Read Uncle John’s Did You Know? Online
Authors: Bathroom Readers’ Institute
Uncle John’s Did You Know? (28 page)
• According to scientists, pigs are the smartest domesticated animals.
• Why do pigs roll around in the mud? They can’t sweat, so they coat themselves in mud to cool off.
• The pygmy hog of India—the world’s smallest pig—weighs about 10 pounds.
• In the 1860s, about 10,000 wild pigs roamed New York City. They ate garbage.
• Pigs can be taught to use a litter box.
• Pigs were first domesticated over 7,000 years ago.
• Ben & Jerry’s sends ice cream waste to local pig farms near its Vermont headquarters. The pigs love it all…except for Mint Chocolate Cookie.
• Engineers in Finland used pig poop to clean a contaminated pond near an old mine. The bacteria in the poop attracted the metals that polluted the water, and the combination sank to the bottom.
• In 2006, 12 piglets from seven countries took part in the Pig Olympics in Moscow, competing in pig-racing, pig-swimming, and pigball, a piggy version of soccer.
• Of the approximately 4,680 species of mammals, nearly half are rodents, and about one-fifth are bats.
• Biggest clam: the tridacna. It can grow four feet wide and weigh up to 500 pounds.
• All animals with hooves are close relatives of whales and dolphins—the rhino seems to be the closest.
• Male Dayak fruit bats are the only male mammals known to produce milk—and they suckle their young just like the females do.
• There’s a deer in Asia called a “mouse deer.” The little guy is only nine inches tall.
• A pregnant polar bear can live off her stored fat for up to eight months while traveling hundreds of miles to give birth and nursing her cubs until they’re more than 10 times their birth weight.
• Hyenas are closely related to cats, but hunt like dogs.
• You probably know that camels can go a long time—up to several months—without drinking. They can also down 13 gallons of water in just a few minutes.
• B-r-r. Z-z-z. B-r-r. Z-z-z. Many species of bats can survive freezing temperatures when they hibernate.
What puts the “you” in human
…
• You genes, called the “blueprints of life,” determine almost everything about you, from your eye color to your shoe size. They tell your cells how to make muscles, nerves, bones—and every other part.
• Cell Fact #1: A cell is the smallest unit of matter considered to be alive.
• Cell Fact #2: There are about 200 different kinds of cells in your body, each with a unique shape and a unique job to do.
• In the center of every cell is a
nucleus
. In the nucleus are several pairs of chromosomes. Chromosomes are crucial because they carry your genes.
• Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in each cell. Mosquitoes have 3 pairs, goldfish have 52 pairs, and onions have 8 pairs.
• Cell Fact #3: Every individual cell in your body is a living creature. If you put a single skin cell in a dish with nutrients, it would continue to live—and even crawl around!
• Should we check the expiration date? Graham crackers, Jell-O, instant coffee, Triscuit crackers, Campbell’s Tomato Soup, and Fig Newtons have all been around for more than 100 years.
• When a swarm of locusts landed on Beijing, China, in 2002, they were scooped up, deep fried…and eaten.
• In 1895, C.W. Post created the very first grocery coupon by offering shoppers 1¢ off the purchase of the company’s new health cereal, Grape-Nuts.
• Americans eat approximately 100 acres of pizza a day. That’s an average of 350 slices per second.
• Sometimes when you want to sell something, you have to give it away—that’s what Kellogg’s did in 1907 when it introduced its new breakfast food. They gave away a free box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes to every woman who winked at the grocer.
• In 2000, the H.J. Heinz, Co. experienced its biggest spike in sales since the company was founded in 1869. That’s when they introduced green ketchup.
• Some people believe tea originated in China on a very windy day. According to legend, a strong wind blew tea leaves into a pot of boiling water.
• Biggest cereal maker in the world: Quaker Oats.
• The most popular pizza toppings in India: dill, ginger, and lamb.
• What do you call a plain, unsalted pretzel? A “baldy.”
• Three jars of peanut butter are sold every second.
• Americans eat nearly 20 billion pickles per year. That’s more than nine pounds per person a year.
• Almost everybody (98%) spreads the peanut butter on first when they’re making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
• The average American eats 24 pounds of cheese per year. That’s nothing compared to the French: They eat 43.6 pounds of cheese per person, per year.
• Don’t try this at home: Among nuts, macadamias have the hardest shells in the world. It takes approximately 300 pounds of pressure to open them.
