A catfish has 27,000 taste buds more than any other animal.
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks or it will digest itself.
The cells that make up the antlers of a moose are the fastest growing cells in nature.
Butterflies taste with their feet.
A giraffe has a tongue that is 14 inches long and black in color.
In 1903, driving his famous "999" built by Henry Ford, Berner Eli ("Barney") Oldfield became the first man to achieve 60 miles per hour, a speed many doctors of the day claimed would cause deafness.
The oldest word in the English language is TOWN.
It took Napoleon four hours to send a message from Rome to Paris - almost 700 miles - using a semaphore systems to signal from mountaintop to mountaintop.
Billy Crystal, who played Jodie Dallas in the prime-time sitcom 'Soap' from 1977 to 1981 portrayed the first openly homosexual character on a nationally broadcast TV series.
The bat is the only land mammal that is native to New Zealand.
The 'Dandelion' flower in French means 'lion's tooth', or dente de lion, for the tooth like points on it's leaves.
The word Koala in the Australian Aborigine language means 'no drink.' The Australian marsupial gets all the liquid it needs from the eucalyptus leaves it eats.
Dairy products make up 29% of all food consumed in the United States.
The world record for rocking non-stop in a rocking chair is 440 hours.
Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left handed people do.
There are 1,525,000,000 miles of telephone wire strung across America.
The length of beard an average man would grow if he never shaved: 27.5 feet.
Australia is the only country to have monotremes. These are mammals that lay eggs but suckle their young on milk once they have hatched. The animals are the platypus and the echidna.
Every ear of corn has an even number of rows of kernels.
Chevrolet made so many of their famous 'Small Block' V8 engines that if you laid them out end to end they would circle the earth 7.5 times.
Airbags explode at 200 mph.
Driving 55 mph instead of 65 mph increases your car mileage by about 15%.
There is a 1/4 pound of salt in every gallon of seawater.
If we had the same mortality rate now as in 1900, more than half the people in the world today would not be alive.
The average person makes about 1,140 telephone calls each year.
The first product to have a UPC bar code on its packaging was Wrigley's gum.
The layout of the Simpson's house keeps changing. Sometimes the hall runs in from the door, and sometimes it runs across it. The upstairs bedrooms change order all the time, but the tree is always outside Bart's window. And the house number is sometimes 742, sometimes it's 762.
The only marsupial with a pouch on its back is the bandicoot.
The smallest fish in the world is the Trimattum Nanus in the Chagos Archipelago. It measures 0.33 inches.
The characters Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street were named after Bert the cop and Ernie the taxi driver in Frank Capra's 'It's A Wonderful Life.'
The criminal penalty for a law enforcement officer convicted of planting evidence in a capital murder case is the same penalty as the person against whome the evidence is planted. In other words, the cop can get capital punishment for planting evidence in a capital case.
The average person blinks 25 times per minute.
Canadian photographer Chris Haney and sportswriter Scott Abbott were inspired to invent the Trivial Pursuit game after competing against each other in a Scrabble game.
The "you are here" arrow on maps is called an ideo locator.
The smallest unit of time is the yoctosecond.
The shortest British monarch was Charles I, who was 4'9" and that was before he lost his head!
The words for the numbers "eleven" and "twelve" in English derive from the Anglo-Saxon for "one left" and "two left", respectively. "Aend-lefene" and "Twa-lefene" describe the process of counting, from left to right, your fingers and then going back one or two.
Tourism, tourist, come from the first people who ever mass travelled for pleasure, being british citizens who visited the Chateaux de la Loire in France, the capital city of which is Tours.
Garibaldi, fighter for Italian unification, made all his own clothes when on campaigns but he couldn't sew buttonholes so all his trousers laced up.
Penn State's East Halls student housing is the largest in the world.
Dogs and bees smell fear.
Every time you pick your nose you lose three nasal hairs.
