Fast Facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Thursday, November 3, 2005
Things you’ve always never wanted to know
The evolution of social life in ants and termites has been accompanied by an extraordinary royal perk — a 100-fold increase among queen ants in average maximum lifespan, with some queens surviving for almost 30 years. This longevity can be attributed in part to the sheltered and pampered life of the royal egg layer.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the fathers of communism, wrote 500 articles for the New York Tribune from 1851 to 1862.
The temperature of lava is dependent on the geographic location. For example, Hawaiian lava can be as hot as 2,140 degrees Fahrenheit. By contrast, lava from mountains like Mount St. Helen’s can be several hundred degrees cooler.
The training of the geisha, a professional female Japanese entertainer, begins at age 7. When she becomes accomplished in dancing, singing and the social graces, she will then contract with an employer to entertain.
Sweat itself is odorless; only when combined with bacteria that break down dead skin cells does it become smelly. Smelly sweat is called bromohidrosis. Sweat is composed of water, sodium chloride, potassium salts, urea and lactic acid.
In high school, Brad Pitt, Mia Farrow, Dennis Hopper, Art Linkletter, Eleanor McGovern, Richard Nixon, David Susskind and John Wayne were on their schools’ debate teams.
If all the water vapor in the Earth’s atmosphere were condensed to liquid water at the same time, there would be enough water to cover the U.S. (including Hawaii and Alaska) with a 25-foot-deep layer of water.
In 1972, Dartmouth became the last Ivy League college to go coed.
It takes 17 facial muscles to smile but 42 to frown.
The first person killed in an airplane accident was Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge. On Sept. 17, 1908, Selfridge was a passenger with Orville Wright in a demonstration flight at Fort Myer, Va., when the crash occurred. Wright survived the crash. The first pilot of a powered airplane to be killed was Eugène Lefèbvre on Sept. 7, 1909, in France.
The term “hush money,” meaning a bribe to keep someone from revealing scandalous or damaging information, was first used in the early 1700s.
During World War II, the U.S. Navy’s world champion chess player, Reuben Fine, calculated, on the basis of positional probability, where enemy submarines might surface.