• The only mammals that don’t give birth to live young are native to Australia. The platypus and the echidna (a.k.a. the spiny anteater) lay eggs.
• Australia is the only continent on Earth without an active volcano.
• The first settlers from England, who arrived in 1788, included 717 convicts and their military guards; 180 of the convicts were women.
• Aboriginal peoples and natives of the Torres Strait Islands off the northern coast of Australia account for about 2% of the country’s population.
• The school year in Australia starts in late January and ends mid-December for the Christmas (summer!) break.
• One out of four Australians was born in another country.
• Cute, but wrong: Baby platypuses aren’t called “puggles” as many people believe. They have no official name, but “platypup” has been suggested.
IMAS
Instant Messaging Abbreviations, Silly.
•WUF Where are you from?
•A3 Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere
•B4N Bye for now
•C&G Chuckle and grin
•DIKU Do I know you?
•DLTBBB Don’t let the bedbugs bite
•EG Evil grin
•GR8 Great!
•K OK
•L8R G8R Later, gator
•::POOF:: Goodbye
•UOK Are you OK?
•ROFLOL Rolling on the floor laughing out loud
•QPSA? ¿Que posa? (How’s it going?)
•S^ ’S up? (What’s up?)
•SUAKM Shut up and kiss me
•U4E Yours forever
•WDALYIC Who died and left you in charge?
•WE Whatever
•WIBAMU Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle
THE HIMALAYAS
No, it’s not a rock group. It’s a mountain range in Asia—and the ultimate climbing challenge for us earthlings.
• Nine of the 10 highest mountains in the world—including Mt. Everest—are in the Himalayas.
• The rocks that make up the Himalayan mountains were an ancient sea floor until about 40 million years ago when, in a process called “uplifting,” the sea floor was forced upward.
• The Himalayas are still growing—at a rate of about 2.4 inches a year.
• Because the planet isn’t a perfect sphere, the point farthest from the center of the Earth is the summit of Mt. Chimborazo in Ecuador, not the top of Mt. Everest.
• The snowfields of the Himalayas are permanent—they never melt, not even in the summer.
• Everest’s name in Nepal is Sagarmatha (goddess of the sky), and in Tibet it’s called Chomolungma (mother goddess of the universe).
• Once known as Peak 15, Mt. Everest was named after Sir George Everest, a British surveyor-general of India. He pronounced his name EEV-rest.
• First skier to descend from the peak: Davo Karnicar of Slovenia in 2000. It took him five hours of uninterrupted skiing.
STRANGE
SUPERSTITIONS
• In Tibet, the number 42 is considered sacred.
• What’s the Mexican version of the Tooth Fairy? The Tooth Mouse!
• The ancient Egyptians believed that black cats had divine powers.
• 84% of Americans say they believe in miracles.
• Phrenology is the belief that the size and shape of a person’s head determines their character. According to phrenologists, the bumps on your head reveal 42 aspects of your personality.
• Storks are considered symbols of good luck. And according to folklore, it’s the stork that delivers every new baby.
• According to legend, emeralds have the power to ward off evil spirits.
• Some people believe that dreaming about a dove will bring you happiness.
• According to ancient Egyptian mythology, the fate of the dead is decided by a group of 42 demons.
• In Asia, cranes are revered as symbols of long life.
• Superstitious people think an itchy nose means you’ll have a quarrel with someone.
A VISIT TO
MICROBIA
Let’s pull up a microscope and visit the land of bacteria, fungi, viruses, and their friends.
• A teaspoon of dirt from your backyard contains more than 1,000,000,000 bacteria. So does a quart of dirty bathwater.
• A virus is a tiny bit of DNA or RNA wrapped in a protein coat.
• There’s a fungus among us: Bread mold, athlete’s foot, yeast, and penicillin are all types of fungus.
• Free-floating viruses are “inert” (inactive) until they come into contact with a living cell—that’s when they come to life and can begin attacking.
• Antibiotics, the drugs commonly used to kill bacteria, do not affect viruses at all.
• Scientists have revived bacteria that had been dormant for 250 million years.
• A type of giant amoeba—named Chaos chaos—can be seen with the naked eye.
• A mushroom is a fungus’s reproductive organ.
• Oh, is that all? About 200 million years passed between the appearance of bacteria on Earth and the next evolutionary step: single-celled organisms with a nucleus.
SURVEY SAYS…
• 56% of men would like to wear a suit of armor.
• 27% of people wish their first kiss had been with someone else.
• 49% of people believe that polls tell the truth.
• 50% of American women prefer to sit with their legs crossed.
• 59% of schoolchildren claim that their parents nag constantly.
• 82% of teens worry about tests.
• 81% of teenage girls say the idea of growing old alone doesn’t bother them.
• Only 15% of adults think journalists tell the truth.
• No! 66% of 16-year-olds say they are pessimists.
• 27% of female lottery winners admit to hiding the winning ticket in their bra.
• 31% of workers don’t eat any lunch.
• Of all the candles sold, women purchase 96% of them.