Dolphins swim in circles while they sleep with the eye on the outside of the circle open to keep watch for predators. After a certain amount of time they reverse and swim in the opposite direction with the opposite eye open.
Now a days 50% of people who get married get divorced.
There are over 180 asteroids that could wipe out the earth, that pass through our orbit every year. Luckily we aren't at the same spot in the orbit as they pass through.
If you could save all the times your eyes blink in one life time and use them all at once you would see blackness for 1.2 years!
An average drummer can play 23 notes per second, however, Michael Flatly (Riverdance, and Lord of the Dance), holds the world record for tap dancing, 35 taps per second.
Cockroaches are the only creatures on earth capable of surviving a nuclear blast. The only material is diamonds.
If sharks stop swimming for more than 30 seconds they will drown!
There has never been a lip print that has been identical to another, similar to fingers.
Gianni Romme, the new Olympic speed skating champion, averages a speed of 47 km and 120 meters per hour during the 5000 meters and 45 km and 284 meters during the 10,000 meters.
Apparently there was only one child in first class that did not survive the Titanic.
Bamboo may grow 3 feet in 24 hours.
If each count was a second it would take 12 days to count to a million and 32 years to count to a billion.
When reflected from bright lights (head lights) deer's eyes are orange, whereas cats and dogs eyes are green. Rabbits eyes remain black.
The ozone hole over Antarctica is estimated to be almost 3 times the area of the United States.
Every day the human population increases by about 200,000 people.
In 1763 James-Earl Patrick of Warwick England invented a special harness to hold down young unwilling brides on their wedding night. It consisted of several straps that could be adjusted to pin the bride to the bed in a variety of positions and allow the groom to receive his honeymoon right. It is believed that the British Monarchy had several such harnesses specially made in anticipation of future Royal weddings. Patrick himself was believed to have been a bigamist, to take maximum use out of his invention.
A rainbow can occur only when the sun is 40 degrees or less above the horizon.
Tigers have round pupils and yellow irises (except for the blue eyes of white tigers). Due to a retinal adaptation that reflects light back to the retina, the night vision of tigers is six times better than that of humans.
Your ears and nose continue to grow throughout your entire life.
Born on November 3, 1718, British politician, John Montague, the 4th Earl of Sandwich, is credited with naming the "sandwich." He developed a habit of eating beef between slices of toast so he could continue to play cards uninterrupted.
Typewriter is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.
In Italy, a campaign for Schweppes Tonic Water translated the name into Schweppes Toilet Water.
Blue toothbrushes are used by people more than red toothbrushes.
The average human produces 25,000 quarts of spit in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.
Apples are more efficient than caffeine in keeping people awake in the mornings.
The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan."
The human tongue has approximately 9,000 taste buds.
A mosquito has 47 teeth.
The great pyramid of King Khafu is so big that 10 football fields could fit onto the ground area covered by the pyramid.
The wind speed inside a tornado is 310 mph.
The skin of the adult human body weighs approximately 6 pounds.
The average flea can leap about 8 inches, more than 100 times its own height.
The Wright Brothers' historic flight lasted 12 seconds.
The height of the 984-foot-tall Eiffel Tower varies by as much as six inches, depending on the temperature.
An electic eel gives off an average discharge of 400 volts.
The deepest hole ever drilled was in the Kola Peninsula (Former USSR) - 7 miles deep.
The human body contains about 60,000 miles of blood vessels.
Quebec and Newfoundland are the only two Canadian provinces which do not allow personalized license plates.
Abdul Kassem Ismael, Grand Vizier of Persia in the tenth century, carried his library with him wherever he went. The 117,000 volumes were carried by 400 camels which were trained to walk in alphabetical order.
The first national park, Yellowstone, was proclaimed a national park in 1872, however, there was no National Park Service until 1916. Until then, the parks were administered by the U.S. Army. When the Park Service was formed they got their first uniforms from the Army, hence the ranger (campaign) hats.
