| 1361/
The computers running the SETI@Home screensaver have put in
a total of over 350,000 years worth of computer time. These
machines are collecting the equivalent of a computer operating
at around ten million million calculations a second, about
ten times faster than any conventional supercomputer. You
can help in the search for extraterrestial life by downloading
the screensaver here.
1362/ In a study by Dr
Thomas Zentall, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky,
he trained pigeons to tap on a small button if they wanted
a snack. Sometimes the pigeon had to tap only once; upon which
the button would turn red and some grain appear. Other times
though the pigeon would have to tap up to 20 times to get
the grain, before the light turned green and the grain was
delivered. The pigeons soon learned that the red button meant
one thing and the green another. You would assume that given
the free choice the pigeons would choose the red button ie
less work, same reward. However, Zentall found that the pigeons
actually chose the green button twice as often as the red.
The effort seemed, according to Dr Zentall, to make the grain
more valuable.
1363/ According to Jens
Rydell and Winston Lancaster at Gothenburg University in Sweden,
the majority of Scandinavian moths have tiny ears tuned to
the ultrasonic pulses that bats emit as they give chase (and
hence hopefully avoid being the bats lunch!). But 4% of the
moths they studied lacked such ears and were reckoned to be
deaf. To compensate however, they found that deaf moths were
able to fly faster then their hearing counterparts.
1364/ Scientists have
found that the Chinese brake fern has an almost insatiable
appetite for arsenic. When planted on sites contaminated with
copper arsenate, Lana Ma of the University of Florida found
that the fronds from the fern had accumulated as much as five
grams of arsenic for each kilogram of the fern's foliage.
In theory, a contaminated site could have much of its arsenic
sucked out of it over the course of a few years by planting
it with Chinese brake.
1365/ Microsoft's Office
Assistant, an irritating paper-clip that tries to help the
user; uses Bayesian statistical methods to analyse recent
actions in order to try to work out what the user is trying
to do. Thomas Bayes was an 18th century Presbyterian minister
and mathematician who published a paper in 1763 explaining
his approach. The essence of the Bayesian approach is to provide
mathematical rules that explain how you should change your
existing beliefs in the light of new evidence. read
more here
1366/ It was not until
about 600 million years ago that we find fossils that are
recognizably animals, plants, or fungi.
1367/ A female oyster
over her lifetime may produce over 100 million young.
1368/ The world's most
fertile woman had sixty-nine children, at least sixty-seven
of which survived infancy.
1369/ The 'Silverback'
gorilla is 30 per cent taller and almost twice as heavy as
the females in the group he dominates.
1370/ Man has by far
the largest penis of any primate. Chimps also have a relatively
large penis which is decorated on its underside with a broad
white stripe.
1371/ The number of atoms
of carbon in a 60 carat diamond (the Koh-I-Noor weighs 109
carats) is about 6 x 10 to the power of 23.
1372/ The isolated island
of Tristan da Cunha has three hundred inhabitants, of whom
over twenty percent suffer from asthma.
1373/ The average man
in the UK has 11 per cent body fat at age twenty and 26 per
cent at age sixty.
1374/ Huntington's disease,
which became notorious when it killed the folk singer Woody
Guthrie in 1967, was first diagnosed by a doctor, George Huntington,
in 1872 on the Eastern tip of Long Island.
1375/ Cancer risk has
been found to vary dramatically between countries. Liver cancer
is eighteen times more frequent in certain parts of Africa
than in Great Britain. Stomach cancer strikes the Japanese
eleven times more frequently than Americans. Colon cancer
is ten to twenty times more common in the US than in certain
regions of Africa. These dramatic differences were not due
to differences in inherited susceptibility. When individuals
migrated from one part of the world to another, their children
soon assumed the cancer risks typical of their new locations.
1376/ The term 'G-Spot'
was coined by Ernest Grafenberg in 1950.
1377/ In humans, most
multiple births involve twins - about once in every eighty-nine
births. By contrast, triplets naturally occur about once in
every 7900 births and quadruplets about once in every 705,000
births.
1378/ A female egg has
a volume that is over 30,000 times greater than a man's sperm.
1379/ The first attempt
to create an artificial womb took place in France in 1969,
when a sheep foetus was kept alive in one for two days.
1380/ A mid-1990s survey
of fertility clinics in the United States and Canada revealed
that sperm samples are routinely taken from dead men at the
request of their partners and families.
Click on the links below for more great
facts...
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