• How many snorers in your household? 71% report they have at least one.
• People in low-income homes spend 50% more time playing video games than people in high-income homes.
ENDANGERED
SPECIES
• Between 1919 and 1921, nearly 108 million animals were killed for the American fur trade.
• During the first 20 years of the Endangered Species Act, 632 species were listed endangered. Today the number is around 500.
• The first animal conservation laws were instituted by Chinese emperor Kublai Khan in the 13th century.
• There are only 3,000 manatees, also known as “sea cows,” remaining in Florida. (They’re related to elephants, not cows.)
• Only about 1,600 pandas survive in the wild today—and only in China.
• Melting sea ice due to climate change leaves less time and area for endangered polar bears to hunt for food and store it.
• There are fewer than 800 nenes—Hawaii’s state bird—left in the Hawaiian Islands.
• Here’s some good news: In 1800 more than 50 million bison roamed the plains of North America. By 1890 only 800 were left, but now the numbers have been built back up to about 130,000.
• Scientists believe that one species becomes extinct every 20 minutes.
THE CLOTHES
CLOSET
• An 8,000-year-old sandal found in a cave in Missouri is the oldest known footwear in the world.
• Mexican sombreros are meant to provide shade for the entire body.
• American men buy 35 articles of clothing a year. American women buy 54.
• Wal-Mart sells more clothing than all other department stores combined.
• How many gallons does a 10-gallon hat hold? Not even one.
• Farmington, Maine, holds a parade on the first Saturday in December to honor Chester Greenwood, the boy who invented earmuffs.
• The woolen swimsui
ts that people wore at the turn of the 20th century weighed about 20 pounds when wet.
• Men carried purses before women did. The purses were called “pockets.” But because they hung from a string and could be easily stolen, eventually they were sewn inside clothing and—voilà!—became the pockets we can’t live without today.
• The first knit socks were discovered in Egyptian tombs of the 3rd-6th centuries A.D.
ANIMAL QUIZ
Q: If you see a moose kneeling, what’s he doing?
A: Eating. He can’t graze like a cow—his neck is too short and his legs are too long—so he has to kneel to eat.
Q: If it has one horn, it’s from Africa; if it has two horns, it’s from India. What is it?
A: A rhino.
Q: Dogs are color-blind when it comes to seeing green and red, so how do seeing-eye dogs tell the difference between a red traffic light and a green one?
A: They don’t. Instead, they watch the flow of traffic to see when it’s safe to cross.
Q: Are zebras white with black stripes or vice versa?
A: Scientists are still arguing about it.
Q: What kind of fish is a Portuguese Man-of-War?
A: It’s not actually a fish—it’s an invertebrate, meaning it doesn’t have a backbone like a true fish does. It’s related to both jellyfish and coral. The Man-of-War isn’t really even one single animal: It’s a colony of four parts that work together to survive.
YOU NAME IT
• Greenland isn’t very green—in fact, it’s almost entirely covered with snow and ice. Viking explorers named it Greenland to lure settlers there.
• It’s the yellow soil beneath China’s Yellow River that gave it its name.
• The Dead Sea really is dead. Located at the end of the Jordan River, the sea’s water evaporates and leaves heavy deposits of minerals, which makes it uninhabitable and much saltier than an ocean.
• The Ivory Coast in northwest Africa was once the center of the ivory trade for Europeans, who hunted elephants for their valuable ivory tusks.
• Why is the Red Sea called “red”? It could be from the occasional red algae that appear there, or it could have been named for nearby red mountains. Some people say it’s actually a mistranslation of “Reed Sea.”
• Huh? The Canary Islands were named for the wild dogs that lived there. You’ve heard dogs called “canines”? Canis is Latin for “dog”—and the ancient Romans named the islands.
• Ireland is called the Emerald Isle because of its green countryside, not because of any actual emeralds.
• Moscow’s Red Square isn’t red: It was so named because red means “beautiful” in Russian.
AMUSEMENT
PARKS
• There are more than 1,300 roller coasters in North America.
• Faster than a speeding bullet? The “Superman: The Escape” roller coaster at Six Flags Magic Mountain in California accelerates to 100 mph in 7 seconds.
• The Ferris wheel was the brainchild—and namesake—of George Ferris, a bridge builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The wheel debuted at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893.
• The world’s tallest roller coaster, Kingda Ka at Great Adventure in New Jersey, reaches its peak at 456 feet. It’s the world’s fastest, too—clocked at 128 mph.
• A 14-year-old German boy built a 300-foot-long working roller coaster in his backyard over the summer of 2005…but local officials made him tear it down.
• That whoopsy feeling you get when you float out of your seat on a roller coaster is called “airtime.”
• The world’s oldest operating amusement park—Bakken Amusement Park in Denmark—first opened for business in 1583.
• Insider’s name for high-speed spinning rides like the Tilt-A-Whirl: “Spin-N-Barf”
SPORTS BY
THE NUMBERS
• How high the hoop: In pro basketball, the hoop is exactly 10 feet high.
