Re: useless facts bin
From here (although I did have to add the list stuff and delete the bibliographies!)
- A medical curiosity was David Kennison, who was born in 1736 and participated in the Boston Tea Party. At the age of seventy-six, serving in the War of 1812, he lost a hand to a gunshot wound. Later, a tree fell on him, and fractured his skull. Some years later, while training soldiers in the use of a cannon, something went wrong and an explosion shattered his legs. He recovered. Yet later, a horse damaged his face. He died peacefully in 1851 at the age of 115.
- In the future people will be able to regrow missing arms or legs like a salamander can grow a new tail. Research has shown promising results in getting bone to grow with the application of electricity. With children under age five who lose the tip of a finger up to halfway to the outermost joint, if left untreated, the finger will regrow completely. If medical attention is applied, stitches for example, the child's finger will not regrow.
- Scientists are working on the possibility of removing a dying woman's ovaries and saving the eggs so that the woman can still have children, even after she is dead.
- If you split a human embryo when it is less than a week old, identical twins will develop. This is already done with cattle.
- Fetuses have gills.
- One out of every 88 births results in twins.
- One out of every 512,000 births results in quadruplets.
- One out of every 16 children is born with defects. Most of these are minor, such as the babies born with tails. When a baby is born with a tail, the doctors cut it off right away. Most people do not know if they had a tail.
- "Ten years ago 80% of underweight, premature babies died, while today 80% survive." - Allan Maurer
- In 1793, in France a true cyclops was born. She was a girl who lived to fifteen years old. She had a single eye in the middle of her face.
- In Finland babies were born in saunas until the 1920's. The babies probably were more comfortable arriving in a dark, warm room than in a bright, cold hospital room.
- When you laugh, you expel short bursts of air at up to 70 miles per hour. Sneezes have been clocked at up to 100 miles per hour.
- Giuseppe De Mai was a normal man in every respect except one: He had two hearts.
- A mathematics major with a higher than average IQ estimated at 130, and seemingly normal in every other way, was referred to a brain specialist because his head seemed a bit larger than normal. The brain specialist was amazed to find that the student had an extreme case of hydrocephalitis, also known as "water on the brain." His brain cavity was mostly filled with fluid, not neurons. The cortex, the main thinking part of his brain, was merely a coating one twenty-fifth of an inch thick on the inside of his skull!
- According to one scientific study, 33% of shy people suffer from hay fever, but almost no extroverts have the problem.
- Many people who eventually get Alzheimer's disease lose their sense of smell first.
- Recent scientific research indicates that garlic is a natural cancer-fighter. It also seems to lower cholesterol.
- It has been found that citrus fruits, peanuts, and possibly cheese help reduce the incidence of tooth decay.
- A child born to a mother under age 30 has a 10 percent chance of being left-handed, but if the mother is over 40, there is a 20 percent chance the child will be left-handed.
- Men are more sensitive to subtle changes in lighting than are women.
- It seems amazing that the little-tiny chains of DNA in each cell of your body contain the complete blueprints for your whole self. Even more amazing, scientists have determined that only 1 percent of that DNA seems to contain all the information for building, repair, fighting diseases and so on, and the other 99 percent has no known function!
- Many garden plants have more DNA in each of their cells than we do in ours.
- The difference between the DNA of a human and the DNA of an ape amounts to about 1.1 percent of the total.
- One out of every 22 Americans is bionic, having artificial parts in their bodies. These parts include heart valves, pins, tubes, joints and more.
- Where did the flu, influenza, get its name? At one time people thought the sickness was caused by the 'influence' of the stars and planets.
- You are more likely to have a heart attack in the morning than at other times of the day.
- There is a woman in India who can multiply a 13-digit number by another 13-digit number in her head in less than a minute and come up with the right answer.
- One out of every four Americans has a blood cholesterol level high enough to be risking heart attack.
- About one out of every 120 Americans have some form of epilepsy.
