| 1221/
Elephants
can detect the aroma of ripening fruit from over 20 kilometres
away.
1222/ It takes 10 to
15 minutes for the fastest human sperm to swim the length
of the cervical canal.
1223/ Salt
is still used as money among the nomads of Ethiopia's Danakil
Plains. At one stage Roman soldiers were also paid in salt,
from which the term "salary" derives (the Latin
being salarium). Also, when coins were invented, they were
embossed with a hallmark (Greek for salt, hal) denoting their
equivalent weight in salt.
1224/ The idea that molecules
have three dimensional shapes dates back to Louis Pasteur,
whose deduction in 1844 arose from the fact that solutions
of two chemical compounds with identical composition could
nevertheless twist a beam of light in opposite directions.
1225/ In Tanzania a male
yellow baboon
can expect to be seriously injured by another male approximately
once every six weeks and will take about three weeks to recover
from each injury.
1226/ Herons stamp and
peck at mosquitoes around their feet up to three thousand
times an hour. This behaviour prevents more then 80 percent
of the mosquitoes from feeding on the heron's blood.
1227/ The ratio of the
length of string that produces a given musical note to the
length that produces its octave is 2:1. (Click
here for information about the connection between music
and mathematics)
1228/ Hyperinflation
in Germany around the First World War developed as follows:
July
1914
January 1919
July 1919
January 1920
January 1921
July 1921
January 1922
January 1923
July 1923
November 1923 |
1 mark
2.6 marks etc.
3.4
12.6
14.4
14.3
100.6
2785
194,000
726,000,000,000
|
|
1229/ By late 1923, 300
paper mills were working at top speed and 150 printing companies
had 2000 presses running day and night turning out currency
in Germany.
1230/ In Ancient Greece,
the Greeks would water down their wine in vast containers
called Kraters. Undiluted alcohol was felt to be the preserve
of the barbarian.
1231/ In 1985 a herd
of 150 Asian elephants broke into an illegal still in West
Bengal and drank copious amounts of moonshine. Inebriated,
they rampaged across the land, killing five people, injuring
a dozen, demolishing seven concrete buildings and trampling
twenty village huts.
1232/ The world record
for throwing a boomerang
is 238 metres. This is held by a swiss thrower called Manuek
Schutz who in 1999 established the record in Kloten, near
Zurich.
1233/ The Nobel Prize
winning biochemist, Hans
Kornberg, once drew up a list of the ten most significant
medical advances of the twentieth century. Seven out of the
ten arose from research that had nothing to do with the eventual
application.
1234/ Not far from Flagstaff,
Arizona, there is a crater 1.2km (1 mile) across and 200m
(650 feet) deep. It was created in an instant 50,000 years
ago, when a meteorite hit the Earth. Assuming that it was
travelling at an average velocity for Earth-crossing asteroids,
about 17.5km (11 miles) per second, the impactor must have
been about 150m (500ft) across. For an asteroid this is tiny.
Yet it hit with an explosive force of about 20 megatons.
1235/ The Mobius
Band, a single sided surface, was invented by the German
mathematician August Mobius in 1858. To recreate one; take
a strip of paper, give it a twist and join the ends together.
Now it has only one side. If you start painting one side red
and keep going, you cover both sides of the paper, not just
one.
1236/ 'Gone' is one of
the most frequent words babies
use. Generally, it is not used to denote food having been
eaten as many parents suspect, but rather as a general term
to denote when something has gone out of view of the baby.
1237/ In 2000 the three
largest US airports in Atlanta, Chicago and Los angeles, were
already running at over 80 percent of maximum capacity. And
that was during good weather. In bad weather, air traffic
controllers had no choice but to increase the spacing between
planes for safety, and under these conditions nearly half
of all major US airports were operating above their maximum
capacity.
1238/ During a drought
period in the Pliocene era (6 million years ago), the softer
grasses in North America were largely replaced by harsh grasses,
which have three times as much silica content. Amongst the
browsing horses, all species became extinct except those with
the longest teeth.
1239/ Our Moon is tilted
by roughly 5
degrees in relation to Earth's own orbit around the Sun.
By contrast, most other planets in our solar system show a
tilt of only 1 to 2 degrees. Researchers at the Southwest
Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado believe that the moons
odd tilt is indicative of a giant impact from a Mars-sized
rock at least 4.4 billion years ago.
1240/ The oldest rocks
collected on the Moon during the Apollo program were approximately
4.4 billion years old.
Click on the links below for more great
facts...
More
next week...
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