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4 Jul 2009
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.
Random Facts
HIV prevalence among pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in South Africa was less than 1% in 1990. A decade later, the country was experiencing one of the fastest growing epidemics in the world, with prevalence among pregnant women at 24.5% by the end of 2000.
In 1930, the annual rate of mortality from cancer in the United States was 143 per hundred thousand of population. By 1990, the rate had increased to 190 per hundred thousand.
When an object is moving slower than the speed of sound, which is about 1,100 feet per second at sea level (about 768 miles per hour), sound waves precede the object like ripples in a pond.
Alcohol lowers the level of the sex hormone testosterone in men but increases it in women.
There are 60,000 miles of blood vessels in the human body.
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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.
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Montreal is the largest French-speaking city in the Western Hemisphere.
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Russian submarine designers are building military submarines out of concrete because it becomes stronger under high pressure. Also, concrete would not show up on sonar displays (it looks just like sand or rocks), so the passing ships would not see the sub lurking below.
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A squirrel cannot contract or carry the rabies virus.
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An amateur scientist named Brandon Meland discovered a field containing a number of crop circles, and suggested that they were caused by "cyclonic wind action". His report was published in the journal Nature in 1880.
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The Babylonians lived in Mesopotamia, a fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. They developed an abstract form of writing based on cuneiform (wedge-shaped) symbols. Their symbols were written on wet clay tablets which were baked in the sun; many thousands of these tablets have survived to this day.
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Each snowflake is made up of from 2 to about 200 separate crystals.
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In the Kingdom of Bhutan, televisions were only allowed in 1999.
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An exploding supernova can outshine an entire galaxy of stars.
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