The opening to the cave in which a bear hibernates is always on the north slope.
Tmesis is the act of putting one word inside another, for example, abso-bloody-lutely.
101 Dalmatians and Peter Pan (Wendy) are the only two Disney cartoon features with both parents that are present and don't die throughout the movie.
Kermit the Frog is left-handed.
Strawberries, blueberries, and other "berries" are not actually berries according to botanical definition. The botanical group "berry" actually consists of things like cucumbers, oranges, and grapes!
The term "dixie" was first used by a New Orleans bank that issued bilingual French-American $10 bills ("dix" is the French word for "10"). It wasn't until Daniel Decatur Emmett's 1859 song "Dixie" that it was applied to mean the south.
The "lock" in the word "wedlock" comes from the Old English word "lac," which means "action" ("wed" is Old English for "pledge").
The expression "good to the last drop" used by Maxwell House Coffee was coined by Theodore Roosevelt.
The first white person to popularize the use of the word "groovy" was Helen O'Connell, a singer with Jimmy Dorsey's band in the 1940's.
Did you know that the word "gullible" was taken out of the English dictionary?
A baby blue whale grows 9 lbs. an hour from the time it is born until it's full grown.
A chicken can run 9 miles and hour.
The only word in the English language that has 4 sets of double letters in a row is balloonneer, which is the name for a balloon seller or for a person who controls a hot air balloon.
Greenland is the largest island in the world.
You gain less calories from eating celery than you use up chewing it.
An Olympic swimming pool is 50 meters.
The average weight of a Giant Schnauzer is 97 lbs.
r2d2 is named r2d2 because it first appeared in reel 2 disk 2 in the making of the movie.
The energy produced by a single flash of lightning is enough to support an average American family for only one day.
With a population of fewer than nine thousand people, Montpelier, Vermont is the smallest state capital in the U.S.
In English, "four" is the only digit that has the same number of letters as its value.
Ronald Reagan was the only divorced president.
Dr. Samuel A. Mudd was the physician who set the leg of Lincoln's assassin John Wilkes Booth, and whose shame created the expression, "His name is Mudd."
Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.
Waylon Jennings gave up his seat to Buddy Holly on the plane that crashed and killed everyone on it that night.
Bill Clinton is the first left-handed American president to serve two terms.
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
The phrase "sleep tight" originated when mattresses were set upon ropes woven through the bed frame. To remedy sagging ropes, one would use a bed key to tighten the ropes.
The Yellowstone River is the longest undammed river west of the Mississippi.
"Polish" is the only word in the English language that when capitalized is changed from a noun or a verb to a nationality.
On average, a hedgehog's heart beats 300 times a minute.
The first song played on Armed Forces Radio during operation Desert Shield was Rock the Casba by the Clash.
In 1920 Ray Chapman, a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, was the only player ever killed as a result of a major league baseball game. He was hit in the temple with a pitch and died the next day.
Hong Kong has the world's largest double-decker tram fleet in the world.
Jackals have one more pair of chromosomes than dogs or wolves.
The Speed of light is 186,282.297 miles per second.
More capital cities begin with B than any other letter: Berlin, Berne, Bonn, Bucharest, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Brasilia, Baghdad, Bratislava, Brussels, Belgrade, Bogato, and of course, Belfast.
Have you ever noticed that the SAVE icon on Microsoft Software shows a floppy disk, with the shutter on backwards?
The fingerprints of koalas are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.
The pH of cow's milk is 6.
The Panama Canal was excavated from the coasts inland; the final short segment was cleared by explosives detonated by President Woodrow Wilson, who sent the signal by wire from New York City.
The word 'samba' means to rub navals together.
In Disney's Fantasia, the Sorcerer's name is "Yensid," which happens to be Disney, backwards.
An ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain.
Skin is thickest at the back at 1/6 of an inch.
The Netherlands and the United States both have national anthems which do not mention their country's name.
