Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
Dogs and cats, like people, are either right-handed or left-handed – that is, these animals favor either their right or left paws.
From 1890 to 1900, 20 tons of ivory were shipped every year from Siberia to London. All of this ivory was taken from the remains of wooly mammoths, which have been extinct since the Ice Age.
There is approximately one chicken for every human being in the world.
There are 35 million digestive glands in the stomach.
One square inch of skin on the human hand contains some 72 feet of nerve fiber.
The famous quotation on the front of the General Post Office in New York City – "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" – is more than 2000 years old. It is taken from the writings of Herodotus, who lived in the fourth century B.C.
The typical American spends an average of one year (8,760 hours) of his or her life speaking on the telephone.
Henry IV of France (1553-1610) was exhumed nearly 200 years after his death so a death mask of his face could be made.
One cannot catch cold at the North Pole in winter. Neither can one contract the flu, nor most of the ailments transmitted by viruses and germs. The winter temperature is so low in this part of the world that none of the standard disease-causing microorganisms can survive.
The French philosopher Voltaire owned 80 canes. His contemporary, Jean Jacques Rousseau, owned 40. Canes in fact were in great vogue in eighteenth-century France, and women, as well as men, carried them. Women's canes often came equipped with perfume bottles, music boxes or romantic pictures hidden inside.