1. If the entire morbidly obese population of the U.S. lived in one state, it would be the 12th highest-populated state, with more people than Virginia.
2. An average adult's skin spans 21 square feet, weighs nine pounds, and contains more than 11 miles of blood vessels.
3. Rats' front teeth grow 4½ to 5½ inches each year. Rats wear them down by continuously gnawing on everything around them, including cement, brick, wood, lead pipes, and other small animals.
4. Landfills are actually the No. 1 human-generated source of methane, belching 7 million tons into the atmosphere each year.
5. Eighty percent of people in the United States die in a hospital.
6. In the ninth century, a team of Chinese alchemists trying to synthesize an "elixir of immortality" from saltpeter, sulfur, realgar, and dried honey instead invented gunpowder.
7. Whales and dolphins can literally fall half asleep. Their brain hemispheres alternate sleeping, so the animals can continue to surface and breathe.
8. Leonardo da Vinci was an accomplished lyre player. When he was first presented at the Milanese court, it was as a musician, not an artist or inventor.
9. Although all seven astronauts died in the space shuttle Columbia disaster, hundreds of nematode worms, carried in canisters to study the biology of weightlessness, survived.
10. Honey never spoils. Ever.
#10: That one I actually knew. Its high sugar concentration makes it very inhospitable to bacteria, and its low moisture content prevents them from breeding in large numbers. It will crystalize, however, an inconvenient fact which can be easily remedied with gentle heating.
Honey should not be fed to children under two years of age, however, because some bacteria can live there -- enough to be a danger to a small child.
Equally shocking is the recent report from Britain that found smoking responsible for 40% of all illness, and alcohol use may be responsible as much as 50% of emergency room visits. Tobacco companies are allowed to rountinely violate Federal Clean Air rules by producing tobacco products that emit cadmium, nickel and 4,000 other substances many of which are completeoly banned from other factory emissions. Cadmium is a substance that was banned from batteries, yet continues to be found in cigarettes for example. Second-hand tobacco smoke is the only form of legal pollution that contains a drug, nicotine, that destroys REM sleep and causes other brain and sleep changes and disturbances in nonusers including children.
Even Phillip Morris indicates on their website that their cigarettes are responsible for causing Sudden Infant Death Syndrome and causing middle ear infections and respiratory infections in nonusers, yet fail to indicate this on their cigarette packaging.
Cigarettes are responsible for thousands of house, business, grasss and forest fires each year, and take more than 800 lives a year, including that of firemen.
Cigarette smoke can cause fatal asthma attacks to persons standing within 1/2 a city block of a smoker. Yet there are no criminal laws for this discharge of extremely dangerous and illegal substances in public places. Lawmakers need to rethink laws related to cigarette use in any public area and apply EPA rules to the fumes emitted.
#4. Landfills? Not bovine flatulence?
Rush? Rush? We've got someone deviating from the party line over here ...
:)
Not bovine flatulence?
I am not sure bovine flatulence qualifies as "human-generated". That is not to say that landfills aren't a bigger source (I don't know either way).
1 - 4: Ewww and yet ... cool.
5: Morbid
6: Figures, doesn't surprise me the pursuit of immortality would lead to a one way trip of instant death.
7: I don't live underwater ... so why do I need to be half asleep so much? ... especially around 3pm?
8: That is a very cool factoid. I had no idea.
9: Lucky Nematodes
10: That is kind of weird and hard to imagine ... but I will take your word for it.
I've suspected that honey has antibacterial properties from experience, namely that when I eat half a dozen Krispy Kreme donuts and fall asleep on the couch w/o drinking water afterwards, I wake up with a nasty sore throat.
Not so if I eat honey or drink hot water with honey.
I love honey. Great against sore throats after you get them, too.
As always, fascinating. What is the source for the Chinese gunpowder story? I can see incorporating that as a sermon illustration, sorta like the inventor of TNT was Cecil Rhodes, who thought that something of such devastating power would actually cause men to rethink war and never fight again. Naive, thy name is Rhodes.
It may be hard to see, but the link to each item is under the number. All come from Discover magazine, which has a number of other trivia items on each of these topics.
Oops. The inventor of TNT was Alfred Nobel, who felt so guilty about his contribution to warfare, he invented the Nobel Peace Prize.
Remind me never to go to a hospital... ha.
According to the article on methane at wikipedia, ruminating animals (cattle, sheep, goats, bison, deer, etc.) account for nearly 3 times as much methane emissions as landfills. The article classifies livestock emissions as anthropogenic, presumably because humans raise far greater quantities of these animals than would otherwise exist.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't believe methane itself contributes anything to global warming. The burning of methane (whether natural gas or biomass) does produce CO2.
Hooson,
I've got bad news for you. Despite your enthusiasm for ridding the world of tobacco...you're going to die anyway. Just a little later.
tom:
You probably already know this, but TNT != gunpowder != dynamite. It was that last that was invented by Nobel.
Bees bring honey down to roughly 14-16% moisture content. They do this by fanning the with their wings, enhancing evaporation. Yeasts and other microscopic baddies generally don't live below 18% so honey is relatively safe from spoilage. That doesn't mean that all honey is safe, however. Remember that just because the moisture content is below the range required by yeasts to propogate it doesn't mean yeasts aren't IN the honey. In fact there can all sorts just biding their time.
Honey varies as widely as the nectar used to make it, which is why we have varietal honeys like orange blossom, blueberry, tupelo, fireweed, clover, buckwheat, etc. Honey also varies widely during the season. During the early spring, clover and wildflower honeys can be milk white and later the in year progress to the more "normal" golden color. Moisture content varies across the varieties of nectars used by bees to make the honeys and the time of season in which the bees make it (and also depend on the weather, humidity, etc).
Honey also has a tendency to crystallize (again varying between varietals), which is where glucose molecules separate from the liquid phase as solid glucose hydrate crystals. This frees up water and increases the moisture content of the honey. So if a honey crystallizes excessively it can allow yeasts to breed and the honey will ferment (yum!).
tgirsch
Yeah, I so totally botched what I meant to say that we'll just leave it with your clarification. Thanks.
Brian wrote:
Honey varies as widely as the nectar used to make it, which is why we have varietal honeys like orange blossom, blueberry, tupelo, fireweed, clover, buckwheat, etc.
There are also persistent stories about poisonous honey from as far back as Xenophon's Anabasis. If I remember correctly, the toxicity has been attributed to a high proportion of Rhododendron nectar.
On #4 There was a Taiwanese paper a while back that proposed that hydro-electric power production is worse from a greenhouse gas POV than hydrocarbons. This was because methane is a stronger contributor to greenhouse effects than CO2 and the methane produced by the vegetation collecting because the water flow was interrupted was a more important effect than the carbon dioxide not put into the atmosphere from burning coal or oil.
The causes of things are often not what we naively expect.
#8 – yes, but that was just to get in the door, so to speak
My understanding was that rice paddies were the largest human source of methane. Termites probably contribute a lot more.
Did it have a guessimate of how much landfill gas we are talking about? The guessimate for paddies is 50 to 100 million tons a year.
Honey is indeed hard to spoil unless you are making mead :)
But salt is probably the only thing we regularly consume that does not spoil. I don't know what kind of salt or the conditions you would need to subject it to for St Paul salt analogy to work.
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