve twins - about once in every eighty-nine births. By contrast, triplets naturally occur about once in every 7900 births and quadruplets about once in every 705,000 births.

1378/ A female egg has a volume that is over 30,000 times greater than a man's sperm.

1379/ The first attempt to create an artificial womb took place in France in 1969, when a sheep foetus was kept alive in one for two days.

1380/ A mid-1990s survey of fertility clinics in the United States and Canada revealed that sperm samples are routinely taken from dead men at the request of their partners and families.

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