DID YOU KNOW 31.In 1935 a writer named Dudley Nichols refused to accept the Oscar for his movie The Informer because the Writers Guild was on strike against the movie studios. In 1970 George C. Scott refused the Best Actor Oscar for Patton. In 1972 Marlon Brando refused the Oscar for his role in The Godfather. 32.The system of democracy was introduced 2 500 years ago in Athens, Greece. The oldest existing governing body operates in Althing in Iceland. It was established in 930 AD. 33.A person can live without food for about a month, but only about a week without water. If the amount of water in your body is reduced by just 1%, youll feel thirsty. If its reduced by 10%, youll die. 34.According to a study by the Economic Research Service, 27% of all food production in Western nations ends up in garbage cans. Yet, 1,2 billion people are underfed - the same number of people who are overweight. 35.Camels are called ships of the desert because of the way they move, not because of their transport capabilities. A Dromedary camel has one hump and a Bactrian camel two humps. The humps are used as fat storage. Thus, an undernourished camel will not have a hump. 36.In the Durango desert, in Mexico, theres a creepy spot called the Zone of Silence. You cant pick up clear TV or radio signals. And locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky. 37.Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T. 38.Bill Gates first business was Traff-O-Data, a company that created machines which recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road. 39.Uranus orbital axis is tilted at 90 degrees. 40.The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon. 41.Outside the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world. 42.The first fossilized specimen of Australopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the paleontologists favorite song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, by the Beatles. 43.Figlet, an ASCII font converter program, stands for Frank, Ian and Glenns LETters. 44.Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell. 45.Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced. 46.Hot water is heavier than cold. 47.Plutonium - first weighed on August 20th, 1942, by University of Chicago scientists Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues - was the first man-made element. 48.If you went out into space, you would explode before you suffocated because theres no air pressure. 49.The radioactive substance, Americanium - 241 is used in many smoke detectors. 50.The original IBM-PCs, that had hard drives, referred to the hard drives as Winchester drives. This is due to the fact that the original Winchester drive had a model number of 3030. This is, of course, a Winchester firearm. 51.Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air. 52.On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity. 53.Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agencys Olympus in 1993. 54.Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper. 55.Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper. 56.A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass. 57.A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block. 58.An ordinary TNT bomb involves atomic reaction, and could be called an atomic bomb. What we call an A-bomb involves nuclear reactions and should be called a nuclear bomb. 59.At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale. 60.At a jet planes speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length.
Posted on: Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:16:54 +0000
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