Interesting Facts

Lirael

Lirael

I love to read and discuss pretty much anything!
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Tell us about the interesting facts you know! :)

(This isn't intended as a spam thread, so try to give some detail. If the fact is short, post a few!)

I've been writing articles for a local wildlife magazine recently and discovered through research that the 'boxing' hares do happens between male and female hares as opposed to it being between two male hares. Furthermore, between the months of March and April, the breeding season, hares who feel threatened will apparently jump to attack a man and his dog if they feel threatened. :lew:

There's one to get us started! I'll post a few more in here later on. :)
 
★ Horses can't throw up (due to the muscle that keeps the food down the stomach doing it's job, unlike with humans. This is why horses can easily develop colic).
★ There is actually a thing called "drinking too much water", and it's quite common with marathoners/runners.
★ The ancient Egyptians used to shave off their brows when mourning over their dead cats.
★ In 1931, Henry Ford decided to preserve his friend, Thomas Edison’s last dying breath. He kept it in a bottle.
★ A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
★ Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
★ Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.
★ The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which
stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.
★ Bats always turn left when exiting a cave.
★ 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321.
★ Honey is the only food that doesn't spoil.
★ No matter its size or thickness, no piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
 
Bed bugs reproduce by the male piercing the female's abdomen with his hypodermic genitalia and ejaculates into the body cavity.
 
+ Fanta was first invented in Nazi Germany during the Second World War in 1941. With Coca-Cola imports from the United States cut off, the German Coca-Cola company sought to combat this issue by manufacturing a similar carbonated drink, using only the most common remaining ingredients.

+ Incidentally, Coca-Cola was a phenomenal success in Germany, from Weimar, through to the Third Reich, through to the Federal Republic, and the Federal Germany of today. In France however, Coca-Cola was seen as an invading American craze (Coca-Colonisation) that had to be suppressed, and an unlikely coalition of Christians and Communists prohibited it in the immediate post-war period.

+ The word "Checkmate" in chess comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".

+ Rather ominously in the London Underground, the most popular time of the day to commit suicide is 11am.

+ Stop calling the British flag the Union Jack. It's only a Union Jack on a ship. Elsewhere, it's a Union Flag.

+ There are only 4 English words in common use ending in "-dous": hazardous, horrendous, stupendous, and tremendous.

+ Nothing rhymes with "orange" and "purple". Neither can you find anything to rhyme with "month".

+ Having fierce sex can make you lose up to 200 calories every time you do it! That's like running on a treadmill for 15 minutes.

+ Apparently, 48% of Englishmen manage to fall asleep during sex...

+ You want to know why there is so much dust in your household? Blame dead skin. It's the most probable cause of it.

+ The Japanese language has thousands of foreign loan words, known as gairaigo. These words are often truncated, e.g. personal computer = paso kon. The number of foreign loan words is steadily increasing.
 
A woman is actually born with two uterus' not one, the original two both become the one we develop fully.

That's pretty much one random fact I really do know, theres probably more but I can't recall any...
 
despite being the second most commonly spoke language in the world, french is a dying one. they no longer add new words to their dictionary (like we have wi-fi) but stick two pre-existing words together.
 
Here are a couple of random things that I know.

~Your stomach creates a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself. :sad3: someone said this one already, oh well.

~Donald Duck Comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear any pants :hmmm:

~Adolf Hitler only had one testicle... (not sure how true this is, just heard it somewhere)

~It's still unknown why a ducks quack does not echo.

That's all I can remember.

So interesting ^_^
 
セラ・ファロン;984727 said:
★ There is actually a thing called "drinking too much water", and it's quite common with marathoners/runners.
Click to expand...
It's also common to people who take too much ecstasy.

If all the people in India and China stood on each others' shoulders then they would be able to reach Mars.
Coconuts are the only fruit which can survive a nuclear winter.
Lenin's body is slowly rotting away in front of peoples' eyes.
Benin is the only country that rhymes with Lenin.
Neanderthals had larger brains than Homo sapiens.
Napoleon was scared of cats.
You need to be a member of the Catholic Church to practise Voodoo.
 
Toldies said:
H

~It's still unknown why a ducks quack does not echo.

^_^
Click to expand...

actually, they do echo


セラ・ファロン;984727 said:
★ The phrase "rule of thumb" is derived from an old English law which
stated that you couldn't beat your wife with anything wider than your thumb.


★ No matter its size or thickness, no piece of paper can be folded in half more than 7 times.
Click to expand...

Both of these are actually false


All the electricity in the world is generated by the static from thousands of cats kept in a large burlap sack.