- A common misbelief is that you are supposed to jam a spoon into an epileptic victim's mouth when having convulsions. This is wrong, and it may lead to a broken tooth, or an injury to the person administering the 'care.'
- In a magazine article, one epileptic described his seizures this way: "A seizure is like flushing a toilet in your brain."
- Our hearts pump about 40 million gallons of blood in a lifetime. Your heart could fill a built-in swimming pool in about 25 days if you had enough blood to spare. But that might be difficult because your whole body contains just a little more than one gallon of blood.
- The sound of a sewing needle falling on a table is so slight that the vibrations may move your eardrums less than the width of a molecule. Yet in a quiet room, you can hear it. The amount of energy reaching your ears has been estimated at less than a millionth of a billionth of a watt.
- There is a gland approximately in the middle of the brain of humans and in lesser animals called the pineal body. Scientists have always been curious about this gland because they don't know exactly what it does, if anything, in humans, yet its location would seem to make it a very important organ.
- In frogs other amphibians, and many reptiles, because they are so small and because part of their skulls are thin, light actually reaches this gland. Evidently, the pineal body triggers the chemical changes that allow some of these critters to change color to match their environment.
- In studies with rats, it has been determined that those kept in light tend to breed more, while rats in darkness breed less. Evidently the pineal body is behind this, receiving its information from the optic nerves, which enter the brain at the same location.
- Some people with multiple personalities have exhibited an interesting fact: Those who have a personality with diabetes and another personality without diabetes change between needing insulin regulation and not needing it depending on which personality is active.
- Older peoples' skin becomes wrinkled because the subcutaneous layer disappears.
- Children have far more colds than adults. One theory to explain this is that we acquire a permanent immunity to a cold once we get it. But there are many variations of the virus, we'd have to catch one of each kind of cold before we would be immune to all colds.
- After age 30, we lose 18 million brain cells per year. However, we also grow billions of new dendrite connections as we age. Scientists recently busted the age-old belief that as we grow older, we naturally start losing intelligence and memory. In tests matching healthy 70-year-olds and 20-year-olds, the old folks outperformed the youngsters in long-term memory tests, and fell slightly behind in short-term memory. However, with practice, they could learn to hold their own in short-term memory tests too.
- There are about 27 trillion cells in a human - 5,000 cells for every human living on earth.
- The liver has been cataloged at over 500 specific functions in the human body to date.
- One out of every 100 cells in our body is for defense against disease. So if you weigh 150 pounds, 1-1/2 pounds of you are for self-defense.
- If you could harness the electrical output of your brain, it would power a 10-watt lightbulb.
- Walking uses more power than a 150-watt lightbulb.
- If you are cold, if you are shivering, try adding up numbers in your head. Researchers at the University of Minnesota School of Medicine found that shivering volunteers stopped shivering when they were given lists of numbers to add up.
- There is a new sickness sometimes called, "mechanical, disillusioned mentality" which is affecting a few teenagers and adults who spend countless hours playing computer games or writing programs. The symptoms seem to be a general loss of interest or ability to interact with people on the informal terms that people do tend to use. They can no longer follow instructions unless they are perfectly stated, and they have no tolerance for discussions with people who relate a story imprecisely or in the wrong order. Your author may be suffering from minor symptoms of this disease. Recently I stated without looking away from the computer monitor, "If pizza, I'm ready." No response was acceptable other than, "It's ready to eat."
- Hypnotized subjects have been made to form blisters on their skin simply from carefully worded suggestions.
- For asthma sufferers: Scientists have proven that many sufferers can reduce or eliminate symptoms with self-hypnosis. Try to imagine or actually view a pleasant image, or imagine yourself in a situation where you are enjoying yourself and are symptom-free. It often works.
- Evidence indicates that women who are or might be pregnant should avoid hot tubs because the rise in body temperature may cause birth defects.
- A group of scientists exposed pregnant or nursing mice to moderate amounts of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) or CBN (cannibinol), the active ingredients in marijuana and discovered surprising results in their male offspring. Once mature, the males had smaller testes and almost no interest in female mice.