• There are at least 1,462 edible insect species in the world. The most popular way to prepare an insect is to cook it live, like a crab or a lobster, and then peel it open and eat the insides.
• Eight out of 10 American families have a box of oatmeal in the kitchen cupboard.
• In Japan, you can taste some unusual ice cream flavors, including horseradish, crab, squid ink, buttered potato, ox tongue, cactus, and chicken wing.
• According to one theory, the word “book” comes from
bok
, meaning “beech” in Old English, because the first books in Europe were written on slabs of beechwood.
• The British Library owns the world’s oldest existing printed book: a Buddhist text called
Diamond Sutra
, published in China in 868 A.D.
• A book of maps is called an
atlas
because the covers of early editions featured pictures of the mythical Greek character Atlas carrying the world on his shoulders.
• The Bible is the bestselling book of all time. More than six billion copies have been sold.
•
The Da Vinci Code
is the bestselling adult novel of all time within a
one-year period
: 6.8 million copies.
•
Orbis Pictus (The Visible World in Pictures)
, a children’s encyclopedia, was published in 1658 by a Czech educator. It’s considered to be the very first picture book for children.
• A
bibliophile
is a person who loves books.
• Ms. Kazuko Hosoki from Japan has written a series of 81 books on fortune telling, with a total of 34,000,000 copies sold.
• An 1859 first edition of Darwin’s
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection
was returned to a Boston public library in 2001—80 years overdue.
• There are about 375 species of shark.
• Great whites are the sharks most commonly responsible for attacks on people. They have a very good sense of smell. How good? They can smell a single drop of blood in an Olympic-size swimming pool.
• Shark attacks are very rare. You have better odds of winning the lottery than being attacked by a shark.
• Some sharks, like blacktip reef sharks, hunt in groups. Blacktip reef sharks can also jump all the way out of the water or just stick their noses out of the water to look around. (Look out, seagulls!)
• Sharks have the unusual ability to sense minute electrical fields that are generated by other creatures. This sixth sense is possible because of specialized sensory organs called the
ampullae of Lorenzini
.
• Great white, tiger, hammerhead, and bull sharks are known as apex predators—they have no natural enemies.
• Scientific research suggests that sharks are the only animals that never get sick. They appear to be immune to every known disease, including cancer.
• The largest shark in the world is the docile whale shark. It can grow to 80 feet long.
• Over its lifetime, a shark can lose and regrow more than 20,000 teeth.
• The cookie-cutter shark is less than two feet long.
• An extinct species of shark, the megalodon shark, was the biggest in the history of the world—so big that it could eat a Tyrannosaurus rex.
• Another extinct species is the iniopterygians shark. It had winglike fins that enabled it to fly short distances.
• During World War II, some fighter planes used shark oil to lubricate instruments.
• The fastest sharks in the sea, mako sharks can swim up to 20 mph.
• Hammerhead sharks have the weirdest looking heads of all sharks: a thick, flat head with eyes on the outside that looks…like the head of a hammer.
• Lantern sharks glow in the dark. Tiny, too: Some grow only to 10 inches long.
• A basking shark has 3,000 teeth.
• The zebra shark’s skin is unique. When they’re young, they have stripes, but as they grow older, the stripes turn into dots.
• Megamouth sharks were only discovered in 1976, and only 36 have ever been sighted. Their immense mouths are 40 inches wide.
• The fin that sticks out of the water is called the dorsal fin.
• A shark’s ears are on the inside of its head.
• It takes about 9 ½ months to plan the average American wedding.
• The tradition of wearing the wedding ring on the third finger of the left hand began in ancient Rome. The Romans believed that the vein that runs through that finger is connected directly to the heart.
• In the United States, June is the most popular month for weddings. On the other hand, most couples in the Philippines get married in December.
• Ancient Romans used to throw cakes at the wedding couple to symbolically bless the marriage with abundance and fertility.
• For good luck, German brides used to carry salt and bread in their pocket. Grooms carried grain.
• Two hundred people are invited to the average wedding. (But they don’t all attend.)
• In the 17th and 18th centuries, pies were a part of a marriage celebration. The “bride’s pie” was filled with mincemeat or mutton. A glass ring was hidden deep inside the pie. The woman who wound up with the piece of pie with the ring in it was said to be the next to marry.