The longest non-medical term in the english language is antidisestablishmentarianism which means opposition to the disestablishment of a church or religious body.
Did you know that Casey Casem did the voice for Shaggy on Scooby-Doo?
If a statue in the park of a person on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle; if the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle; if the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.
Each king in a deck of playing cards represents a great king from history: Spades--King David, Clubs--Alexander the Great, Hearts--Charlemagne, and Diamonds--Julius Caesar.
The reason firehouses have circular stairways is from the days of yore when the engines were pulled by horses. The horses were stabled on the ground floor and figured out how to walk up straight staircases.
The giant Sequoia tree bears seeds so small that 3,000 of them weigh one ounce.
A single ounce of gold can be beaten into a film so fine that it would cover 100 square feet.
Clans of long ago that wanted to get rid of their unwanted people without killing them would burn their houses down - hence the expression "to get fired."
The San Francisco cable cars are the only mobile national monuments.
In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
47 czars are buried within the Kremlin.
An average giraffe heart weighs 25 pounds and is 2 feet long.
Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite.
Almonds are a member of the peach family.
Armadillos have four babies at a time and they are always the same sex.
When spelt phonetically, Esso means stalled car in Japan.
Penguins can jump as high as 6 feet in the air.
No one knows exactly why tigers are striped, but scientists think that the stripes act as camouflage, and help tigers hide from their prey. The Sumatran tiger has the most stripes of all the tiger subspecies, and the Siberian tiger has the fewest stripes. Tiger stripes are like human fingerprints; no two tigers have the same pattern of stripes.
The longest street in the world is Yonge Street in Canada. It begins in Toronto, Ontario and ends 1,178 miles to the northwest in the town of Rainy River.
In Germany, Sunbeam's Mist-Stick curling iron was translated into manure wand.
Nectar from flowers, not your blood, is the main food of mosquitoes. The blood we lose to mosquitos - females only - is needed for protein to help them lay their eggs.
"The Nelly" is the Canadian equivalent of the Emmy.
A Sailfish is the fastest known fish, it can swim more than 60 mph.
The walls of the igloo stand up much better to modern artillery than a concrete barricade, according to tests conducted by the Swedish army. Not only do it's walls absorb an artillery blast, but they are almost invisible from the air and can't be spotted by the infrared sensors that guide today's missiles.
In an ancient Roman amphitheater or stadium, a vomitory was a large opening that served as an entrance to or exit from a tier of seats.
The famous poet John Keats was known to his close friends by the nickname of Junkets.
The greyhound and the terrier were crossed to create the whippet.
The fast food chain "Arby's", founded in 1964, was named for brothers Forrest and LeRoy Raffel. The name stands for RB--Raffel Brothers.
Everyone knows that spinach is loaded in iron and makes you stronger - just look what it has done for Popeye's career. Well, Popeye was wrong. So were all of those parents that stuffed it down their kids' throats. In reality, spinach has no more iron in it than any other vegetable. This spinach misconception dates back to the 1950's when a food analyst made an error while calculating the iron in spinach. His decimal place was off by one place, suggesting that spinach had ten times as much iron content than it really did.
The largest known kidney stone weighed 1.36kg.
One third of all cancers are sun related.
Aeschylus, the Greek poet and dramatist, was killed when an eagle flying overhead dropped a turtle on his head.
The Black Death reduced the population of Europe by one third in the period from 1347 to 1351.
The fig tree is the only fruit bearing tree that does not have a blossom.
Cow tipping is impossible. Cows do not sleep standing up.
Venus was once thought to be a lush jungle world. Nowadays we know that an unprotected person on the surface would be crushed, broiled, corroded before he or she could suffocate.
The dye saffron comes from the crocus.
DNA stands for Deoxyribonucleicacid.
The average weight of Miss America was 132 pounds in 1954, in 1980 it was 117 pounds.
The speed of a typical raindrop is 7 miles per hour.
