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21 Nov 2008
Each King in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history. Spades - King David; Clubs - Alexander the Great; Hearts - Charlemagne; and Diamonds - Julius Caesar.
Developing countries have approximately 80% of the world’s population, but have access to only 20% of the safe global blood supply.
Early Roman women were the pioneers for modern day beauty treatments. They employed white lead and chalk as face powders, squashed ants eggs and flies to emphasise the eyes, and red earth as blusher.
In 1949 Antonio Egaz Moniz won a Nobel Prize for pioneering pre-frontal lobotomy - the severance of the connections of the frontal lobes from the rest of the brain - in the control of schizophrenia and other mental disorders.
The now extinct woolly mammoth of Northern Europe and Russia have been found in ever increasing numbers deep frozen in remarkable condition. Some of these bodies flesh, many of which have lain undisturbed for tens of thousands of years, are still said to be edible!
Dogs of the Basenji breed don't bark.
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Two athletes who were Olympic champions in 1936 managed to defend their titles twelve years later. They were Ilona Elek of Hungary in women’s foil fencing and Jan Brzak of Czechoslovakia in the canoeing Canadian pairs 1,000m.
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International weather data shows that 2005 was the warmest year ever in the Northern Hemisphere and the second warmest year worldwide. Temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are about 0.4°C higher than a decade ago.
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To escape the Earth's gravity a rocket need to travel at 7 miles a second.
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In one study of leatherback turtles, over 50% of the leatherbacks tested had stomachs containing cellophane after eating discarded plastic items thinking they were jellyfish.
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Of the 26 people present at the opening of the tomb of Tutankhamen, six perished within ten years. Of the ten who had witnessed the unwrapping of Tutankhamen's corpse, none died within that period.
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The fossil record commences in pre-Cambrian times with organisms resembling bacteria and blue-green algae in deposits 3 billion years old.
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If a helium atom could be magnified to be as far across as 30 football fields, its nucleus would only be the size of a ping-pong ball.
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Frederick Winthrop Thayer of Massachusetts, and the Captain of the Harvard University Baseball Club received a patent for his baseball catcher's mask on February 12th 1878.
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A brown dwarf is a very small, dark object, with a mass less than 1/10 that of the Sun. They are "failed stars" – globules of gas that have shrunk under gravity, but failed to ignite and shine as stars.
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