Uncle John’s Did You Know?

by Bathroom Readers' Institute

  HAIR ALL OVER

  • Studies show that boys’ hair grows faster than girls’.

  • Fish scales, reptile scales, fingernails, and feathers are made of the same stuff as hair.

  • Spiders are hairy all over.

  • The hairiest animal in the world is the chinchilla. It has about 60 hairs sprouting from each hair follicle.

  • Hair grows faster in warm weather.

  • From one strand of hair, scientists can determine what you eat, if you smoke, and your ethnic origin. What they can’t tell: your gender.

  • In Costa Rica, women decorate their hair with fireflies.

  • Any creature with skin or fur can get dandruff, but when animals get it it’s called “dander.”

  • Shirley Temple’s hairstyle had exactly 56 curls.

  • Crabs are equipped with small hairs on their claws that help them detect vibrations and water currents.

  • Leila’s Hair Museum in Independence, Missouri, specializes in antique jewelry made of hair.

  • A single strand of hair can support 100 grams of weight, about the weight of 20 Hershey Kisses. Based on that, an entire head of hair—about 130,000 hairs—should technically be able to lift two full-grown elephants. (But don’t try it.)

  LAS VEGAS!

  Let’s pay a visit to the city that never sleeps.

  • The MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas washes 15,000 pillowcases every day.

  • Every year 100,000 people go to Las Vegas…to get married (230 marriage licenses are issued every day).

  • If you wanted to sleep one night in every hotel room in Las Vegas, it would take you 329 years.

  • Over 35 million people visit Las Vegas every year. Each of them loses an average of $665 while gambling.

  • The most money ever won at a slot machine was $39,713,982.25, at Las Vegas’s Excalibur Hotel Casino on March 21, 2003. The winner was a 25-year-old software engineer who had fed the machine about $100 before hitting the jackpot.

  • Only 10% of parents who visit Las Vegas bring their kids.

  • The Spanish named Las Vegas, which means “the meadows,” in the 1800s. The area was an oasis for travelers along the pack-mule trail from New Mexico to California.

  • When most people think of Las Vegas, they usually think of “The Strip,” the stretch of glitzy hotels and casinos that was first built in the 1950s. But technically, most of the Strip isn’t in Las Vegas—it’s located in Paradise, Nevada.

  • Las Vegas’s biggest wedding chapel is called (what else?) Viva Las Vegas. It seats 100 guests.

  • Gangster Bugsy Siegel opened the first hotel in Vegas—the Flamingo—in 1946.

  • Over 40,000 people moved to Las Vegas in 2005, bumping up the population to 545,000.

  STORMY

  WEATHER

  • There were 27 named tropical storms during the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, the most active one since record keeping began 150 years ago.

  • Sorry, Zorba. Hurricanes are given names starting with letters A through W (no Q, U, X, Y, or Z).

  • A hurricane weighs about the same as 40 million elephants—more than all the elephants on Earth. Maybe even more than all the elephants ever on Earth.

  • There are an estimated 16 million thunderstorms globally each year.

  • Kampala, Uganda, may hold the world record for thunderstorms: It averages 242 thundery days each year. (Central Florida is pretty stormy too: It has approximately 100 thunderstorm days annually.)

  • Thunder is caused by lightning: Air surrounding the lightning heats rapidly, then expands and contracts at supersonic speeds, creating a series of claps and rumbles.

  • The coastal deserts of Chile and Antarctica have almost no thunderstorms.

  • When is a tropical storm not a tropical storm? When it has wind speeds of more than 74 miles per hour. Then it’s a hurricane.

  ELEPHANT-ITIS

  They’re big, they’re lovable, and you’d better stay out of their way when they’re in a hurry!

  • An elephant eats 250 pounds of plants and drinks 50 gallons of water a day.

  • An elephant’s heart weighs about 48 pounds, a little more than the average six-year-old person’s entire body. An entire elephant weighs about the same as 70 grown men.

