Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, April 13, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
A 1946 visitor to the Greek Orthodox St. Catherine's monastery, founded in the sixth century at the foot of Mount Sinai, learned that the monks there did not know of World War II and that some had not heard of World War I.
Lightning strikes earth 100 times per second, generated by the 1,800 thunderstorms in progress at any given moment.
The World Health Organization lists more than 20,000 plants as used for therapeutic purposes.
Fleas are essential to the health of armadillos and hedgehogs; they provide necessary stimulation of the skin. De-flead armadillos and hedgehogs do not survive for long.
The only U.S. Navy sailor hanged for mutiny was the son of a secretary of war. In 1842, midshipman Philip Spencer was found guilty, along with two enlisted men, of plotting to turn his ship, the USS Somers, to piracy.
When World War I broke out, Vladimir Lenin was on a walking tour in the Dolomites. He was imprisoned and might have been shot as a Russian spy by the Austrians if the socialist mayor of Vienna hadn't believed Lenin was a greater danger to the Russians than he was to the Austrians.
The great cathedral of St. Sophia at Constantinople (Istanbul) has sustained for 1,600 years what was until recent times the largest self-supporting dome ever constructed.
The height of the 984-foot Eiffel Tower varies by as much as 6 inches depending on the temperature.
In their encyclopedia, Elements of Mathematics, a group of French mathematicians working under the collective pseudonym of Nicholas Bourbaki spent 200 pages introducing matters relating to the number 1.
There are more than 60,000 miles of blood vessels in an adult human's body.
After being shot in the chest by an insane saloonkeeper who opposed his third-term candidacy, Theodore Roosevelt went on to finish the speech he was delivering in Milwaukee, in 1912, before he accepted medical care.