Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin
If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime
It takes a lobster approximately 7 years to grow to be one pound
The average adult male ostrich, the world's largest living bird, weighs up to 345 pounds - In some countries, people race ostriches, particularly popular in parts of Africa
The average American spends 120 hours a month watching television, the equivalent of five complete days in front of the TV
The average elephant produces 50 pounds of dung each day
The average healthy porpoise lives 30 years
The average human head weighs about eight pounds
Thomas Edison holds the record for the most patents issued for an individual inventor in the US with 1,093
Green turtles may breed for the first time when they are between 25 to 50 years old. This figure varies, depending upon the creature's range and the diet of the maturing turtle (Pictured below a pair of green turtles mate underwater, ages unknown)
Among American children under 18, Facebook was ranked third in the top 100 searches of 2009, behind YouTube and Google. Sex and porn rounded out the top five searches
The ice cream cone was invented in the summer of 1904 by Charles Menches. It made its debut one year later at the St. Louis World Fair
Approximately 60% of the water used by households in the United States and Canada during the summer is used for watering flowers and lawns - some municipalities and townships put restrictions on water use during periods of drought to conserve water
Solstice derives from a combination of Latin words meaning "sun" and "to stand still" - two solstices occur each year: The Winter Solstice is on December 21, and the Summer Solstice is on June 21
Midsummer was thought to be a time of magic, when evil spirits were said to appear. To thwart them, Pagans often wore protective garlands of herbs and flowers. One of the most powerful of them was a plant called 'chase-devil', which is known today as St. John's Wort and still used by modern herbalists as a mood stabilizer that alleviates depression and anxiety
When Kellogg's Raisin Bran first came out in 1942, they had a bunch of grapes instead of raisins next to the name of the cereal on the cereal box. In 1966, Sunny the happy smiling sun came out and that is when the grapes turned into raisins
Going barefoot has often demonstrated humility and piety in the presence of God. Hindu documents warn worshippers to remove their footwear before entering a shrine. Muslim tradition demands that shoes be removed before entering a place of worship
The idea of Boxing Day (Dec. 26) was to give boxes of food and clothing to the poor. In most countries it's now viewed as an opportunity to take advantage of reduced prices to get merchandise for oneself
Worldwide, 7 out of 10 people believe in life after death
The risk of being struck by a falling meteorite for a human is one occurrence every 9,300 years
In the Durango desert, in Mexico, a spot called the "Zone of Silence" exists where you can't pick up clear TV, cell phone, or radio signals - locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky (Pictured below is a streak from a meteor shower, which some scientists say is what the locals are actually seeing)
NEWS FEED:
Tihomir Petrov, 43, a mathematics professor at California State University Northridge, was charged in January
with misdemeanors for allegedly urinating twice on the office door of a colleague with whom he had been feuding. (Petrov was identified by a hidden camera installed after the original puddles turned up.) Petrov is the author of several scholarly papers, with titles such as "Rationality of Moduli of Elliptic Fibrations With Fixed Monodromy"
Gangs in Durban, South Africa, have recently begun stealing expensive anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs destined for AIDS patients and using them in the country's most popular street drug "whoonga," a highly addictive, smoked cocktail of detergent, rat poison, marijuana, and the ARVs. The crisis was reported by KwaZulu- Natal province drug-abuse organizations and Durban police, who stood by their claims despite attempts by South African president Jacob Zuma to assure international suppliers of ARVs that more were needed and that none were being diverted for whoonga
Prison inmates in the United States finagled $39 million in undeserved federal tax refunds in 2009, according to a February 2010 report by the U.S. Treasury Department's inspector general for tax administration. In Key West, Florida, for example, where prisoner Danilo Suarez was sentenced in January to five years in prison for filing multiple fraudulent returns, jailers discovered a pass-around sheet of instructions for false filings. While some refunds were legitimate (e.g., on pre-incarceration investment activity), IRS was found to conduct fraud screenings on fewer than half of all returns filed by prisoners. (IRS complained that, until 2008, it was illegal for the agency to share information with state corrections officials- or even with the federal Bureau of Prisons)
State law in Tennessee prohibits registered sex offenders from re-contacting their victims, but there is no such restriction on anyone convicted of a sex crime before 2007, and still in prison, but who is not yet on the registered list. (Post-2007 sex criminals are automatically registered upon conviction.) Consequently, according to a February WMC-TV report, convicted molester Terry McConnell cannot be prevented from mailing birthday cards to one of his two pre-2007 victims (one reading, "I cannot believe my little tot-tot is already a teenager. You might be tired of me writing this, but I can't get over how fast you are growing up"). (Prison officials say their limited resources are better used on monitoring incoming mail rather than outgoing)
