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721/ There is an organisation
in Berkeley, California, whose members gather monthly to discuss
and honour the garlic plant. Called "The Lovers of the
Stinky Rose", this unusual organisation holds an annual
garlic festival and publishes a newsletter known as "Garlic
Time".
722/ There's enough energy
in ten minutes of one hurricane to match the nuclear stockpiles
of the world.
723/ A beautiful mirage called
the Fata Morgana appears in the Straits of Messina, between
Sicily and Italy. It is an image of a town in the sky, but
it seems more like a fairy tale landscape than a real town.
It is believed to be a mirage of a fishing village situated
along the coast.
724/ A bolt of lightning can
strike the earth with a force as great as 100 million volts.
725/ A "cold front"
travels at a speed of about 30 miles per hour - faster then
the fastest person can run - and may overtake any warm front
ahead of it. The resulting mix of air is called an "occluded
front".
726/ A cumulonimbus cloud
can be enormous: six miles across and eleven miles high, and
twice as high as Mount Everest.
727/ A dripping water tap
wastes an average of 40 kilowatt hours of electricity per
month. This is the equivalent of running a colour television
8 hours a day for about 31 days.
728/ A drop of water may travel
thousands of miles between the time it evaporates into the
atmosphere and the time it falls to the Earth again as rain,
sleet, or snow.
729/ A green flash is sometimes
seen just as the sun sets or rises. This occurs because green
light is bent most strongly by the atmosphere. So the green
is seen before other colours at sunrise, and after the other
colours have vanished at sunset.
730/ Three hundred and fourteen
acres of trees are used to make the newsprint for the average
Sunday edition of the New York Times. There are nearly 63,000
trees in the 314 acres.
731/ Traces of copper give
the gemstone turquoise its distinctive colour.
732/ Use of less fertilizer
at precisely the right times can cut costs by up to 17 percent
for farmers in developing countries and reduce damage to the
environment.
733/ Variations in colour
in pearls are still a mystery, but some experts believe that
high water temperatures contribute a golden cast to some pearls.
734/ Waste industry experts
estimate that Americans discard 250 million tyres each year,
and that more than 3 million are stored in landfills. Tyres
burning at landfills generate huge amounts of noxious air
pollution. During the 1980's an East Coast landfill burned
for three years when hundreds of thousands of tyres caught
fire.
735/ A hailstone weighing
more than one and a half pounds once fell on Coffeyville,
Kansas. No one was hit.
736/ A hurricane that hit
Puerto Rico in 1928 dropped 30 inches of rain over the island.
The deluge was estimated to weigh 2,800,000,000 tons.
737/ A large cumulonimbus
cloud can hold enough water for 500,000 baths. Most of the
water droplets in a cloud re-evaporate and nver reach the
ground. Only one fifth actually falls as rain.
738/ A polar air mass moving
South from Canada may pick up from the Mississippi basin more
than nine times as much water as flows out from the mouth
of the river.
739/ At the height of the
property boom in Japan during the 1980's the Emperor's 300
acre palace in central Tokyo was valued at more than all Canada.
740/ A Saguaro Cactus can
top 60 feet, and may live 300 years.
Click on the links below for more great
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