Illustration by Jennifer Kearney

Things you've always never wanted to know

As late as 1820, the universe was thought by European scientists to be 6,000 years old. It is now thought to be between 15 billion and 20 billion years old.

In many ways the U.S. does not measure up to its image of advanced medical care. There are 16 other countries, including the Scandinavian countries, France and Spain, in which a newborn baby has a better chance to survive its first year.

Every year, dirt costs the United States $4.9 billion. That is the estimate by the U.S. Council for Environmental Quality of the damage to vegetation and the works of man caused by airborne dirt.

Gen. Ulysses S. Grant rated a woman, Elizabeth Van Lew, as his most efficient secret agent during the Civil War. Known as "Crazy Bet," this supposedly demented daughter of a well-to-do Richmond merchant passed information to Union commanders and arranged daring prison escapes for Union soldiers, hiding fugitives in a secret room in her mansion overlooking the James River.

Nearly 100 pollution-filled, weather-beaten years in New York have done more damage to "Cleopatra's Needle" - a granite obelisk covered with hieroglyphics - than did 3,500 arid years in Egypt.

The greatest funeral for a gangster ever held in Chicago was for a flower shop entrepreneur named Dean O'Banion. The shop, at the corner of State and Superior Streets, was a front for O'Banion's bootlegging and hijacking operations. Ten thousand mourners were in attendance, and the most expensive wreath - costing $1,000 - came from Al Capone, who had ordered that O'Banion be rubbed out.

On August 12, 1895, Minnie Dean was the first woman to be hanged in New Zealand. Her crime was "baby farming." She would adopt unwanted babies for a certain fee and then dispose of them, a "service" she began in 1889. The police caught on to Minnie after six years and found her to be most certainly guilty when they dug up three bodies of infants in her flower garden.