- Male human brains are about 10 percent heavier than female brains.
- Human brains weigh about 44 to 50 oz. The biggest brain in any class of apes is only about 16 oz.
- Your brain consumes 25 percent of all the oxygen used by your body.
- Professor Julian Jaynes has written a controversial book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. In the book he hypothesizes that consciousness as we know it did not develop in man until about 2000 BC. Until then, we did not think introspectively, he says. In fact, people were probably more like modern-day schizophrenics, in whom there appear to be two minds. One, controlled by the left hemisphere of the brain takes actions, and the other, controlled by the right side, dreams and hears voices. For proof, Mr. Jaynes (he walked away from the title of Ph.D. although fully qualified) looks at ancient books including the Bible. In the Old Testament he says there is no mention of the subjective I, no introspective thinking, no sense of self. But in the later New Testament, the features of modern consciousness take shape.
- How could the pyramids and other construction take place then? Introspective thinking was not necessary, he asserts, just as you can drive a car without theorizing about how the car's engine works.
- Take a guess: How many vertebrae do you have? You have 33. How many bones? 206. Babies start with 305 bones.
- Almost 90 percent of people who consistently dye their hair develop eye cataracts because of a chemical in the dye called paraphenylenediamine.
- If you use eye drops often, you can get varicose veins on your eyes.
- Asthmatic children have often been cured when their parents quit smoking.
- Some researchers have determined that more than half of all Americans get an hour per day less sleep than they should, leading to symptoms of stress.
- Sweat glands are little coiled up ducts. If you stretched them out and lined up all of the sweat glands in one human end to end, the line would be 1972 miles long.
- Women who have had liposuction, the removal of fat from the abdominal area, have shown increases in their breast size. Evidently the body makes up for lost fat tissue by building it up elsewhere.
- Dr. David Weeks, a psychologist has studied eccentric people extensively. He has discovered that eccentric people are typically more intelligent and have a better sense of humor than the average population. They are healthier, visiting the doctor only 1/24 as often as typical folks, and live from five to ten years longer than average! When asked about their happiness, eccentrics report that they are quite happy.
- The youngest parents on record are a Chinese couple who gave birth to a normal boy when the father was nine years old and the mother was eight.
- A baby was born to parents in Turkey that weighed 24 pounds, 4 ounces at birth.
- A woman in Russia had 69 children. (16 were quadruplets, 21 were triplets and 32 were twins.)
- Shortest adult: Pauline Musters, one foot, 9.65 inches tall.
- Tallest adult: Robert Wadlow, 8 feet, 11 inches tall.
- Lightest adult: Lucia Zarate 13 pounds at age 20.
- Heaviest adult: Jon Minnoch, 1,400 pounds.
- The person who is currently the oldest in the world is 115 years old. She spent 75 years of her life in a mental institution.
- There was a fellow in Japan, Mr. Izumi, who made it to the age of 120 or 121. His grey hair was starting to turn black again.
- Hawaii is the state where life expectancy is the longest. The average lifespan there is 73.6 years.
- In the US 30.8 percent of women live to be at least 85 years old, but less than 15 percent of men do.
- Average life expectancy around the world in 1950 was 47.4 years.
- Two centuries ago almost 50 percent of women died before making it to age thirty-five.
- In prehistoric times, people lived to an average age of eighteen.
- As you age, your ability to taste sweet flavors fades out.
- Your hair grows 83 feet per day. Explanation: This is the total growth of all your 120,000 hairs. Each grows one-hundredth of an inch per day. If you figure that you need a haircut after you hair grows out one-half inch, you will need a haircut every seven weeks.
- If you stretched out all the blood vessels and capillaries in your body, they would wrap around the equator two times. The smallest of your capillaries are one-fiftieth the diameter of one of your hairs. If you weigh twenty-five pounds more than average, your heart has to work to circulate blood an extra 5,000 miles.
- Your body is creating and killing 15 million red blood cells per second.
- If you start counting the twenty-seven trillion cells in your body, at the rate of ten per second, it will take you around one hundred thousand years to finish.
