Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (26 page)
• Ha! The average person laughs 15 times a day.
• How many senses do humans have? Your basic five senses are touch, taste, sight, smell, and hearing. But some scientists say we actually have nine senses: the basic five, plus balance, heat, pain, and body awareness. What do you think?
• On average, men blink about 6.2 million times per year. Women blink about 12 million times.
• There are six facial expressions that are universal: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, anger, and surprise.
• The most frequently used facial movement? A smile.
• Women smile more than men, but children smile more than adults.
• Remember this the next time you stub your toe: Scientists say that laughter reduces pain.
• Do you sneeze when you step out into a bright sunny day? It’s called a “photic sneeze,” and about one out of three people do it.
• In times of extreme stress, humans can sometimes perform amazing feats of strength. For example, in 1982, Angela Cavallo lifted a Chevy Impala to free her teenage son, who was trapped underneath it.
• There are more than 1,800 species of fleas.
• The average butterfly cocoon contains more than 1,000 feet of silk.
• The practice of eating insects has a name:
entomophagy
. People in many cultures have been eating insects for centuries (and plenty still do).
• Most lipsticks—and even some fruit drinks—are colored red with a dye from an insect known as the cochineal.
• It’s a bird! It’s a bat! It’s…an atlas moth. Atlas moths are so big, they’re sometimes mistaken for medium-sized bats.
• If you lined them up end to end, all the earthworms under a typical football field would stretch for 94 miles.
• Some fleas freeze at night and thaw out—still alive—the next morning.
• Bees have to fly a total of 72,000 miles to gather enough honey for one jar.
• A tiny fly called a “midge” beats its wings 62,000 times a minute.
• There are 45 species of ladybug in Great Britain and 450 in North America.
• Tarzana, California, is where Edgar Rice Burroughs lived when he wrote jungle adventure stories featuring a main character called…Tarzan.
• Ding Dong, Texas, is in Bell County.
• Peculiar, Missouri, was named by the postmaster after the town fathers told him, “We don’t care what you name it as long as it’s sort of peculiar.”
• Lake Webster in Massachusetts is called “Webster” because no one can pronounce its real name: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.
• Halfway between Pine, Oregon, and Cornucopia, Oregon, is the town of…Halfway.
• People in Gnaw Bone, Indiana, tell colorful stories of how the town got its name, but the truth is that it’s named after the French city of Narbonne.
• The town of Chicken, Alaska, was going to be named “Ptarmigan” in honor of the state bird…but the townspeople didn’t know how to spell it.
• Towns named for parts of the body, from the head down: Sweet Lips, Tennessee; Left Hand, West Virginia; Shoulderblade, Kentucky; Bowlegs, Oklahoma; and Bigfoot, Texas.
• “Outer space” officially begins 50 miles above the surface of the Earth.
• If you were in a car traveling at 100 miles per hour, it would take you
29 million years
to reach the nearest star.
• You may not be able to feel it, but our galaxy—the Milky Way—revolves a million miles per day, or 40,000 miles per hour.
• If the universe were the size of a building 20 miles long, 20 miles wide, and 20 miles high, all the matter it contains would add up to a single grain of sand.
• What are your chances of being hit by a meteorite? Slim. The mathematical probability is that only one person will get bonked every 180 years.
• Start counting! There are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on Earth.
• A comet’s tail always points away from the Sun.
• Because of the speed of the Earth’s rotation, it’s impossible for a solar eclipse to last more than 7 minutes and 58 seconds.
• A
galaxy
is a huge system of stars, typically containing between 10 million and 1 trillion stars each. Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. Astronomers estimate that the universe contains 100 billion galaxies
besides
ours.
• The first movie theater in the United States was the Vitascope Hall, built in 1896. Where was it? Hollywood? Nope. New Orleans.
• China has about 1,000 movie theaters. That’s one movie theater for every million people.
• Almost three billion movie tickets are sold every year in India—an average of three tickets per person. (Americans buy about five tickets per person.)
• The weather is so nice in Greece that many movie theaters don’t have roofs.
• John Ratzenberger, the actor who played the mailman Cliff Clavin on
Cheers
, is Pixar’s “good-luck charm.” Ratzenberger has been in every film Pixar’s made. He was the voice of Hamm in
Toy Story
, the Abominable Snowman in
Monsters, Inc
., P.T. Flea in
A Bug’s Life
, a school of fish in
Finding Nemo
, the Underminer in
The lncredibles
, and Mack in
Cars
.
