Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Monday, April 11, 2005
Things you always never wanted to know
The National Safety Council reports the object most often choked on by Americans is the toothpick.
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 U.S. government.
So they would have a fashionably flat skull, infants in the Chinook Indian tribe were strapped between boards, from head to toe, until they were about a year old.
Special oil lanterns for lighting public places began to appear in European cities in the last third of the 17th century. The king of Naples tried to introduce streetlights, but succeeded only when holy shrines were set up at convenient street corners and the inhabitants were persuaded to keep lamps burning below them.
The Eskimo make and use wooden "eyeglasses," with only narrow slits for eyepieces, to protect their eyes from glare reflected by ice and snow.
A brick wall and a plate-glass window are made from the same principle ingredient: sand.
The celebrated 17th century pirate Willam Kidd was a wealthy landowner in New York.
Because of the junk food offered by tourists, a herd of mountain sheep in Alberta, the Canadian province, has been in danger of being killed off. The herd neglects the normal grass diet in favor of the candy. The animals are losing weight, and the females may not be producing enough high-quality milk.
Humans, if they are very sensitive, can detect sweetness in a solution of one part of sugar to 200 parts of water. Some moths and butterflies can detect sweetness when the ratio is 1 to 300,000.
Robert Moses, the planner largely responsible for many of New York's bridges, tunnels and parkways, never learned to drive.
About 1.6 percent of the water on Earth is fresh. Most of it is locked - unusable for living things - in the snow and the ice at the poles, and on the peaks of the highest mountains.