Your teeth chatter when you are cold because your body is trying to eat itself in preparation for winter. This is an evolutionary by-product from when food was scarce during winter months

Chair is an anagram for perpendicular, get a pen and paper and work it out!

If you stacked all Beatle's records on top of each other, your parents still wont love you
 
Apparently, cats don't only purr when happy. They also purr when angry, unhappy, distressed, curious and (this one shocked me the most when I was young) when they're about the die.

The character Freya in IX and her personal story (with Fratley) is based on poems from the Poetic Edda. I found this out in Old English last year and was absolutely thrilled! :D

10% of the human beings ever born are alive now... The population is set to increase. Scary thought. :ness:

Hummingbirds have an inbuilt clock which tells them when plants will produce their nectar again. They can remember the exact place of - I believe - hundreds of plants and can remember when all of these are going to be ready for eating.

Their wings flap 12-80 times per SECOND depending on the species.
 
  • Women on average have larger brains than men.
  • Cats purring has been shown to have a purpose in terms of the vibrations generated helping to maintain bone density & strength.
  • China has 14 of the 30 most polluted cities on earth.
  • The term "computer bug" was coined from an incident where a moth was trapped inside a computer's innards causing it to malfunction
  • Peter Norton the man behind Norton AV was a very loud and vocal disbeliever in the existence of computer viruses when they first emerged. He said they were "as mythical as the alligators in new yorks sewer system". Irony.
  • Luke Skywalker's name was originally Luke Starkiller. Luckily, someone was there to tell George Lucas the moniker didn't fit someone who was supposed to be a farmer.
  • The character Scar from Disney's Lion King was one of the first to intentionally be modeled after pop culture gay mannerisms.
  • It was once thought that 64 kilobytes of RAM is more than anyone would ever need.
  • Google and Apple were both started in someone's garage.

Couldn't think of anything good. :grin:
 
Richard B Riddick said:
  • The term "computer bug" was coined from an incident where a moth was trapped inside a computer's innards causing it to malfunction

Couldn't think of anything good. :grin:
Click to expand...

Sadly this isn't true, there are documented cases of the term being used before the moth incident occurred.

Rattlesnakes get their name from the fact that much like the toy, they should be given as gifts to small children

A female ferret will die if she goes into heat and then doesn't have sex
 
Isaac said:
Sadly this isn't true, there are documented cases of the term being used before the moth incident occurred.
Click to expand...

:ohshit:

I thought this was the earliest instance...

Ever wondered about the origins of the term "bugs" as applied to computer technology? U.S. Navy Capt. Grace Murray Hopper has firsthand explanation.

The 74-year-old captain, who is still on active duty, was a pioneer in computer technology during World War II. At the C.W. Post Center of Long Island University, Hopper told a group of Long Island public school administrators that the first computer "bug" was a real bug -- a moth. At Harvard one August night in 1947, Hopper and her associates were working on the "granddaddy" of modern computers, the Mark II. "Things were going badly; there was something wrong in one of the circuits of the long glass-enclosed computer," she said. "Finally, someone located the trouble spot and, using ordinary tweezers, removed the problem, a two-inch moth. From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs in it."

Hopper said that when the veracity of her story was questioned recently, "I referred them to my 1947 log book, now in the collection of Naval Surface Weapons Center, and they found the remains of that moth taped to the page in question."

http://www.waterholes.com/~dennette/1996/hopper/bug.htm
Click to expand...

But, you're right. It seems Edison and others used the term earlier.

Still, it wasn't a term popularized until 1947, so eh who knows. :grin:
 
You should wait at least 30 minutes after drinking soft drink before brushing your teeth.

Some people think that it's a good idea to brush your teeth straight after drinking or eating sugary foods, so as not to let it sit on your teeth.

In actual fact it has been found that less enamel was lost when people waited 30 minutes to an hour to brush, than when they brushed within half an hour after.

It feels too wierd to brush your teeth right after eating anyway. I always wait about an hour for my belly to settle before brushing my teeth.
 
I learned this horrifying fact today.

Female bedbugs do not have sexual openings so to get around this the male bedbug uses his penis to drill a vagina into the female. :hmph:

Clatty!
 
Scientists can not figure out what makes cats purr, it is still unexplained.

In Alaska it is illegal drop a live moose from an airplane.

When glass breaks, the cracks move faster than 3,000 miles per hour. To photograph the event, a camera must shoot at a millionth of a second.

Triskaidekaphobia is the fear of the number 13.
 
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