Tuesday, July 1, 2008
I just love reading about random facts so thought I'd keep up with the posting...
- Astronaut Buzz Aldrin's mother's maiden name was "Moon." Buzz was the second man to step onto the Moon in 1969.
- A famous bullfighter, Lagarijo, killed 4,867 bulls in the 19th century.
- Adolf Hitler wanted to be an architect, but he failed the entrance exam at the architectural school in Vienna.
- After the death of the genius, Albert Einstein, his brain was removed by a pathologist and put in a jar for future study. He was also offered the presidency of Israel in 1952, but he declined.
- Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never telephoned his wife or mother because they were both deaf.
- At just four years old Mozart was able to learn a piece of music in half an hour.
- During his lifetime, artist Vincent Van Gogh only sold one of his paintings (The Red Vineyard).
- French astronomer Adrien Auzout had once considered building a telescope that was 1,000 feet long in the 1600s. He thought the magnification would be so great, he would see animals on the moon.
- In 1876, Maria Spelterina was the first woman to ever cross Niagara Falls on a high wire.
- In October 1973, Swedish sweet maker Roland Ohisson of Falkenberg was buried in a coffin made of nothing but chocolate.
- The natural diet of Lady Beetles consists of soft bodied insects such as aphids, spider mites, and young caterpillars. Adults can consume up to 100 aphids a day.
- The Giant cricket of Africa enjoys eating human hair.
- A nest in which insects or spiders deposit their eggs is called a "nidus".
- Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
- The only insect that can turn its head 360 degrees is the praying mantis.
- There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas.
- Crickets don't chirp by rubbing their legs together, they make the noise by rubbing their wings together.
- The social life in ants and termites has been accompanied by an extraordinary royal perk: a 100-fold increase among queen ants in average maximum lifespan, with some queens surviving for almost 30 years. This longevity can be attributed in part to the sheltered and pampered life of the royal egg layer.
- You're more likely to get stung by a bee on a windy day that in any other weather.
- Until very recently, no centipede was found that did not have an ODD number of leg pairs. Usually the number varies from 15 to 191 pairs, all odd. No one knows why. However, Chris Kettle, a doctoral student in ecology, recently found a centipede with 48 pairs of legs, an even number. The remarkable discovery was presented to the International Congress of Myriapodology in Poland and featured in the science journal Trends in Genetics. Mr. Kettle suspects a genetic mutation is responsible for the even number of leg pairs.
- 62 degrees Fahrenheit is the minimum temperature required for a grasshopper to be able to hop.
- Mosquitoes prefer children to adults, and blondes to brunettes.
- Spiders have transparent blood.
- There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are humans on the entire earth.
- Some crickets burrow megaphone-like tunnels that help transport the sound of their chirps as far as 2,000 feet away.
- A mature, well-established termite colony with as many as 60,000 members will eat only about one-fifth of an ounce of wood a day.
- The silkworm's silk comes out of its mouth as a thread of gooey liquid, so that nice silk blouse you spent a fortune on is really just worm spit.
Lunch anyone???
