Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Things you've always never wanted to know
The wingspan of a Boeing 747 jet is longer than the distance of the Wright brothers' first flight.
Australian scientists have identified some species of baby spiders that bite off the limbs of their mothers and slowly dine on them over a period of weeks. The researchers hypothesize the maternal sacrifice keeps the young from eating one another.
Kim Basinger's mother was a champion swimmer who performed water ballets in several Esther Williams movies in the 1940s.
The Amazon River has 1,100 tributary streams.
You blink every two to 10 seconds. As you focus on each word in this sentence, your eyes swing back and forth 100 times a second, and every second, the retina performs 10 billion computerlike calculations.
It would require an average of 18 hummingbirds to weigh in at 1 ounce.
Nitrogen used to be called azote.
It was King Edward II of England (1324) who decreed the inch to be equal to three barleycorns end to end.
Montreal is the largest French-speaking city in the Western Hemisphere.
Olive trees can attain a great age. Some in the eastern Mediterranean are estimated to be more than 2,000 years old. They grow to a height of 20 to 40 feet and begin to bear fruit between 4 and 8 years old.
Fighting alongside Americans and British during the D-Day invasion of 1944 were 15,000 Canadian troops - who were the first to reach their planned objective.
In the winter of 1724, while on an outing at sea, Peter the Great of Russia caught sight of a foundering ship, jumped in the water and helped in the rescue. He caught cold, suffered from a high fever and died several weeks later.
A dragonfly flaps its wings 20 to 40 times a second, bees and houseflies 200 times, some mosquitoes 600 times and a tiny gnat 1,000 times.
"Lobster shift" is a colloquial term for the night shift of a newspaper staff.
It took 214 crates to transport the Statue of Liberty from France to New York in 1885.