| 1381/
In one study by educational psychologist, Sandra Scarr, she
located people who had been adopted in the 1950s when they
were just two years old. She measured the IQs of the adoptees
when they were eighteen years old. If the effects of family
and schooling were important in determining IQ, then such
influences would show up after the first eighteen years of
life. What she found was that the IQs of the people she tested
bore no relation to the IQs of the families in which they
were brought up.
1382/ In another study,
sixty eight year old identical twins Caroline and Margaret
Chang, separated at birth, had IQ test scores that were as
similar to each other as the same person tested twice.
1383/ 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.
1384/ The adult spinal
cord is normally between 40 and 50 centimtres (16 to 20 inches)
long, and runs between your head and a point about level with
your navel.
1385/ Every year in the
UK, twenty people are electrocuted by their bedside lamp or
alarm clock. Another twenty die as they fall getting out of
bed. Thirty people die from drowning in their morning bath,
and sixty are seriously injured putting on their socks. 600
also die each year from falling down stairs (almost two a
day!).
1386/ The risk of dying
in an aeroplane crash over a period of one year is about 0.000002,
or one in 500,000.
1387/ For every person
murdered today, it is thought that ten were murdered in the
Middle Ages. The murder rate has halved in the past two hundred
years.
1388/ For every death
from an infectious disease in the twenty-first century, there
was probably at least a hundred in the Middle Ages.
1389/ From 1985 to 2000
there were fewer then a hundred Ecstasy related deaths in
the UK, while estimates of deaths related to either long-term
or short-term abuse of alcohol numbered around thirty thousand
each year. One poisons expert, Professor John Henry of St
Mary's Hospital in London, said that in his hospital, cases
of Ecstasy toxicity were rare, but that 40% of all emergency
cases were directly related to alcohol.
1390/ For every six successful
summits of Mount Everest, one person dies.
1391/ Oxygen becomes
a liquid if cooled to below minus 183 degrees centigrade (minus
297 F). The resulting liquid is pale blue. Cool it still further,
to minus 218 degrees centigrade (minus 361 F), and it becomes
a bright red solid.
1392/ The amount of haemoglobin
present in the blood changes with altitude: the body increases
the rate at which it manufactures haemoglobin carrying red
blood cells as a result of acclimatization to high altitudes.
If you were placed from sea level on to the summit of Mount
Everest, giving the body no chance to acclimatise, you would
quickly die.
1393/ Between 1895 and
1905, India's total population declined for ten years as a
result of economic depression, repeated famines and plague.
1394/ In 1982-1983 the
Galapagos Islands received 2,770 millimeters of rain, almost
six times the normal amount. The number of flightless cormorants
fell by 45 percent, while 78 percent of the rare Galapagos
penguins perished. On some islands, 70 percent of the marine
iguanas starved because red algae, nourished by the much warmer
water, replaced the green algae that forms the lizards staple
diet.
1395/ In 13,000 BC, the
world's hunter-gatherer population was approaching eight and
a half million.
1396/ The longest ruling
Pharoah in Ancient Egypt was Pepi II who ascended the throne
in 2278 BC at the age of six and ruled for 94 years. This
was at a time when typical life expectancy was 25 to 35 years.
1397/ Europe enjoyed
five and a half centuries of warmer temperatures and ample
rainfall, commonly called the Medieval Warm Period (very roughly
spanning 850 to 1400 AD). Average temperatues in the British
Isles between 1140 and 1300 were up to 0.8 degrees centigrade
higher than those of 1900 to 1950. Only now are some temperatures
reaching Medieval Warm Period levels.
1398/ The Medieval Warm
Period was then followed by what has been called the Little
Ice Age; which began about 1400 and only ended about 150 or
so years ago. At its height, between AD 1550 and 1700, mean
temperatures worldwide were 1.2 to 1.4 degrees celsius below
those of the Medieval Warm Period.
1399/ Between April and
June 1815, Mount Tambora, a volcano on the island of Sumbawa
in Indonesia, erupted massively. The explosion was heard in
Sumatra, sixteen hundred kilometres away. Only twenty-six
of the island's twelve thousand people survived.
1400/ By 1500 European
summers were about seven degrees celsius cooler than they
had been during the Medieval Warm Period. The growing season
in England was shortened by about three weeks, and by as much
as five by the seventeenth century.
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