The Channel between England and France grows about 300 millimeters each year.
Mars has a volcano, Olympus Mons, which is 310-370 miles in diameter and 16 miles high.
The statue “The Thinker” by Rodin is actually a portrait of the Italian poet Dante.
X-ray technology has shown that there are 3 different versions of the “Mona Lisa” under the visible one.
A pig’s snout is called a gruntle.
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Brandy is from the Dutch brandewijn, meaning burnt or distilled wine.
The most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust is aluminum.
The largest wave ever recorded was near the Japanese Island of Ishigaki in 1971 at 85 meters high.
Fulgurite is formed when lightning strikes sand.
At the nearest point, Russia and America are less than 4 km apart.
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Fidel Castro was voted Cuba’s best schoolboy athlete in 1944. He was a left-handed pitcher.
Right-handed people tend to scratch themselves with their left-hand. Vice-versa for lefties.
Chuck Berry has a degree in cosmetology from Gibbs Beauty College. Maybe that’s why he went into music.
A dog’s normal body temperature is 101 degrees Fahrenheit.
A bee will flap its wings 300 times per second.
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While the state of Ohio is listed as the 17th state in the USA, that’s really not true: technically, it is #47. Congress “forgot” to vote on admitting Ohio into the Union until August 7, 1953.
The tallest building in the world in 1885 was The Home Insurance Company in Chicago. It was nine stories tall.
A female praying mantis will devour her male sexual partner while mating.
A fly’s taste buds are in its feet.
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon. His mother’s maiden name was “Moon.”
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What is longitude?
Latitude and longitude are the means by which a ship (or person) is able to discover its location and as a result navigate safely. They are imaginary lines drawn on the face of maps of Earth. Latitude was discovered by measuring the height of the sun, but longitude is a different matter. It was discovered if a person compared the time shown on two clocks, one adjusted to keep showing local time and the other remaining unaltered, the longitude could be calculated. But the problem was the clocks of centuries past were not accurate enough, especially those capable of running aboard ships. Errors of a few minutes could cause mistakes which led to shipwrecks.
Greenwich Observatory in Greenwich, England, was established by King Charles II in 1675 to study means of fixing longitude and became the acknowledged world authority on the subject. The telescopes and other instruments there determined the exact position of the meridian, and, in 1884, an international
conference in Washington agreed Greenwich should be the site at zero longitude.
As a result, all time zones across the world are expressed as being plus or minus so many hours Greenwich Mean Time. The prime meridian is at zero degrees longitude where it passes through Greenwich. In the courtyard of the observatory, and just outside, are brass strips set in the ground and walls marking the exact site. It is therefore possible to stand astride the line, with a foot in each hemisphere.
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In 1915, a telephone call from New York to San Francisco cost $20.70 for the first three minutes.
The “Delicious” variety of apples were originally known as “Hawkeyes.”
Queen Anne of England (1665 – 1714) outlived all 17 of her children.
The tallest man in the world, Robert Wadlow, was 8 feet eleven inches tall. He died at the age of 22, in 1949, due to an infection caused by leg braces he needed to be able to stand on his feet.
Squirrels live to be about nine years old.
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There is no statute of limitations on murder.
Once you are thirsty you are already dehydrated. Thirst is secondary.
The first cook book was written by the Greeks in 400 B.C.
There are 4,300 known species of ladybugs in the world.
On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
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Very few species of shark, including the mako and great white, are warm blooded.
Marilyn Monroe had six toes.
Shakespeare invented the word ‘assassination’ and ‘bump.’
Some lions mate over 50 times a day.
The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.
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What is a CAT Scanner?
CAT stands for computerized axial tomography, a way of taking photographs of cross sections of diseased tissue 100 times more detailed than by the traditional X-ray method.
The inventor was Godfrey Hounsfield of Britain’s Electrical and Musical Industries, the company that first brought television into the home. The first CAT scanner in clinical use entered medical history in 1972 when it was used to diagnose a brain tumor in a woman patient in Wimbledon, England.
Hounsfield shared the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine with American inventor Allan Cormack, who had independently worked on the principles of CAT scanning.
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When reflected from bright lights (head lights) deer’s eyes are orange, whereas cats and dogs are green. Rabbit’s eyes remain black.
Dogs will yawn in order to express that there is a conflict of interest between their own ideas or desires and those of their owners.
The heaviest dog on record is an Old English Mastiff named Zorba, who weighed 343 pounds and measured 8 feet and 3 in. from nose to tail.
The saying “it’s so cold out there it could freeze the balls off a brass monkey” came from when they had old cannons like ones used in the Civil War. The cannonballs were stacked in a pyramid formation, called a brass monkey. When it got extremely cold outside they would crack and break off… Thus the saying.
In the movie ‘The Lion King’, when grown up Simba goes on top of the cliff and lies down and causes a cloud of dust to rise in the air, you can see the word, ‘sex’ appear in the dust.
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Trivia of the Day 