She’s Royal

1. A ‘clue’ originally meant a ball of thread. This is why one is said to ‘unravel’ the clues of a mystery.

2. The act of snapping one’s fingers has a name. It is called a ‘fillip.’

3. The longest cells in the human body are the motor neurons. They can be up to 4.5 feet long and run from the lower spinal cord to the big toe.

4. Each unit on the Richter Scale is equivalent to a power factor of about 32. So a 6 is 32 times more powerful than a 5.

5. Punctuation did not come into use until the advent of printing in the fifteenth century. Before that, words written by scribes were runtogetherlikethis.

6. The word ‘sabotage’ is derived from a French word for shoe. In France, a sabot is a kind of heavy boot or shoe worn by workmen. During the Industrial Revolution, when machine-driven mills were first introduced in France, workers dis-placed from their jobs by these automata would throw their shoes into the gear mechanisms, wrecking the engines and thus sabotaging the business.

7. The last stagecoach holdup took place in Tennessee on October 15, 1882.

8. Vampire and fruit bats can hear pitch as high as 210,000 hertz, ten times higher than humans. The dolphin’s hearing is even more sensitive, with an acuity of 280,000 hertz.

9. The ancient Egyptians often named their children after animals-such as Gazelle, Monkey or Wolf.

10. Psycho was the first Hollywood film that showed a toilet flushing-thereby generating many complaints.

11. The FDA has concluded that frozen fruits and vegetables are just as healthy as fresh and may even retain their nutritional value longer

12. TIP is the acronym for “To Insure Promptness.”

13. If you stack one million US $1 bills, it would be 110m (361 ft) high and weight exactly 1 ton.

14. In 1865, Frederik Idestam founded a wood-pulp mill in
southern Finland, naming it Nokia. It rapidly gained worldwide recognition, attracting a large number of workforce and the town Nokia was born. In 1898, the Finnish Rubber Works company opened in Nokia, taking on the town name in the 1920s. After WWII, the rubber company took a majority shareholding in the Finnish Cable Work. In 1967, the companies consolidated to become the Nokia Group. The recession of the 1990s led the group to focus on the mobile phone market.

15. According to suicide statistics, Monday is the favored day for self-destruction.

16. Many horses live, until they are over 30 years old. The oldest recorded horse was a barge horse in England known as “Old Bill”. He lived till the grand old age of 62!

17. Cows might very well be one of the main contributors to global warming. In the United States, cattle release some 5.5 million metric tons of methane annually.

18. Toothbrushes before 1938 were made using the hair of horses, hogs and beavers.

19. The name Dracula means, Son of the Devil, in Romanian.

20. Most spiders have 8 eyes.

21. The driest inhabited place in the world is Aswan, Egypt where the annual average rainfall is 0.02 inches.

22. The air at the summit of Mount Everest, 29,029 feet is only a third as thick as the air at sea level

23. On the day that Alexander Graham Bell was buried the entire US telephone system was shut down for 1 minute in tribute.

24. Chewing gum stimulates areas of the brain responsible for the release of nervous energy. Keep some handy for the next time you feel stressed and need something to calm your nerves.

25. Lebanon is the only country in the Middle East that does not have a desert.

26. The actor who portrayed the “Marlboro Man” for the world’s best-selling cigarette died of lung cancer.

27. The ridges on the U.S. dollar, half dollar, quarter and dime is called ‘reeding.’

28. In 1638 John Harvard, a wealthy Massachusetts settler, left half his estate $1480 to a two year old local bible college. It was the largest gift to the new school at that point;the school repaid the favor by calling itself Harvard College.

29. At the Pacific Ocean’s greatest depth–36,200 feet (in the
Marianas trench southwest of Guam)–the pressure is 16,124
pounds-per-square inch, more than 1,000 times the atmospheric pressure at sea level (14.7 pounds-per-square inch)