Fast facts


Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, April 29, 2005

  • The coldest permanently inhabited place in the world is the Siberian village of Oymyakon (pop. 4,000) in Russia, where the temperature reached -90 degrees Fahrenheit in 1933.

  • The king crab has 208 pairs chromosomes per cell. By comparison, humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in each cell.

  • The Vatican City, or Holy See, had approximately 911 inhabitants in 2003. The Vatican is the world's smallest country. It is also the country that produced the highest government revenues from taxation per square kilometer of physical land, with $476,363,636 as of 2001.

  • Jean-Claude Duvalier succeeded his father, Francois Duvalier, as Haitian president for life April 22, 1971, becoming the world's youngest president at the age of 19 years and 292 days. He served as president of Haiti until 1986.

  • Oktoberfest '99 (Munich, Germany), held September 18 to Oct. 5, was visited by 7 million people who consumed a record 1.53 million gallons of beer in 11 beer tents covering an area as large as 50 football fields.

  • The most valuable telephone number is 8888-8888. It was bought by a bidder representing Sichuan Airlines Co. Ltd. Aug. 19, 2003 for 2.33 million yuan ($280,723) during an auction in Chengdu, China, of more than 100 telephone numbers. Eight is considered lucky in China as it is similar to the Cantonese word for "getting rich."

  • The most time dilation experienced by an individual is around 1/50th of a second, for Russian cosmonaut Sergei Avdeyev. This is a consequence of the 747 days, 14 hours and 22 minutes he has spent in low Earth orbit, traveling at about 17,000 mph. Relative to people on Earth, Avdeyev has "time traveled" 1/50th of a second into the future, a phenomenon consistent with Albert Einstein's theory of relativity.

  • The Amele language of Papua New Guinea has the most verb forms, with more than 69,000 finite forms and 860 infinitive forms of the verb. Haida, a North American Indian language, has the most prefixes, 70, and Tabasaran, a language of southeast Dagestan, uses the most noun cases, 48. The Eskimo language used by the Inuit has 63 forms of the present tense, and simple nouns have as many as 252 inflections.