| 3101/
There is some evidence that religiosity - the ability to feel
'spiritual' - may be inherited. In one study, Dr Tom Bouchard
from Minneapolis compared thirty-five sets of identical twins
with thirty-seven non-identical twins. Each of the pairs of
twins had been brought up from birth by different adopting
parents. Identical twins reared apart showed much closer similarity
in their religiousness than non-identical twins. If one identical
twin was deeply religious, the other was likly to be as well,
even if the adopting parents did not have any particular religious
tendencies. A twin brought up in one religion would tend to
be as spiritual as its twin brought up in another, even if
the parents were agnostic or atheist.
3102/ Half the Earth
was covered in snow and ice from sixty thousand to ten thousand
years ago. Global temperatures were about 18 degrees Fahrenheit
(10 degrees Celsius) cooler than today's.
3103/ There are no mountains
or trains in the Orkney Islands.
3104/ The worst gusts
of wind surge across the polar ice caps. Winds regularly reach
120 miles per hour (190 kilometres per hour) in Antarctica.
They are called katabatic wind; from the Greek word meaning
'to go down'.
3105/ However, the fastest
gust of wind ever recorded on Earth was at Mount Washington
in New Hampshire on 12th April 1934. It measured 231 miles
per hour (372 kilometres per hour).
3106/ On the night of
the 6-7th February 1933 the US Navy ship Ramapo was steaming
across the North Pacific when a typhoon slammed into it at
78 miles per hour (126 kilometres per hour). And then it faced
a monster wave. An estimated 112 foot (34 metre) tall wave,
as tall as a four-storey office block, rose up out of the
sea and smashed down onto the ship. By some sort of miracle
the Ramapo was not sunk.
3107/ However, the biggest
ever actually scientifically recorded wave (surfers record
higher waves, but they are not measured) was 65 feet 5 inches
(20.4 metres) from trough to crest which took fifteen seconds
to pass a weather ship lying close to the track of a hurricane
in 1961.
3108/ The International
Brotherhood of Teamsters was formed in 1907.
3109/ It was not until
1926 that Pneumatic tyres surpassed solid tyres in numbers
used on vehicles.
3110/ It's a myth that
lightning never strikes the same place twice. The Empire State
Building and the Eiffel Tower are struck on average twenty
to thirty times a year because lightning usually seeks out
the highest object.
3111/ Route 66 - A 2,200
mile highway from Chicago to Los Angeles opened in 1929.
3112/ The Kudzu Vine
was imported into the US in the Early 19th Century for erosion
control, but now envolopes whole forests.
3113/ The first shots
of the Civil War were fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston's
Harbour in South Carolina.
3114/ In 1993 the Journal
of Meteorology reported that a car stalled at a road junction
just before a lightning bolt struck just a few metres away.
As soon as the lightning struck, the car started again without
any further problems.
3115/ The Citrus Industry
in Florida is worth over $8 billion a year.
3116/ Missouri was admitted
to the Union as a slave state in 1821 under the terms of the
Missouri Compromise (which permitted slavery in Missouri but
prohibited it in any other part of Louisiana Territory above
the 36 degree 30 parallel).
3117/ According to Greek
mythology, thunderbolts had been invented by Athena, goddess
of wisdom, forged by the ironsmith Hephaestus, but were actually
thrown by Zeus, father of all Gods, to punish the arrogant.
(Editor's Note - Try being arrogant
with a lightning bolt in your head!)
3118/ The Daily Telegraph,
June 1980, reported that a sixty-two year old man blinded
in an accident nine years previously regained his sight after
being struck by lightning near his home in Falmouth, Maine
on 4th June.
3119/ One of the worst
incidents of metal conducting a lightning bolt was in July
1955 at the Royal Ascot races. Lightning ripped along metal
railings in a series of blue sparks, injuring forty-five people
and killing two.
3120/ Fog, quite simply,
is a cloud hugging the ground, and like a cloud, its dense
blanket is made of tiny droplets of water so small that it
would take 7000 million of them to make a single tablespoonful
of water.
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facts...
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