Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, March 24, 2005
On average, humans lose one neocortical neuron each second, or approximately 85,000 each day. That's 31 million each year.
The yolk of a bird's egg is connected to the shell by albumen "ropes." During incubation, these ropes break and the mother bird must rotate her eggs to keep the yolks in the center while the chicks are forming.
The skin corrugations that dolphins develop while accelerating and while swimming at their maximum speed are thought to make it possible for them, by reducing water resistance, to sustain speeds that are about 10 times more than they "should" achieve with their muscle power.
The sap of the giant sequoia is non-resinous. Once they have developed a heavy bark, the trees are practically fireproof, which may account for their long life. Even if they are fire-damaged, the high tannin content of the sap has the same healing action that tannic acid has on human flesh when burned.
Czar Nicholas II considered the construction of an electric fence around Russia and expressed interest in building a bridge across the Bering Straits.
It takes more than two tons of South African rock to produce less than an ounce of gold.
At the end of the American Revolution, Congress was forced to flee Philadelphia - not due to British activity, but because of a mutiny by Pennsylvania troops demanding back pay. The Congressional meeting site was changed to Trenton, N.J., and later to Annapolis, Md.
The ancestors of the horse were only about a foot tall 60 million years ago.