• Some scientists say that
Jurassic Park
portrayed velociraptors inaccurately. In real life, they probably weren’t as vicious as they were on-screen.
• Phone numbers used in movies and TV shows always begin with “555.” Why? No
real
phone number starts with 555, so viewers can’t dial the number from the movie and bother the poor person who happens to have that number.
• What does
salsa
mean? It’s Spanish for “sauce.”
• Ketchup was once sold as medicine. The miracle sauce was advertised as a cure for all sorts of illnesses and maladies, including baldness and athlete’s foot.
• What’s the difference between mayonnaise and Miracle Whip? Miracle Whip is mayonnaise with corn syrup and sugar added.
• A1 steak sauce contains raisins.
• The earliest known recipe for mustard appeared in 42 A.D.
• Pour it on: Half a cup of ketchup contains as much nutrition as a large tomato.
• After astronauts complained about the bland food they had to eat during spaceflights, NASA chefs included Tabasco Sauce in the kitchens of the Space Shuttles and the International Space Station.
• The ancient Chinese were the first to make ketchup. Called
kachiap
, it was made with pickled fish and spices—not tomatoes.
• U.S. troops have used miniature Tabasco bottles to make chess sets and Christmas tree decorations.
• Tartar sauce is typically used on fried seafood dishes, but in Seattle, Washington, it’s more popular on French fries than ketchup.
• A group of citizens in Mesa, Arizona, are circulating a petition against the police department’s intention to train a tiny monkey that they can dress in a bulletproof vest and send into dangerous situations.
• Scientists say that young female chimps are smarter than young males.
• A species of monkey recently discovered in Tanzania communicates in honking barks. Scientists think it’s different enough to have its own new genus:
Rungwecebus
.
• After a young colobus monkey escaped from Ireland’s Belfast Zoo, zookeepers told the press that the monkey had recently had an argument with his dad.
• In 2003 Los Angeles customs officials arrested a man for trying to smuggle two pygmy monkeys into the United States. Where’d he hide them? In his pants.
• Apes have blood types similar to humans, but chimpanzees mostly have blood type A, almost no blood type O, and never blood type B. On the other hand, gorillas have blood type B, almost no blood type O, and never blood type A.
• The Vegetarian Banquet for Monkeys is an annual tradition at a Buddhist shrine in Thailand. The guest list in 2004 included more than 3,000 macaques.
All Good Things Must Come to an End
• In 2005, the top three deadliest jobs in the United States were logger, airline pilot, and deep-sea fisherman.
• At high levels, carbon monoxide gas can kill a person in under three minutes.
• In Hong Kong, about 12 people are killed every year by trash that’s thrown out of windows.
• Smoking is the number-one leading cause of death in the United States. The second leading cause of death? Poor diet.
• Of the 2,245 people onboard the
Titanic
, 1,513 perished and 732 survived.
• Henry Ford owned a bottle containing the last breath of his friend Thomas Edison. It was caught and sealed in the bottle on October 18, 1931.
• Ferocious warrior Attila the Hun died of a nosebleed.
• In 65 B.C., the Greek playwright Aeschylus was killed when an eagle dropped a tortoise on his head.
• The creator of Star
Trek
, Gene Roddenberry, died in 1991. Six years later, a cylinder containing his ashes was shot into outer space.
• For every one time the Earth orbits the Sun, the Moon orbits the Earth 13 times.
• The largest known crater in the solar system is on the far side of the Moon (the side facing away from Earth). It is 1,454 miles (2,340 km) across and eight miles (13 km) deep—more than twice as big as Alaska and deeper than the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean.
• The Moon doesn’t radiate its own light—when we see moonlight, what we see is actually sunlight reflected off the Moon’s surface.
• Light from the Moon gets to Earth in about 1.5 seconds.
• The distance from Earth to the Moon: about 15,654,023,458 inches.
• The Moon is one-fourth the size of the Earth.
• Flying around the Moon’s equator, you would cover the same distance as flying from New York to London and back again.
• Full moons occur every 29 or 30 days. A “blue moon” is the second of two full moons that appear in the same calendar month.
