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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, September 9, 2003
Things you always never wanted to know
In ancient China, doctors were paid when their patients were kept well, not when they were sick. Believing that it was the doctor's job to prevent disease, Chinese doctors often paid the patient if the patient lost his health. Further, if a patient died, a special lantern was hung outside the doctor's house. At each death another lantern was added. Too many of these lanterns were certain to ensure a slow business.
The jaws of African fire ants are used to suture wounds in Kenya, Uganda, and parts of South Africa. After an operation is performed, an ant is brought to bite into the two flaps of skin along the line of the incision. The ant's body is then twisted off, leaving the head with its mandibles locked into the skin, like a stitch. A number of these miniature "stitches" are placed along a wound. During the healing process, they closely emulate modern surgical stitches.
When the volcano Krakatoa erupted in the Dutch East Indies in 1883, the sound was heard in Bangkok, 3,000 miles away. At Batavia, 100 miles away, the sky was so darkened that people had to light their lamps during the day. The fine particles ejected by the blast spread to almost every part of the world, and for the next two years a thin haze of these particles could be seen in the sky each night as far away as London.
Almost all of our breakfast cereals are made of grass. Oats, barley, corn, and wheat are all different varieties of grass and are all descended from the same botanical species. Moreover, most of the sugar we eat also comes from grass ÷ sugar cane ÷ as do most of our alcoholic beverages.
Though the neck of a giraffe is about seven feet long, it contains the same number of vertebrae as the neck of a mouse ÷ seven. The giraffe's tongue extends to 18 inches. It can open and close its nostrils at will, can run faster than a horse, and makes almost no sound whatsoever. The first giraffe ever seen in the West was brought to Rome about 46 B.C. by no less a personage than Julius Caesar.
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