The Ultimate Illustrated Bathroom Reader Volume 2

1,000 Fascinating Facts to Entertain, Amuse, and Educate All Ages

By: David Fickes

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

If you love trivia and interesting facts, this book has 1,000 fascinating facts and 96 black-and-white photographs to entertain, amuse, and educate all ages. It makes the perfect bathroom reader or coffee table book and is a great conversation starter and source of entertainment while learning a little. The facts and illustrations cover a wide variety of topics; for example:

• Almost 3% of the ice in the Antarctic glaciers is from penguin urine.
• Wilmer McLean's homes were involved in both the beginning and end of the American Civil War. On July 21, 1861, the First Battle of Bull Run took place on his farm near Manassas, Virginia. To escape the war, he moved to Appomattox, Virginia, but in 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant in McLean's house in Appomattox.
• As much as 95% of all dreams are forgotten shortly after waking. Research suggests that the changes in the brain during sleep do not support the information processing and storage for forming long-lasting memories.
• After the fall of the Roman Empire, the technology to make concrete was lost for 1,000 years. Roman concrete is still more durable than the concrete we make today, and it gets stronger over time. Their concrete was created with volcanic ash, lime, and seawater mixed with volcanic rock; it created a rock-like concrete we haven't been able to duplicate.
• Fruit flies produce the largest sperm of any animal. Their sperm is coiled up and unspools to about 2.3 inches, approximately 20 times the length of their body and 1,000 times larger than human sperm.
• In 1863, a military draft was started to provide troops for the Union army during the American Civil War. The draft was set up to allow two ways that you could avoid going; you could pay $300 or find someone else to go in your place. What happened is that people paid $300 to have someone else go in their place. Some people made a career out of taking the money to be a substitute, deserting, and repeating the process.
• In the 3rd century BC, Aristarchus of Samos first proposed that the planets orbited the sun. Copernicus developed a fully predictive model in the 16th century, but he wasn't the first to propose the concept.
• Koalas are one of the world’s sleepiest animals; they sleep 22 hours per day.
• Velociraptors were nothing like they were portrayed in the movie Jurassic Park. They were about 3 feet tall and 6 feet long including their tail; they had feathers and weighed about 30 pounds, the size of a large turkey.
• Melanistic animals are the opposite of albinos. They are all black and have an excess of melanin that makes their skin, hair, or fur very dark or black.
• Measured by its share of the world's population, the largest empire in history was the Persian Empire; in 480 BC, it accounted for approximately 44% of the world's population. Comparatively, the British Empire accounted for about 23% of the world's population at its peak.
• Dragonflies may have the best vision of any animal. Humans have three light-sensitive proteins in the eye for red, blue, and green (tri-chromatic vision); dragonflies have up to 33. Their bulbous eyes have 30,000 facets and can see in all directions at once.
• If you have bloodshot eyes after swimming in a pool, it isn't chlorine causing the reaction; it is urine mixing with the pool's chemicals. The nitrogen in urine combines with the chlorine and forms chloramine, causing eye irritation.
• Sea otters have the densest fur of all animals; they have up to one million hairs per square inch on the densest parts of their body.
• The practice of quarantine began during the 14th century when ships arriving in Venice from plague-infected ports were required to sit at anchor for 40 days before landing. The word quarantine derives from the Italian “quaranta giorni,” which means 40 days.