  • The noise that elephants make while digesting food can be heard up to 200 yards away. But they can actually stop the sounds of digestion when they sense danger.

  • Is your living room bigger than an elephant? Male elephants are usually about 20 feet long. But don’t try to bring one inside: They weigh about 16,500 pounds.

  • Elephants have only four teeth for chewing. As their teeth wear down, they’re replaced up to six times. Old elephants who’ve used up all their teeth sometimes starve to death because they can’t chew anymore.

  • Those ivory tusks are used for defense, digging for water, and lifting things.

  • Elephants communicate over vast distances, warning other elephants of danger, telling them where to find water, and signaling that the mating season has begun.

  LOTS OF

  ENERGY

  • As long as they’re plugged in, appliances like microwave ovens and TV sets use energy even when they’re not turned on.

  • Turn your computer off when you’re not using it; The energy required to keep it in standby mode costs $65 a year.

  • Every 60 seconds of every day, the United States spends almost $ 1 million on energy.

  • Recycling just one aluminum can saves enough energy to run your TV for three hours. Recycling one glass bottle could provide enough energy to light a 100-watt lightbulb for four hours.

  • Only 4% of the energy put out by an incandescent lightbulb is light—the rest is wasted producing heat.

  • Over its lifetime, the average microwave oven uses more energy running its digital clock than it does heating food.

  • Talk about efficient: The Hubble Space Telescope completes one orbit around the Earth in just 97 minutes. To do it, the Hubble uses about the same amount of energy as it takes to light 30 lightbulbs.

  OFFICIAL

  LANGUAGES

  • A nation’s official language is a language that’s been given “privileged” status and is used for legal and public documents. Many countries have more than one, especially if several cultural groups live there.

  • The country with the most official languages is India, with 23: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Urdu, English, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Oriya, Konkani, Maithili, Manipuri, Santhalii, Tamil, Sindh, Te lugu, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi, Malayalam, and Sanskrit. (South Africa is second, with 11.)

  • Irish, the official first language of the Republic of Ireland, is spoken by less than a third of the population. English, its official second language, is spoken by nearly everyone.

  • Can a country have no official language? Yes—half of the world’s nations don’t have one, including the United States, the United Kingdom, and Sweden.

  • Israel’s official languages are Hebrew and Arabic.

  • Sprechen-vous Italiano? Switzerland has four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romansch.

  • New Zealand’s third official language, after English and Maori, is New Zealand Sign Language. It’s the first official sign language in the world.

  REMARKABLE

  BODIES

  • Sandy Allen, an American, is the world’s tallest living woman. She’s 7 feet, 7 ¼ inches tall and wears size 22 shoes.

  • The shortest man in the world, Younis Edwan of Jordan, is 25 ½ inches tall.

  • Bulgaria’s Kolyo Tanev Kolev has had a bullet lodged in his skull for more than 60 years.

  • In his lifetime, Maurice Creswick of South Africa has donated over 350 pints of blood.

  • China’s Xie Qiuping has been letting her hair grow since 1973; it’s now more than 18 feet long.

  • The U.K.’s Garry Turner can stretch his skin a distance of 6 ½ inches.

&nb
sp; • Lucky Diamond Rich of Australia had his entire body tattooed with black ink, including his eyelids, the skin between his toes, and his gums.

  • Lee Redmond of the United States hasn’t cut her fingernails since 1979. Combined, they measure over 24 feet long.

  • Weighing in at more than 1,400 pounds, Jon Brower Minnoch of Washington was officially the heaviest person in medical history.

  OPEN FOR

  BUSINESS

  • The first Sony product was a rice cooker.

  • U-Haul spends more money on advertising in the Yellow Pages than any other company.

  • Two-thirds of home-based businesses are owned by women.

  • The five most valuable brand names as of 2005: Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, GE, and Intel. The fastest up-and-coming brands are Apple, Blackberry, Google, Amazon.com, and Yahoo!

  • Nine out of 10 restaurants fail in their first year. Of the ones that stay open, 9 out of 10 fail in their second year.

