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Victoria

Intrepid Sojourner
Bold Member!
I love coming across weird, strange and true facts that one runs across and thought I'd start a thread on them. I searched a couple of different ways so I hope this doesn't duplicate a previous thread. Whatcha got all you brilliant, quick and curious minds?

Did you know that the Blue Whale has a tongue that weighs approximately the same weight as an adult elephant, their throats are so narrow that they can't swallow anything larger than a grapefruit, have a penis sixteen feet long and testicles that weigh 22 pounds each and carry approximately 7 gallons of semen in each testicle?

Did you know that Scottish John Henry Anderson, know as the wizard of the north, was the first magician to pull a rabbit from a hat?

Did you know that there is a little pouch on an otter's body where they keep their favorite rock?

Did you know that Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was an eccentric boy who was teased mercilessly about his appearance, was agoraphobic, gay and it has been suggested that he died a virgin and his fairytale, The Ugly Ducking, went to his experience living as a gay male?


Did you know that Algae is estimated to provide more than 50% of Earths oxygen?

Did you know that Henry the Eighths enormous body and organs were rotting from syphilis at the time of his death, that his bloated, swollen guts exploded as his body was carried through the streets which induced many to vomit. And it was not six wives he had to his credit as his marriage to Anne of Cleves was never consummated and annulled by agreement of all parties.

Did you know that the bard, William Shakespeare's only son, 11 year old Hamnet died and during his dark and painful grief sprang the work Hamlet?

Did you know that contrary to the once long held opinion that chameleons change their color to blend into their surroundings that scientist have now determined that their color changes to match their mood?
 
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*squeels with delight.
I love this thread. Thank you, Victoria.

Did you know

Hippopotamus milk is pink.

Platypus mothers sweat milk to feed their off spring.

(Cockroaches have titties. Just kidding. @Satanica )
 
Did you know that Guinness Brewers went to Irish poet and playwright Brendan Behan to write a catchy slogan for their product and left a large supply of that product with him. After a reasonable period of time the brewers went to the brilliant man with a sharp wit to see what he had come up with. They discovered that all the Guinness was gone and all the alcoholic Behan, drunk on his Irish arse could offer up with sheepish eyes was, "Yes, yes, yes, not to worry, I've got it."
"Guinness." "It makes you drunk."

[doublepost=1469661537,1469658275][/doublepost]~ @Keepalowprofile ~ You are most welcome! <3<3<3
 
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Did you know that Scotland's National Animal is the Unicorn and they call their fairy folk the wee beasties who are of course responsible for everything when things start to go south?

That a strawberry is not a berry and that a banana is a berry?

That nowhere in the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty is it stipulated that Humpty Dumpty is an egg?
 
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Did you know that Scotland's National Animal is the Unicorn and they call their fairy folk the wee beasties who are of course responsible for everything when things start to go south?

That a strawberry is not a berry and that a banana is a berry?

That nowhere in the nursery rhyme Humpty Dumpty is it stipulated that Humpty Dumpty is an egg?

Are you also aware that Scottish people are mostly inbred, Marxist imbeciles? o_O

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http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/1999/02.18/light.html

Physicists Slow Speed of Light

Light, which normally travels the 240,000 miles from the Moon to Earth in less than two seconds, has been slowed to the speed of a minivan in rush-hour traffic -- 38 miles an hour.

An entirely new state of matter, first observed four years ago, has made this possible. When atoms become packed super-closely together at super-low temperatures and super-high vacuum, they lose their identity as individual particles and act like a single super- atom with characteristics similar to a laser.

Such an exotic medium can be engineered to slow a light beam 20 million-fold from 186,282 miles a second to a pokey 38 miles an hour.

"In this odd state of matter, light takes on a more human dimension; you can almost touch it," says Lene Hau, a Harvard University physicist.

Hau led a team of scientists who did this experiment at the Rowland Institute for Science, a private, nonprofit research facility in Cambridge, Mass., endowed by Edwin Land, the inventor of instant photography.

In the future, slowing light could have a number of practical consequences, including the potential to send data, sound, and pictures in less space and with less power. Also, the results obtained by Hau's experiment might be used to create new types of laser projection systems and night vision cameras with power requirements a million times less than what is presently possible.

