"E" is the most frequently used letter in the English alphabet, "Q" is the least - When speaking English, "I" is the most common word spoken and, therefore, the most common letter used
According to the Detroit Free Press, 68% of professional hockey players have lost at least one tooth during a game in professional hockey during the past 50 years
The favorite wins fewer than 30 percent of all horse races
The word "karate" means "empty hand"
The favorite wins fewer than 30 percent of all horse races
The human eyes can perceive more than 1 million simultaneous visual impressions and are able to discriminate among nearly 8 million gradations of color
When young, the hoatzin, a crested, olive-colored South American bird, has claws on its wings (The hoatzin pictured below is about to take flight- the claws on its wings are located on the underside and near the edges, and are not fully extended unless the bird is snagging the skin of its prey - slightly visible are the white ends of the claws in this picture)
The first lightweight luggage designed for air travel was conceived by aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart
Vampire bats do not suck blood - They bite, then lick up the flow (Pictured below a vampire bat has large ears that help with navigation - the bat uses echo-location - and large teeth for biting, and to many people can look menacing... and not only can they fly, but they usually bite a sleeping mammal (their typical prey) by walking up to it, and they can walk away at about 4 miles an hour)
The human heart beats about 70 times per minute, the shrew's 600 times a minute, a hummingbird's heart can beat up to 1,300 times per minute. By comparison, the blue whale, the largest mammal in the world has a heart that weighs 1,300 lbs and beats only about 10 times per minute
In the American film industry, a "chute cowboy" is a slang expression for experienced parachutists that either perform or assist with stunts involving parachutes - nearly half of these "cowboys" are stunt women
"Lobster shift" is American slang for the night shift of a newspaper staff or late-night delivery person who would deliver newspapers to storefronts - the term, though accepted now as meaning only a late-night worker, was originally a derogatory term - lobsters were believed to be stupid animals, and those who could find work only at night were deemed as less competent, and were often immigrants not fluent with the English language
A quart-size pail holds 8 million grains of sand
Aluminum forms one-twelfth of the Earth's crust
Lightning kills more people in the US than any other natural disaster: an average of 400 dead and 1,000 injured yearly (Pictured below a man's scar from a lightning strike has left an image that resembles the strikes we see in the sky)
Lightning strikes the earth 1000 times a minute
Horse racing is one of the most ancient sports, originating in Central Asia among prehistoric nomadic tribesmen around 4500 B.C.E. When humans began keeping written records, horse racing was already an organized sport throughout the world (Discovered in the late 1800s, this cave drawing in northern China depicts horse racing, with the large horse representing the winner)
Americans consume more than 10 billion bowls of soup each year
In 1951, Jack in the Box opened its first restaurant in San Diego, California, pioneering the drive-thru concept and featuring 18-cent hamburgers - Jack in the Box was the first fast-food restaurant to introduce the fast-food breakfast
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| (1951) America's first drive-thru caters to the order of a car in the vintage photograph |
It has been estimated that at least a million meteors have hit the Earth's land surface, which is only 25 percent of the planet. Every last trace of more than 99 percent of the craters thus formed has vanished, erased by wind, water, and living things
While known as a painter, sculptor, architect, and engineer, Leonard da Vinci was the first to record that the number of rings in the cross section of a tree trunk revealed its age. He also discovered that the width between the rings indicated the annual moisture
The first spacecraft to send back pictures of the far side of the Moon was Luna 3 in October 1959. The photographs covered about 70 percent of the far side (Pictured below is the Luna 3 and an image of the far side of the moon)
NEWS FEED:
China's Zisiqiao Village in Zhejiang province is actually headquarters for the country's revered snake industry, with 160 families raising about three million serpents a year, mostly to harvest livers and gall bladders for soup, wine, and other products consumed for their immunity-building properties. In a June Reuters dispatch, one farmer described the 25-year evolution of "Snake Town" from a place where farmers simply threw males and females together for breeding to today's sophisticated production facilities that supply proper snake diets, research measures to enrich female fertility, and provide enhanced incubation conditions
Alleged gang members Barbara Lee, 45, and Marco Ibanez, 19, were arrested in Hallandale Beach, Florida in April and charged in the assault and stabbing of four deaf people. Lee was at the Ocean's Eleven Lounge one evening when she saw several people in a group make hand signs that she interpreted as disrespecting her own gang's signs, and, according to police, left to recruit Ibanez to come administer retribution. Unknown to Lee or Ibanez, the group were deaf people using sign language and had no idea they were making "gang" signs
Parkridge Medical Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee apologized and paid the bill in June for exhuming the body of the recently-deceased Kenneth Manis. The man who had shared Mr. Manis's hospital room during his final days had reported that his dentures were missing, and the hospital determined that they had been mistakenly buried with Mr. Manis
