Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, June 8, 2005
taken daily with a grain of salt
Sound travels 15 times more swiftly through steel than through air.
All of the gold in the world would fit into a single block measuring 18 cubic yards.
Anurag Kashyap, 13, of Poway, Calif., won this year's National Spelling Bee by correctly spelling "Appoggiatura," a type of musical note.
One hundred ninety-eight convicted sex offenders in New York State have been reimbursed by Medicaid for Viagra since 2001. This number is similar to those of Texas and Florida.
Colonel George Washington of the Virginia Militia was denied a commission in the regular British army in 1754. He resigned his militia commission and became a Virginia planter at Mount Vernon. His resentment of the British over this rejection helped lose George III his colonies.
The Crusaders were able to conquer Acre, a coastal town 80 miles north of Jerusalem, in July 1191, after 100,000 on both sides had been killed.
Alexander Graham Bell was working to improve the telegraph when he invented the telephone.
Internal combustion engines lose efficiency at the rate of more than 2 percent for every 1,000 feet of altitude. At Lake Titicaca, at 12,500 feet in the Andes, motorcars and powered boats lose about 30 percent of their rated horsepower.
A study of 72 factories in 1881 in Russia revealed that some workers worked 18-20 hour shifts and they often lost most of their wages in fines levied by employers.
Except for five votes in the U.S. Senate, the Panama Canal would have been built in Nicaragua.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of communism, wrote 500 articles for the New York Tribune, from 1851 to 1862.
Having survived a barrel ride over Niagara Falls that broke "nearly every bone" in his body in 1911, Bobby Leech embarked on a lecture tour around the world. In New Zealand, he slipped on a banana peel and died of complications from the fall.