But that's not why Hau, a research scientist at both Harvard and the Rowland Institute, originally set out to do the experiments. "We did them because we are curious about this new state of matter," she says. "We wanted to understand it, to discover all the things that can be done with it."

It took Hau and three colleagues several years to make a container of the new matter. Then followed a series of 27-hour-long trial runs to get all the parts and parameters working together.

"So many things have to go right," Hau comments. "But the results finally exceeded our expectations. It's fascinating to see a beam of light almost come to a standstill."
[....]
The idea of this new kind of matter was first proposed in 1924 by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose, an Indian physicist. According to their theory, atoms crowded close enough in ultra-low temperatures would lock together to form what Hau calls "a single glob of solid matter which can produce waves that behave like radio waves."

This so-called Bose-Einstein condensate was not actually made until 1995, because the right technological pot to cook it up in did not exist. Vacuums hundreds of trillions of times lower than the pressure of air at Earth's surface, and temperatures almost a billion times colder that that in interstellar space, are needed to produce the condensate. Temperatures must be lowered to within a few billionths of a degree of absolute zero (minus 459.7 degrees F), where atoms have the least possible energy and all but cease to move around.

Hau and her group started with a beam of sodium atoms injected into a vacuum chamber and moving at speeds of more than a thousand miles an hour. These hot atoms have an orange glow, like sodium highway and street lights.

Laser beams moving at the normal speed of light collide with the atoms. As the atoms absorb particles of light (photons), they slow down. The laser light also orders their random movement so they move in only one direction.

When the atoms are slowed to a modest 100 miles an hour or so, the experimenters load the atoms into what they call "optical molasses," a web of more laser beams. Each time an atom collides with a photon it is knocked back in the direction from which it came, further slowing it down, or cooling it.

The atoms are now densely packed in a cigar-shaped clump kept floating free of the walls of their container by powerful magnetic fields.

"It's nifty to look into the chamber and see the clump of cold atoms floating there," Hau remarks.



In the final stage, known as "evaporative cooling," atoms still too hot or energetic are kicked out of the magnetic field.

The stage is now set for slowing light. One laser is shot across the width of the cloud of condensate. This controls the speed of a second pulsed laser beam shot along the length of the cloud. The first laser sets up a "quantum interference" such that the moving light beams of the second laser interfere with each other. When everything is set up just right, the light can be slowed by a factor of 20 million.

The process is described in detail in the Feb. 18 issue of the scientific journal Nature. (Warning: Don't try this at home.)

Relativity and the Internet

Slowing light this way doesn't violate any principle of physics. Einstein's theory of relativity places an upper, but not lower, limit on the speed of light.

According to relativity theory, an astronaut traveling at close to the speed of light will not get old as fast as those she leaves behind on Earth. But driving at 38 miles an hour, as everyone knows, will not affect anyone's rate of aging.

"However, slowing light can certainly help our understanding of the bizarre state of matter of a Bose-Einstein condensate," Hau points out.

And a system that changes light speed by a factor of 20 million might be used to improve communication. It can be used to greatly reduce noise, which allows all types of information to be transmitted more efficiently. Also, optical switches controlled by low intensity light could cut power requirements a million-fold compared to switches now operating everything from telephone equipment to supercomputers.

But what about the cost and exotic equipment needed for such improvements? "Technologies that push past old limits are always expensive and impractical to begin with; then they become cheaper and more manageable," Hau says matter-of-factly. She sees the possibility that slow light will lead to "significant advances in communications ten years from now, if we get to work on it right away."

What will she do next?

Hau sweeps her hand over a roomful of equipment and explains how things are already being set up to slow light speed even more, to one centimeter (less than a half-inch) a second. That's a leisurely 120 feet an hour.
[doublepost=1469712506,1469711370][/doublepost]In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.

A shrimp's heart is in its head.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

The United States has five percent of the world's population, but twenty-five percent of the world's prison population.

Some dogs can predict when a child will have an epileptic seizure, and even protect the child from injury. They're not trained to do this, they simply learn to respond after observing at least one attack.

