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5 Jul 2009
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.
Cooking and salad oils could lubricate machinery, such as cars and boats, according to Penn State chemical engineers. Tests found that when blended with an additive developed at Penn State, some vegetable oils perform as well as or better than commercial oils.
Climb on the Columbia Glacier in Prince William Sound in Alaska, but don't expect a fast ride. A turtle moves faster in 10 minutes than this glacier moves in a day
Copernicus' great book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres was published in the year of his death, 1543. The book put forward the then scandalous idea that the Sun is at the centre of the Universe, not the Earth, and that the Earth along with the other planets revolves around it.
A pulsar is a neutron star that emits pulsed radio signals. The first pulsar was discovered in 1967.
In 1900 there were 50,000 motorised vehicles worldwide. In 2000 there were more than 650 million.
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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 and measured the IQs of the adoptees when they were eighteen years old. The IQs bore no relation to the IQs of the families in which they were brought up.
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The steepest street in the world is Baldwin Street located in Dunedin, New Zealand. It has an incline of 38%.
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The first airline, DELAG, was established on October 16th, 1909, to carry passengers between German cities by Zeppelin airships.
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A goldfish is the only animal that can see both infrared and ultraviolet light.
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Fata Morgana mirages are caused by a temperature inversion, where cold dense air is trapped next to the ground under a layer of warmer air.
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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.
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To duplicate the airflow pattern of a full-size car around a 1/10 scale model, a wind velocity 10 times as great as the actual highway speed must be used.
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A digital watch has an average of over half a million transistors in its microchips.
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The first spacecraft to visit Venus was Mariner 2 in 1962. It was subsequently visited by many others (more than 20 in all). Including Pioneer Venus and the Soviet Venera 7 - the first spacecraft to land on another planet - and Venera 9 which returned the first photographs of the surface.
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