| 3341/ The Chauvet
caves in Southern France were discovered in 1994 and have
the most ancient cave paintings in the world. These are 30,000
years old and include images of animals such as owls, panthers
and hyenas, not seen before on cave walls.
3342/ According to a study by
Professor Alexander Kira of Cornell University, women take
2.3 times as long as men to go to the toilet on average.
3343/ Hair grows at a rate of
around 0.015 inches a day. It grows faster at night and in
warm weather. Black hair grows faster than blonde hair.
3344/ The number of hairs on
the head varies with colour, for reasons still unknown. Blondes
have 140,000 hairs, dark-haired people have around 108,000,
while redheads have fewest at 90,000.
3345/ Over 7 and a half million
men in the UK suffer from hair-loss, but black men are four
times more likely to have a full head of hair than Caucasian
men. The incidence of hair-loss is also lower in Chinese and
Japanese men.
3346/ Hair is an appendage of
the skin consisting of threads of cells filled with keratin,
a protein which is also found in a harder form, in fingernails
and toenails. Hair usually grows everywhere on the body, except
on the palms, soles, lips, nipples, the end of the penis and
the lips of the vulva.
3347/ Each hair is anchored in
a tiny pit called a follicle, underneath the skin. The shape
of the follicle affects the appearance of the hair. A round
follicle gives straight hair, an oval one wavy hair, while
people with curly hair have spiral follicles.
3348/ At any one time, about
90% of the hairs on your head will be in the growing phase,
with about 1% in transition and the rest waiting to be shed.
It's quite normal to lose between 50 and 100 hairs a day.
3349/ The words Caesar, Kaiser
and Tsar all originally meant hairy.
3350/ Men with dark hair who
go grey early tend not to go bald.
3351/ As you age your body hair
tends to get thicker and stronger whilst scalp hair falls
off.
3352/ A study by Thomas Cash
at Old Dominion University compared two sets of similar photos
where in one the people had hair, and in the other they were
bald. Overall, the balding partner was rated as being less
attractive, less successful and less assertive than the non-balding
one. There was also a tendency to over-estimate the age of
the balding partner by up to three years and to underestimate
that of the non-balding one by around two years.
3353/ There are over 50,000 accidental
fires in homes in Britain every year - that's nearly 140 a
day.
3354/ Aluminium has about half
the thermal conductivity of silver, and iron has about one-eighth.
3355/ When a boy's voice breaks,
the length of the vocal chords increases (it may double in
length), causing the voice to shift downwards in pitch.
3356/ The idea that perfect pitch
is learned rather than innate is supported by the fact that
50% of children with a visual disability are better able to
identify musical notes due to their increased reliance on
sound.
3357/ The Spartans developed
the first military cryptographic device, the scytale, by writing
a message along a long strip of leather wrapped around a staff.
When unwound the strip would appear to bear nothing but an
innocuous list of letters. To read the message the receiver
would simply wrap it around an identical staff.
3358/ Mortality rates by cause
of death vary with age and sex. In 2002, for young people
aged 15 to 29 in the UK, mortality rates were highest for
injury and poisoning (41 per 100,000 population for men and
10 per 100,000 for women).
3359/ According to UK Government
Statistics, in the second quarter of 2004, 52 per cent of
households in the UK (12.8 million) could access the Internet
from home, compared with just 9 per cent (2.2 million) in
the same quarter of 1998.
3360/ The Earth is not round.
It is an oblate spheroid, which means that it is a bit squashed
on one plane. The Polar diameter is 12,713.6 km whilst the
Equatorial Diameter is 12,756.4 km. At the equator the earth
spins at 1674 km/h and is 149,600,000 km from the Sun.
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