Broadway, originating from Lower Manhattan at Bowling Green and ending in Albany, is one of the world's longest streets at 150 miles. The official name of this street is Highway 9.
There is a correlation between the phase of the moon and the frequency of emergency room cases in hospitals.
The names of the three wise monkeys are: Mizaru--See no evil, Mikazaru--Hear no evil, and Mazaru--Speak no evil.
Another recent study shows that computer users blink an average of 7 times per minute. The average persons blinks 22 times per minute.
If you're going to eat fast food, the odds are 2 out of 5 you will buy it at McDonald's. The odds are 1 out of 5 you will choose Burger King, and 1 out of 10 for Hardee's and for Wendy's.
Seven thousand people die from food poisoning every year in the U.S., and another seven million get ill from eating contaminated food. Eggs, unwashed produce, and rotten meat are the main culprits.
Since 1977, American's consumption of Mexican foods has increased four-fold, and consumption of snack foods such as crackers, popcorn, pretzels, and corn chips has tripled.
The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth II, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.
Most people know that the legendary trumpet player Louis Armstrong was nicknamed Satchmo. However, did you know that Satchmo was short for Satchel Mouth?
66% of Japan is covered in forest.
Recreational boaters spent about $17.7 billion on boats, motors, trailers and accessories in 1996.
Mexican free-tailed bats sometimes fly up to two miles high to feed or to catch tail-winds that carry them over long distances at speeds of more than 60 miles per hour.
During the Middle Ages, very few people--including the average knight--could read or write. Since the Church played such a large role in medieval life, learning took place in the monasteries, where books were written and the first libraries were kept.
When Ronald Reagan was President and he got his first hearing aid, the sale of hearing aids went up in the United States by 40%.
The wettest spot in the world is located on the island of Kauai. Mt. Waialeale consistently records rainfall at the rate of nearly 500 inches per year.
A single little brown bat can catch 600 mosquitoes in just one hour.
The average person, some experts estimate, speaks about 31,500 words per day.
Margarine was developed in the 1800’s by a Frenchman who was searching for a substitute for butter, which was costly and scarce at the time. First called 'oleomargarine,' derived from the Greek word margarites (meaning pearl) and the Latin term oleum (meaning oil), 'oleomargarine' first came to the U.S. in the late 1800s. Today, the term oleomargarine has been shortened by common usage to 'margarine.'
The phrase "back to square one" (or "back at square one", which was the original way of saying it) comes from football radio commentaries from the 1930s. There being no picture, these live reports would explain the position of play by dividing the football pitch into numbered grids and "square one" was just in front of the goal ...... so, when a ball went out of play and resulted in a goal kick, the play was "back at square one".
Barbie's measurements if she were life-size; 39-29-33.
If you go blind in one eye you only lose about one fifth of your vision but all your sense of depth.
Women blink nearly twice as much as men.
The human heart creates enough pressure to squirt blood 30ft.
The first CD pressed in the US was Bruce Springsteen's 'Born in the USA'
The thumbnail grows the slowest; the middle nail grows the fastest.
Dates are the only fruit that has no aroma or odor.
The toes of mummies are wrapped individually.
The plastic things on the end of shoelaces are called aglets.
A human has a bone just after the spine ends, which proves that humans once had tails.
The queen of England has two birthdays.
The Beatles song "Dear Prudence" was written about Mia Farrow's sister, Prudence, when she wouldn't come out and play with Mia and the Beatles at a religious retreat in India .
Neither the emu or kangaroo can walk backwards. This is why they're on the Australian Coat of Arms.
No piece of paper can be folded more than 7 times.
The smoke detector was invented in 1969
The average flea can jump up to 150 times its own length. To match that a human would have to jump 1,000 feet.
Women, according to the U.S. National Health Survey team, have more headaches than men.
The most popular name for a boat in 1996 was Serenity.
The average cough comes out of your mouth at 60MPH.
