FASCINATING FACTS

-The Sahara is as large as Europe and larger than the combined area of the next nine largest deserts in the world.
-Up to 30,000 tonnes of cosmic dust are deposited on the earth each year.
-Flies take off with a backward jump.
-Fireflies are bright enough to shine through the stomach of a frog.
-Three 25 watt bulbs produce less light than one 75 watt bulb.
-The sun weighs 3, 30,000 times as much as the earth.
-The world’s largest palace is the Imperial Palace in the heart of Peking, which covers an area of 178 acres.
-Typewriters were first developed to help the blind.
-The Ostrich can run at speeds of up to 40 miles an hour and on Ostrich farms in Cape Province, South Africa, they hold Ostrich races for tourists.
-The cigar is named after the Mayan word for smoking, sik’ar.
-The human eye can distinguish about 17,000 different colours.
-There is more sugar in a kilo of lemons than in a kilo of strawberries.
-If you had fifteen books on a shelf and you arrange them in every possible combination, and if you made one change every minute, it would take you 24, 87,996 years to do them all.
-It was claimed that a tiger shot by Colonel Jim Corbett in 1907 had killed 436 people in India.
-A rattle snake or viper has special cells between its nostril and its eye which are sensitive to infra-red radiant heat. They can locate people in the dark by the heat they give off.
-The Emperor Penguin of the Antarctic can reach a depth of 870 feet and remain submerged for as long as 18 minutes.
-Lightening strikes the earth a hundred times every second from the 1800 thunderstorms in progress, at any given moment.
-Eighty percent of the world’s supply of dates comes from Iraq.
-Scientists have found that mice prefer women to men.
-Early guns took so long to load and fire that bows and arrows – in trained hands – were twelve times more efficient.
-The silkworm is not a worm: It is a caterpillar.
-Each square inch of human skin consists of 19 million cells, sixty hairs, ninety oil glands, and nineteen feet of blood vessels, 625 sweat glands and 19,000 sensory cells.
-The driest place on Earth is Calama, in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Not a drop of rain has been seen there.
-Every year more than 50,000 earthquakes take place on earth. Of these most are too slight to be noticeable to man.
-There are 25, 00,000 rivets in the Effel Tower.
-There are more than 600 muscles in our muscular system.
-Of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only one, the Pyramids of Egypt, is still in existence. Others have crumbled and disappeared. The great reason of the duration of the Pyramid above all other forms is that it is most fitted to resist the force of gravitation.
-The royal house of Saudi Arabia may at present have as many as 5,000 prices and an equal number of princesses. King Abdul Aziz Saud, who ruled from 1932 until his death in 1953, had 300 wives.
-Coffee is the world’s second largest item of international commerce. (Petroleum is first.)
-House Lizards are perfectly harmless. They neither bite nor are they aggressive. In fact they help man by eating insects like flies and mosquitoes.
-A popular misconception seems to be that filtered cigarettes are less dangerous than unfiltered ones. According to a study the opposite would be the case: people who prefer filtered cigarettes are in danger of dying two to almost four years earlier than smokers of filter less cigarettes. Filters prevent the dilution of the smoke by oxygen so that the bloodstream builds up higher levels of carbon monoxide, in the form of carboxyhemoglobin.
-Egyptian embalmers used to remove a dead person’s brains through his nostrils.
-The heaviest bell in the world, the Tsar Kolokol Bell, was cast in 1733 in Moscow, Russia. This bell, which has been standing in the Kremlin since 1836, is over 19 feet high, 24 inch thick and weighs 216 tones.
-A person’s hair can not turn white overnight because of some terrible tragedy or frightening experience – or for any other reason.
-Assembly line method made it possible for the US Shipyards of Henry J.Kaiser during World War-II to produce a ship in just four days.