  • Tuesday is the most productive day of the workweek in Canada.

  • Businessmen are called “salarymen” in Japan.

  • The average business document is copied 19 times. (And about one in every 10 of them gets lost.)

  • Tiffany & Co. made $4.98 in sales on their opening day in 1837.

  • The world’s most popular perfume: Chanel No. 5. One bottle is sold every 30 seconds.

  WEIGHTS AND

  MEASURES

  • How tiny can you get? A “micron” is equal to 1/1000th of a millimeter.

  • There’s a liquid measure called a “hogshead,” probably because it’s about the same size as a real hog’s head. It holds 432 pints.

  • A “dash” is 1/16 of a teaspoon.

  • Horses are measured in “hands.” This particular kind of hand is equivalent to four inches.

  • There are 86,400 seconds in a day.

  • A “gross” is one dozen dozens. That’s 12 times 12, which equals 144.

  • In England, a person’s weight is measured in “stones.” A stone is equal to 14 pounds, or 6.35 kg.

  • A “score” is a unit of measure that means 20. Four score years, for example, is 4 x 20, or 80 years.

  • Racetracks are measured in “furlongs.” There are eight furlongs in a mile.

  • One million hours add up to 114 years.

  • Here’s an easy way to remember that there are four quarts in a gallon: A quart is a quarter of a gallon.

  • It takes about 120 drops of water to fill a teaspoon.

  MYTHOLOGY

  • The Amazon rain forest in South America was named after a mythical tribe of female warriors who supposedly lived there.

  • Good name for a running shoe: Nike was the Greek goddess of victory.

  • Spiders are called arachnids after Arachne, a girl in Greek mythology who wove a tapestry that made fun of the gods and goddesses—not a good idea—so the goddess Athena turned her into a spider.

  • The word “cereal” comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and grain.

  • Some Native American peoples believed in “tricksters,” spirits who took animal forms, such as a fox or coyote, and caused mischief and humiliation.

  • In Greek myth, Pandora’s box—which contained all the world’s evils, and which Pandora was warned not to open, but she did, anyway—wasn’t a box. It was a jar.

  • The (former) planet Pluto was named after the Roman god of the underworld because it’s so far away from the Sun that it seems to be in eternal darkness.

  • Wednesday is named for the Norse god Odin. Thursday is named for Thor, the god of thunder.

  • The four winds, or Anemoi, from Greek mythology had names: They are Boreas (north wind), Notus (south wind), Eurus (east wind), and Zephyrus (west wind).

  PENCIL US IN

  • The word “pencil” is Latin for “little tail.”

  • We still call it “lead,” but the core of a modern pencil is actually a combination of graphite and clay.

  • The amount of carbon in the human body could fill about 9,000 pencils.

  • In 1851 there were 319 companies in Great Britain that manufactured pencils.

  • Americans buy 2.5 billion pencils a year

  • How many times can a pencil be sharpened? About 17 times.

  • 75 percent of all pencils sold in the United States are yellow. Why? Tradition. In the 1800s, the best pencils came from China, where yellow was associated with royalty.

  • Three things one ordinary pencil can do: 1) make about 4,000 check marks before needing to be sharpened again, 2) write 45,000 words, and 3) draw a line 35 miles long.

  • Pencils are international: They’re made of wood from Pacific cedars, graphite from Madagascar, and carnauba wax from Brazil.

  • Carpenters use square pencils so they won’t roll off roofs.

  • The largest pencil ever made is 65 feet high. (It’s on the grounds of a pencil factory in Malaysia.)

  ANTARCTICA

  • Of all the continents, Antarctica is the coldest (with temperatures as low as –129°F), the windiest (with winds as strong as 190 mph), and the highest (with an average altitude of 7,200 feet above sea level).

  • Antarctica is the only continent that has never had a native population of humans.

  • Some people visit Antarctica, though. Summer population: 4,115. Winter population: 1,046.

