FastFacts


Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, January 18, 2006

Things you've always never wanted to know

China's Beijing Duck Restaurant can seat 9,000 people at one time.

In the U.S., a pound of potato chips costs 200 times more than a pound of potatoes.

Nabisco's Oreo is the world's best-selling brand of cookies at a rate of 6 billion sold each year. The first Oreo was sold in 1912.

The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.

Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.

The human brain is about 85 percent water.

In the days of the great buffalo herds on the plains, the largest recorded group was observed by Thomas Farnham. Traveling the Santa Fe Trail in 1839, he was in the midst of buffalo for three days. It is estimated that this herd of more than 1 million buffalo covered some 1,350 square miles - a little more than the size of the state of Rhode Island.

There are locusts that have an adult life span of only a few weeks after having lived in the ground as grubs for 15 years.

The international telephone dialing code for Antarctica is 672.

It cost $4,000 per inch to build an interstate highway project on the fringe of New York in the late 1970s­ - more than $250 million per mile.

A catastrophic temperature drop is not needed to get an ice age under way. The drop need only be enough to allow a little more snow to fall during a slightly colder winter than can be melted by a succeeding, slightly cooler summer.