Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Friday, September 30, 2005
Things you've always never wanted to know
Signing a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery was Benjamin Franklin's last public act.
A vamp is the upper front top of a shoe.
In Paris horse meat was all the rage in the 1870s. Apparently, the Parisians were forced to eat it during the Franco-Prussian war when beef was unavailable, and discovered they liked it.
The number of possible ways of playing just the first four moves on each side in a chess game is 318,979,564,000.
To make a 1-pound comb of honey, bees must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers.
The average human heart beats about 100,000 times every 24 hours. In a 72-year lifetime, the heart beats more than 2.5 billion times.
The common male housefly completes its entire life cycle in just 17 days.
One hundred thousand cubic feet of water pours over Niagara Falls every second.
According to a survey, the most popular day for eating out in the United States is one's own birthday - 49 percent of American adults do. The least popular holiday for eating out is Grandparents' Day, with less than 5 percent participating.
The jet streams blow from the west with such a power that eastbound airliners fly across North America about an hour faster than airliners flying westward.