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Illustration by Holly Randall
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Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
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Things you always never wanted to know
Toward the end of the 15th century, men's shoes had a square tip like a duck's beak, a fashion launched by Charles VIII of France to hide the imperfection of one of his feet, which had six toes.
The bearded vulture, or "lammergeier," is noted for its habit of carrying off large bones and dropping them onto rocks from heights of up to 200 feet, smashing them in order to feed on the marrow inside. It is the only bird of prey that does this.
On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, "Nothing of importance happened today." He had no way of knowing what had occurred that day in Philadelphia.
When he learned in 1905 that one of his company's batteries was defective, Thomas Alva Edison offered to refund all buyers. He returned $1 million out of his own pocket.
The gold reserve of the U.S. Treasury was saved in 1895 when J.P. Morgan and the Rothschilds loaned $65 million worth of gold to the United States government.
All of Reykjavik, the capital of Iceland, is heated by underground hot springs. Reykjavik is probably the cleanest capital city in the world.
Because radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second and sound waves saunter along at 700 mph, a broadcast voice can be heard sooner 13,000 miles away than it can be heard at the back of the room in which it originated.
Bombyx mori, a silkworm moth, has been cultivated for so long that it can no longer exist without human care. Because it has been domesticated, it has lost the ability to fly.
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