  • Antarctica isn’t “owned” by any country. In 1959, 12 nations (including the United States, France, Japan, and the Soviet Union) signed the Antarctic Treaty that set aside the continent for scientific study.

  • 90% of all the ice on Earth is located in Antarctica.

  • Antarctica has loads of ice, but it gets very little rainfall—only slightly more than the Sahara Desert gets—and doesn’t have much snowfall. Technically, that makes this ice-covered continent the largest desert on Earth.

  • In the winter, the ocean around Antarctica freezes into a vast ice sheet—more than 7 million square miles. The frozen seawater causes deep ocean currents that then drive ocean-current patterns all over the world.

  • You might be surprised to know that the South Pole has the clearest, calmest weather of any place on Earth.

  IT’S A

  WILD WORLD

  • Octopusses are highly intelligent. One at the Bronx Zoo in New York City figured out how to unscrew the lid from a jar to get to the food inside…in two minutes.

  • Black sheep have a better sense of smell than white sheep.

  • In one year a single beaver can chomp down more than 200 trees.

  • Chickens have terrible night vision.

  • A honeybee will die after it stings you—but only if it’s a female.

  • The next time you see a loaf of bread in the supermarket, think of this: It’s larger than a newborn polar-bear cub and about the same weight.

  • Millions of years ago, dolphins had legs. They looked like wolves (but acted more like cows).

  • One little slug can have as many as 27,000 teeth.

  • Sea otters use flat stones and rocks to help them pry mussel shells free from rocks and then open them.

  • The clown fish lives among sea anemones, luring in other fish for the sea anemones to eat.

  • The three-toed sloth is the slowest mammal in the world, barely reaching 0.1 miles an hour.

  AMERICA

  NUMERICAL

  • 45% of Americans don’t know that the sun is a star. (Did you?)

  • Approximately 25% of American kids aged 6 to 14 have a magazine subscription.

  • Only 40% of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments.

  • Seven out of 10 American homes use candles.

  • 80% of American homes have at least one can of WD-40 lubricant.

  • 70% of Americans 50 or older say they’re “very patriotic.” Only 32% of 18- to 34-year-olds say they are.

  • 63% of Americans aged 18 to 24 cannot locate Iraq on a map of
the Middle East. (Can you?)

  • Most Americans actually read the nutrition info on food packages, but half of those who do say they often purchase items even if they’re high in fat or sugar.

  • 90% of Americans say they believe in God. (Only 68% believe in the Devil.)

  • Eggs-actly two out of five Americans say they eat breakfast every day.

  • 22% of the world’s beer is produced in the United States.

  SPORTS

  NICKNAMES

  • Guys who’ve been there say that when NFL running back Jerome “The Bus” Bettis crashed into you, it felt like you’d been hit by a bus.

  • Eldrick “Tiger” Woods is named after a Vietnamese soldier-friend of his father.

  • Teammates called Willie Mays “The Say Hey Kid” because before he knew all their names, he greeted them with “Say hey, man.”

  • Baseball star Hideki Matsui was a feared hitter even as a kid. He earned the nickname “Godzilla” during Japan’s 1992 high school championships.

  • Basketball player Karl “The Mailman” Malone got his nickname because “he always delivers.”

  • All-around athlete and Olympic champ Mildred “Babe” Didrickson Zaharias was named for Babe Ruth after she hit five home runs in a baseball game.

  • Hockey’s Bernie “Boom-Boom” Geoffrion invented the slapshot. Fans say that his stick hit the puck so hard, it made a booming sound.

  • Baseball pitcher Leroy “Satchel” Paige was nicknamed by a friend who was with him on a day when he tried to steal a suitcase.

  POST IT

  • The United States Postal Service handles over 40% of the world’s mail volume.

  • The world’s largest post office is in Chicago, Illinois; the smallest is in Ochopee, Florida.

  • In 1973, the nation of Bhutan issued a set of postage stamps that were tiny phonograph records. They could be played on a turntable and featured folk songs.