Illustration by Jennifer Kearney

Things you've always never wanted to know

Instruments record some half-million seismic or micro-seismic disturbances on Earth each year. One hundred thousand of those are felt, but only 1,000 cause damage.

Betsy, a chimpanzee at the Baltimore Zoo, has had 65 of her paintings sold - one of them going for $75. Congo, a chimp at the London Zoo, is not so "commercial" an artist as Betsy but has made over 400 paintings. If anyone tries to urge Congo to go on with a painting after he considers it finished, the chimp draws lines in all directions that, in effect, cross out and destroy the painting.

Twenty percent of U.S. Presidents were born in the same state: Virginia. Nearly 40 percent were born in either Virginia or Ohio: eight in Virginia, seven in Ohio.

Around 340 B.C., Aristotle observed that dolphins gave birth to live young that were attached to their mothers by umbilical cords. For this reason, he considered dolphins and related creatures to be mammals. Biologists agreed with him - 24 centuries later.

Jupiter's great red spot is 25,000 miles wide. The spot may be the vortex of a hurricane that has been whirling for at least seven centuries.

The woman who has appeared most on the covers of Time magazine is the Virgin Mary - 10 times.

Columbus was returned to Spain in chains after his third trip to the New World. He was charged with tyrannical mismanagement of the Haitian colony. On his fourth voyage, he tricked the Indians by predicting an eclipse he knew would occur.

Most plant pollen is highly flammable. It will ignite and explode when placed on an extremely hot surface. In the early days of modern theater, artificial lightning was produced by throwing pollen grains of club moss onto a hot shovel.

Sticking to their belief that the Lord alone giveth and the Lord alone taketh away, members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints refused help from the U.S. government during the Depression of the 1930s. They were the only American farm cooperative (so called because the land, owned by the church, was worked by church members) to do so.