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20 Nov 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
The rosy periwinkle plant, found in Madagascar, is used to cure leukemia while the anti-malarial drug quinine is taken from the bark of the Andean cinchona tree. The rauvolfa shrub found in Asian and African forests is used to cure high blood pressure and mental illness.
The Egyptians were the first to notice that the stars seem "fixed" and that the sun moves relative to the stars. They also noticed five bight objects in the sky (Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn) that seemed to move in a similar manner. They called Mars Har Decher - the Red One.
About 110,000 million tons of carbon dioxide enter the atmosphere each year as the result of burning fossil fuels. Removing this amount of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere requires a forested area the size of Australia.
Spiders are believed to have existed for more than 300 million years.
Darwin marvelled that such a wonderful structure as an eye could have evolved through natural selection, but comparative anatomists have shown that eyes evolved in the animal species at least 40 times independently.
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Some duplications cause disease. A type of Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, for example, arises from a duplication of 1.5 million bases in a gene on chromosome 17. The disease causes numb hands and feet.
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Rocks in Devon and Cornwall are fairly rich in uranium, which decays to radon gas. Not good for you: Its thought to add to lung cancer risks.
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The fastest spacecraft can go 40,000 mph.
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Houseflies watch each other constantly and follow each other to food sources. That's why there are always so many enjoying the same food.
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In 1994 Stuart Campbell published a book called The UFO Mystery - Solved! In which he proposed that UFOs are not in fact caused by little green men flying over our heads, but rather are caused by astronomical mirages.
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A team of Canadian palaeontologists working along Hudson Bay in northern Manitoba has discovered the world's largest recorded complete fossil of a trilobite, a many-legged, sea-dwelling animal that lived 445 million years ago.
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Over 350,000 tons travelling at 650 miles per second creates air resistance so massive that the first two reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion Joules of energy, per second. The lead pair will burst into flame, exposing those behind them and creating deafening sonic booms. All 214,000 reindeer will be vaporised in just 4.26 thousandths of a second.
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Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.
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The escape velocity from the Sun's surface is 600 kilometres per second - still only one fifth of one per cent of the speed of light.
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