Really Interesting Stuff You Don't Need to Know Volume 2

1,200 Fascinating Facts

De: David Fickes

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

With added illustrations !!

Do you love trivia and interesting facts? This book has 1,200 fascinating and educational facts including periodic illustrations to add even more to your enjoyment. The facts cover a wide range of subjects: animals, arts, history, literature, miscellaneous, movies, science and nature, sports, television, U.S. geography, U.S. presidents, and world geography; for example:

• If you could fold an average thickness (0.004 inch) paper in half 42 times, it would be thick enough to reach the moon; if you could fold it 103 times, it would be 109 billion light-years thick, thicker than the observable universe is wide.
• Camels store water in their bloodstream not in their hump. They can drink up to 20 gallons at a time; the hump is almost all fat and serves as an alternative energy source and helps regulate body temperature. By concentrating fat in the hump as opposed to being spread over their body, they are better able to handle hot climates.
• About 12% of people dream entirely in black and white. The exposure to color television seems to have had a significant impact on whether people dream in color; people who grew up with little access to color television dream in black and white about 25% of the time. In the 1940s before color television, the numbers were reversed with about 75% of people reporting they dreamed in black and white.
• Mushrooms are more closely related to humans than they are to plants. Animals and fungi branched off from plants about 1.1 billion years ago; later, animals and fungi separated genealogically making mushrooms closer to humans than to plants.
• Venus rotates so slowly that you could watch a sunset forever just by walking towards it. At the equator, Venus rotates 4 mph; the Earth rotates 1,038 mph at the equator.
• To avoid dating relatives, Iceland has a phone app that lets users bump phones to see if they are related. Iceland has a relatively small population of over 300,000 people and is somewhat insular, so most people are distantly related. The app emits a warning alarm if people are closely related, so they know not to date.
• When you read to yourself, your tongue and vocal cords still get movement signals from the brain. The process is known as subvocal speech and is characterized by minuscule movements in the larynx and other muscles involved in the articulation of speech; the movements are undetectable without the aid of machines.
• All the gold ever mined in the history of the world would fit in a 67-foot cube.
• In traditional vampire folklore, one of their weaknesses is arithmomania, a compulsion to count things. This weakness can be used to defend against them by placing grains of rice or sand out which they will be compelled to count. Therefore, Sesame Street's Count von Count's love of counting is part of being a vampire.
• Koala bear fingerprints are virtually indistinguishable from human fingerprints, even with careful analysis under a microscope. They have the same loopy, whirling ridges as humans.
• The sound you hear when you hold a seashell to your ear is surrounding environmental noise resonating in the seashell cavity. In a soundproof room, you don't hear anything when you hold a seashell to your ear.
• Over the last 20,000 years, the size of the average human brain has shrunk by about 10%. There are no clear answers to why.
• Before it was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, the Mona Lisa was not widely known outside the art world. Leonardo da Vinci painted it in 1507, but it wasn't until the 1860s that critics noticed it as a masterpiece. It wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery at the Louvre, let alone the entire Louvre.