Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, February 3, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
On average, people can hold their breath for one minute before passing out. The world record is 7 1/2 minutes.
If the amount of water in your body is reduced by just 1 percent, you'll feel thirsty.
Claudio Toscanini, a follower of the red-shirted revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, was sentenced with others to be shot. One by one, his comrades were placed against a wall and executed. When his turn came around, he was placed against the wall. He was teased, he was taunted. And he was finally reprieved, and sentenced to three years' imprisonment.
A person remains conscious for eight seconds after being decapitated.
The Ganoderma applanatum, a type of mushroom, can live for 50 years and grow to a diameter of 2 feet.
A manned rocket reached the moon in less time than it took a stagecoach to travel the length of England.
Mark Twain secured a patent in 1873 for a self-pasting scrapbook. In it, a series of blank pages was coated with gum.
At his trial in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann asserted that he had not read "Mein Kampf." Neither had other big Nazis, citing that the book was too boring.
One of the most popular and important playwrights in the Elizabethan age was Thomas Watson, and not a single one of his dramas exists today.
The parents of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who rose to become one of the few five-star generals in history, were pacifists.
Scientists have been measuring the speed of light for three centuries, and they have it down to an accuracy of half feet per second. The speed of light is 186,282.3959 miles per second.
In 1814, when George Byron's poem "The Corsair" was published, 30,000 copies were sold in a single day.