71% of office workers stopped on the street for a survey agreed to give up their computer passwords in exchange for a chocolate bar.

Toto was paid $125 per week while filming the "Wizard of Oz".

It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.

A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.

Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.

A snail can sleep for three years.

It was discovered on a space mission that a frog can throw up. The frog throws up it's stomach first, so the stomach is dangling out of it's mouth. Then the frog uses it's forearms to dig out all of the stomach's contents and then swallows the stomach back down again.

To "testify" was based on men in the Roman court swearing to a statement made by swearing on their testicles.

On average people fear spiders more than they do death.

If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

An iguana can stay under water for 28 minutes.

A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside.

In the United States, a pound of potato chips costs two hundred times more than a pound of potatoes.

A rainbow can be seen only in the morning or late afternoon. It can occur only when the sun is 40 degrees or less above the horizon.

It costs more to buy a new car today in the United States than it cost Christopher Columbus to equip and undertake three voyages to and from the New World.

If you were to spell out numbers, you would you have to go until 1,000 until you would find the letter "A".

A baby is born without kneecaps. They appear between age 2 and 6.

The Weddell seal can travel underwater for seven miles without surfacing for air.
 
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

~ @Satanica ~ Loved this and will be looking!!
[doublepost=1469718174,1469715911][/doublepost]Do you know how the Tanzanian tribe of fierce warriors, the "Hehe" got their name?



hehehehehehehe..... :hilarious::hilarious::hilarious:

Did you know that Virginia has claim to the most American Presidents?

If you have ten dollars in your pocket and no debt that you are wealthier than 25% of Americans?


That the Library Of Congress is keeping an archive of every tweet ever tweeted?

During Prohibition that the US Government started poisoning beer which resulted in the death of thousands?

That Americans consume 22 million chickens every day?

That 27% of people in the United States do not believe that we landed on the moon?

That right now more than 200 Million people around the globe are unemployed and hungry, yet 20% of American waste that go into landfills is food? On average Supermarkets in the United States throw out an approximated 5.4 million pounds of food per year.

That the first person in America to own a slave was a black man?

That although the majority of Americans speak English, the United States have never adopted an official national language?

That Apple has more money than the united States Treasury?
 
Did you know that birds were once dinosaurs, but now they have involuntary anal sphincters?

th
I'm convinced my ex-hb had an involuntary anal sphincter. I've never met someone who would shart their pants like he would. I'm like "dude...you gambled and lost..AGAIN!" Quit gambling.
 
There are male and female bell peppers.
Females have 4 bumps and males only 3.

Females are better for eating fresh (raw) and males are better when cooked.

Whan im out shopping, How i remember which is which,

Females have 2 boobs and 2 ovaries.
Males a penis and 2 testicles.
;)
 
Did you know that the additional weight due to obesity cost airlines a staggering 270 Million per year?


[doublepost=1469987467,1469740569][/doublepost]Did you know Albert Einstein once memorably said there are only two infinites, the Universe and peoples endless capacity for stupidity and I'm not sure about the Universe.

English novelist Barbara Cartland kept hearing the ghost of a woman calling out to her in her home and when work was being done on her residence a body of a young woman was discovered who had been bricked up in one of the walls.

That in ancient Rome when all else failed it was believed that affixing the genitals of a fox to the forehead would cure the most stubborn headache.

That breast milk from a woman who had produced a son cured nausea.

Wiping your face with a cloth under a falling star was thought to cure acne.

Cobblers blacking mixed with basil helped with flatulence but if taken to liberally could result in madness and could produce coma.


That if you touched papyrus or linen to the tip of the genital was thought to be a cure for incontinence?

Drinking water taken from a spring in the skull of a dead man was remedy for epilepsy?
 
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"When ceratioid males go looking for love, they follow a species-specific pheromone to a female, who will often aid their search further by flashing her bioluminescent lure. Once the male finds a suitable mate, he bites into her belly and latches on until his body fuses with hers. Their skin joins together, and so do their blood vessels, which allows the male to take all the nutrients he needs from his host/mate’s blood. The two fish essentially become one."


 

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