• When the word “ski” is mentioned, three out of five Americans say that Colorado is the first place they think of.
• In major league baseball, the pitcher’s plate is 10 inches above the level of home plate. The pitcher’s mound is 18 feet across.
• The fastest recorded tennis serve? 153 miles per hour.
• The hurdles in the women’s 100-meter hurdle event are 33 inches high. In the men’s 400-meter hurdles, they’re 36 inches high. Which is only fair because on average, men are 3 inches taller than women.
• Old-time baseball player Hughie Jennings holds the records for being hit by the most pitches (287 times) and for being hit the most in a single season (51).
• Take that! A professional boxing glove weighs eight ounces.
• The top rope surrounding a boxing ring is 52 inches high.
• The length of a bowling lane is 60 feet from the foul line to the center of the first pin.
DEAR DAIRY
• In Spain, people pour chocolate milk or coffee on breakfast cereal.
• The average American drinks 400 glasses of milk per year.
• Roughly one in seven people is lactose intolerant, which means they have trouble digesting milk.
• Every year, the Kraft company makes enough Cool Whip to fill the Grand Canyon.
• Love cheese? You’ll probably eat more than a ton—2,000 pounds—of it in your lifetime.
• It takes 29 cups of milk to make one pound of butter.
• Butter’s yellow color comes from the beta-carotene in the grass that dairy cows eat. Butter is yellower in the summer, when grass is plentiful. In winter, it’s usually off-white.
• People added carrot juice to butter in the Middle Ages, thinking it made the color more attractive.
• Need something to cool off your mouth after eating spicy food? Try milk—it contains casein, a protein that soothes burning taste buds.
• Bad, but still good: Blue cheese was most likely discovered by accident centuries ago, when cheese was stored in caves. A batch of cheese probably got moldy, and some brave person decided to taste it anyway.
BIG CITIES
• Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world located on two continents: Europe and Asia.
• Los Angeles’s full name—El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula—can be abbreviated to 3.63% of its size: L.A.
• The first city to reach a population of 1 million was Rome, Italy, in 133 B.C.
• In the year 1900, the largest cities by population were London, England (6.5 million), New York City (4.2 million), and Paris, France (3.3 million).
• The largest city in Africa: Cairo, with a population of over 7 million.
• 36% of New York City’s 8 million people are foreign-born; 41% of Los Angeles’s 4 million people are.
• Shanghai, China, has the highest population of any city in the world: over 14 million.
• New York City was nicknamed “the Big Apple” by jazz musicians of the 1930s, who used the slang expression “apple” for any town or city. Therefore, to play New York was to play the big time.
ANIMALS IN
CAPTIVITY
• Sea World owns 25 orcas—55% of the worldwide total in captivity. And, by the way, they’re not killer “whales,” they’re a type of dolphin.
• A zoo gorilla named Jambo made headlines in 1986 when a five-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure and lost consciousness. Jambo placed himself protectively between the little guy and the other gorillas until he was rescued.
• Watch your hands: In 2004 a piranha was discovered living in a petting-zoo aquarium in Berlin, Germany.
• Jungle gym: Zookeepers in Anchorage, Alaska, installed a treadmill to help an elephant named Maggie lose some weight. The treadmill and a diet helped Maggie lose 1,000 pounds, down from 9,000.
• Zoo authorities in England sent a parrot into solitary confinement after the bird used some really bad language directed at two policemen, a mayor, and a priest. (They can�
�t figure out how he learned it.)
• About a month before St. Patrick’s Day in 2004, two polar bears in the Singapore Zoo turned green. A zoo spokesperson explained that it was because of harmless algae growing in their hollow hair shafts, and could be easily cured with a salt solution.
SOUND EFFECTS
• The people who create sound effects for movies are called “Foley artists.” Sometimes they use very bizarre objects to find just the right sound, like snapping celery sticks to mimic the sound of bones being broken.
• In Star Wars, Chewbacca’s voice is a combination of sounds from a bear, badger, walrus, and camel.
• The sound of the tornado in Twister is a recording of camel moaning played back at slow speed.
• The background crowd noise in a movie or television show is called a walla. The term comes from the early days of radio (before TV), when dramas were performed. A group of actors would repeat the word “walla” over and over again, which was supposed to sound like the murmur of a crowd. Today’s walla actors use real words and conversations.
• In The Matrix, for the slow-motion shots where bullets slow down and the camera whips around, the sound designer put real bullets on strings and whirled them around to create the “whoosh” sound in the background.
• The ape’s roar in King Kong is a lion’s roar played at half speed, backwards.
• In E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, the sound of E.T.’s waddling walk was created by squeezing a wet T-shirt stuffed with Jell-O.
WE’VE GOT
CHEMISTRY
• Elements named for famous scientists: einsteinium (after Albert Einstein) and fermium (after Enrico Fermi).
• Chlorine will keep your swimming pool clean, but its first use was as a chemical weapon in World War I.
Uncle John’s Did You Know? Page 6