Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday November 18, 2003
Things you always never wanted to know
Bamboo may grow 3 feet in 24 hours.
The plant life of the oceans make up about 85 percent of all the greenery on the planet.
The rockets mentioned in "The Star-Spangled Banner" were less effective than bombs. They had a shorter range and were so inaccurate that they had to be abandoned as weapons after the War of 1812. Not until World War II did rockets become important.
In the 1970 census, the United States had 2,983 men who were already widowers by the age of 14 and 289 women who - at that same age - already had been widowed or divorced.
Seven percent of licensed drivers in the United States are 16- and 17-year-olds, and they are responsible for 30 percent of all automobile fatalities.
Using cesium atoms, the clock at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., will gain or lose only one second in 300 years.
The world's largest office building without internal supports is the Goodyear Airship hangar in Akron, Ohio. It holds 55 million cubic feet of air. Clouds form in the top of the structure during sudden temperature changes and it rains.
Albert Einstein was offered the presidency of Israel. He refused the opportunity, having no head, he said, for human problems.
Adolf Hitler kept a framed photograph of Henry Ford on his desk and Ford kept one of Hitler on his desk in Dearborn, Mich. Hitler had used in "Mein Kampf" some of Ford's anti-Semitic views, and he always welcomed Ford's substantial contributions to the Nazi movement.
Some 2 million people who enter U.S. hospitals each year with one ailment wind up with another one. Hospital-related infections are fatal for about 15,000 Americans every year.
Bacteria, the tiniest free-living cells, are so small that a single drop of liquid may contain 50 million of them.
A person's hair cannot turn white overnight because of some terrible tragedy or frightening experience - or for any other reason.