22% of American women aged 20 gave birth while in their teens. In Switzerland and Japan, only 2% did so
"Formicophilia" is the fetish for having small insects crawl on your genitals
Sliced bread was patented by a jeweller, Otto Rohwedder, in 1928. He had been working on it for 16 years, having started in 1912 (Pictured below is Rohwedder and a newer model of his machine for slicing bread, circa 1930)
The Nobel Prize resulted form a late change in the will of Alfred Nobel, who did not want to be remembered after his death as a propagator of violence - he invented dynamite
The richest 10% of the French people are approximately fifty times better off than the poorest 10%
In the 1970's, the Rhode Island Legislature in the US entertained a proposal that there be a $2 tax on every act of sexual intercourse in the State
Native American Indians used to name their children after the first thing they saw as they left their tepees subsequent to the birth. Hence such names as Sitting Bull and Running Water (Pictured below is Chief Sitting Bull, who fought against the genocide of his people at the hands of American settlers and military)
The Emperor Caligula once decided to go to war with the Roman God of the sea, Neptune, and ordered his soldiers to throw their spears into the water at random
The American pilot Charles Lindbergh received the Service Cross of the German Eagle form Hermann Goering in 1938 - because of his trips to Nazi Germany, combined with a belief in eugenics, Lindbergh was suspected of being a Nazi sympathizer but it was never proven, and he denied the allegation although he did not deny his belief in the superiority of European genes to other races of people
The Earth’s moon is 240,000 miles away. Earth’s next closest neighbor is Venus, which comes as near as 24 million miles. After the moon and Venus, Mars is our next closest neighbor at 34 million miles away—though when Mars and Earth are at the opposite sides of their orbits around the sun, they are separated by 249 million miles
There have been four major global flu pandemics since 1900. The most recent pandemic is the current swine flu (officially named “Novel H1N1 Influenza A”). The last global pandemic was the Hong Kong flu (1968-1969) which killed approximately one million people. The Asian flu pandemic (1957-1958) originated in China and is estimated to have killed between one and four million people. The Spanish flu pandemic (1918-1919) killed between 50-100 million people worldwide
During a Mars winter, almost 20% of the air freezes
On the day the Roman Colosseum officially opened, 5,000 animals were killed. During its history, it has been estimated that over 500,000 people and over a million animals were killed there (Pictured below is a shot of the ruins of the once great Colosseum that included aqueducts for indoor toilets)
Thirty-nine decimal places of pi suffice for computing the circumference of a circle girding the known universe with an error no greater than the radius of a hydrogen atom
The National University of Mexico was founded in 1551 by Charles V of Spain and is the oldest university in North America
The father of calculus (meaning “pebble used in counting” from calx or “limestone”), Isaac Newton calculated pi to at least 16 decimal places
The probability of a first marriage ending in a divorce within 5 years is 20%, but the probability of a premarital cohabitation breaking up within 5 years is 49%. After 10 years, the probability of a first marriage ending is 33%, compared with 62% for cohabitations
Scientists have discovered than men's and women’s brains actually function somewhat differently. When focused on a task, men tend to use only one side of their brain at a time, devoting all of their attention and concentration to the task at hand. Women, on the other hand, tend to use both sides of the brain at the same time, making them more adept at "multi-tasking"
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Some Burmese Kayan women who, fleeing regular assaults by soldiers of the military government of Myanmar, become valuable exhibits at tourist attractions in neighboring Thailand--because of their tribal custom of wearing heavy metal rings around their necks from an early age. The metal stacks weigh 11 pounds or more and depress girls' clavicles, giving them the appearance of elongated necks, which the tribe (and many tourists) regard as exotic. While human rights activists heap scorn on these Thai "human zoos" of ring-necked women, a Nacogdoches, Tex., poultry plant recently began offering some of the women a more attractive choice - lose the rings and come work in Texas, de-boning chickens
The Montana House of Representatives passed a tough drunk-driving bill in March to combat the state's high DUI rate, but it came over the objection of Rep. Alan Hale (and later, Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy). Hale, who owns a bar in Basin, Mont., complained that tough DUI laws "are destroying small businesses" and "destroying a way of life that has been in Montana for years and years." (Until 2005, drinking while driving was common and legal outside of towns as long as the driver wasn't drunk.) Furthermore, Hale said, people need to drive home after they drink. "[T]hey are not going to hitchhike." Sen. Windy Boy said such laws put the legislature on "the path of criminalizing everyone in Montana"
Arifinito (he goes by one name), a member of the Indonesian parliament, resigned in April after a news photographer in the gallery zoomed in on the tablet computer he was watching to capture him surfing Internet pornography sites. Arifinito's conservative Islamic Prosperous Justice Party campaigned for a tough anti-pornography law in 2008