- Your mouth produces about 16 ounces of saliva per day. Can you imagine drinking it all at once?
- You can sweat up to 3 gallons per day.
- How good are human eyes? On a clear night you can see the flame of a match up to fifty miles away.
- You can't sneeze with your eyes open.
- Your body is 63 percent hydrogen and 25.5 percent oxygen. Also necessary are fluorine, silicon, tin and vanadium.
- Your skin weighs 6 pounds and covers about 17 square feet.
- If you straightened out a French horn, the tubing would be 22 feet long. Human intestines, straightened out are 21 feet long.
- It is possible for a tapeworm over thirty feet long to grow inside your belly.
- It has been proven that if you exercise, you will add about two years to your life. However, you will use the two years exercising.
- Have you ever had the disease, acute nasopharyngitis? That is the common cold.
- Scientists are not yet fully in agreement about how colds are transmitted. There is one theory commonly accepted: It seems that the cold virus cannot live for more than a few microseconds at less than body temperature (98.6 f). It is transferred by people muffling a sneeze or cough with their hands and then shaking hands or touching another person. The recipient now has some germs in the skin of their hand, but is not yet truly infected. What it takes to catch a cold is to then put the hand in nose, mouth, or rub the corner of an eye.
- You are most infectious with cold viruses for the first three days that you have cold symptoms, but you can pass along a few viruses from three days before symptoms to three weeks after recovery.
- It may not seem fair, but teenagers catch colds twice as often as people over the age of fifty.
- The average American adult has at least two colds per year. Children can get as many as twelve colds per year.
- Adults in childless households get less than half as many colds as do mothers and fathers.
- Married people have about a 40 percent chance of catching a cold from their spouse. There is somewhat less chance of catching a cold from a fellow worker.
- A scientific study has proven that blindfolded people can figure out what sex another person is just by the other person's smell.
- Twenty-five percent of the 20,000 people who responded to a survey by Omni Magazine said they could detect a difference between how each nostril perceives smells.
- We have four different kinds of taste buds. Each can taste only one kind of flavor. These basic flavors are sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Smell, texture and imagination make up the rest of the variety of flavors we experience. If you could feed a slice of raw potato to a blindfolded volunteer who also had a plugged nose, and said the potato was an apple, the volunteer would not say otherwise.
- Some people have as many as 500 taste buds per square centimeter, others as few as five per square centimeter. Do pancakes with maple syrup taste the same to you as they do to me?
- A newborn baby is a colony of 26 billion cells.
- Until babies are six months old, they can breathe and swallow at the same time. Adults cannot.
- Science has determined that fetuses can hear sounds while still in the womb. Sometimes they remember. One two-year-old girl was found sitting on the floor reciting, "breathe in, breathe out, breathe in..." The only time she could have heard this was when she was in the womb as her mother was practicing the LaMaze exercises which help a mother during childbirth.
- A research project found that children were more likely to be born male if their father was under less stress than their mother at the time of their conception, and be female if their mother was under less stress.
- There is a disease called hypertrophy of the tongue that can make the tongue so large that it no longer fits into a person's mouth.
- Occasionally people are born with horns. The majority of these horns protrude from people's foreheads, but some folks have had horns on their thighs, backs, noses, sexual organs and feet.
- Members of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church have ten times less lung cancer, 40 percent less heart disease and one-fourth as many dental cavities than average Americans.
- Men in Vermont are twice as likely to have high blood pressure as the national average.
- The native residents of the Andes Mountains, where the air is thin and oxygen is hard to get, have more than two extra quarts of blood in their bodies.
- People with blue eyes are better able to see in the dark.
- People who are chronically ill never yawn. When nurses see their sickest patients yawn, they know that it is time to stop worrying. A psychologist noticed that when a speaker yawns during a meeting, others in the room will yawn too. Those who do yawn, are most likely to agree with the arguments of the speaker.
- People are about an inch shorter in late evening than first thing in the morning.
- You can last about eleven days without water.
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