Fast facts
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Things you always never wanted to know
Rattan palms found in the jungles of Southeast Asia have vine-like stems that trail along the jungle floor up to 250 feet in all directions.
A species of starfish known as Linckia columbiae can reproduce its entire body – that is, grow back completely – from a single severed piece less than a half-inch long.
There is an executive officer of the U.S. government whose job consists solely of investigating applications to the president of the United States for clemency and pardon.
The monarch butterfly can discern tastes 12,000 times more subtle than those perceivable by human taste buds.
A cat has 32 muscles in each ear.
Salt Lake City, Utah, gets an average of 17 inches more snow annually than Fairbanks, Alaska. Santa Fe, N.M., get an average of 9 inches more snow each year than New Haven, Conn.
At birth, barnacles look like water fleas. In the next stage of their development they have three eyes and twelve legs. In their third stage they have 24 legs and no eyes. Barnacles stay fastened to the same object for their entire lives.
Japanese farmers, after removing the hulls from their rice crop and sorting out the white grains, take the hulls from the leftover rice, mix them into a kind of paste, mold the substance into brick-shaped blocks and build houses with them. Such buildings are known in Japan as “houses of rice skin.”
The bateleur eagle of Africa hunts over a territory of 50 square miles a day.
If one were to unravel the entire human alimentary canal – esophagus, stomach, large and small intestines – it would reach the height of a three-story building.
If all the blood vessels in a single human body were stretched end to end, they would form a rope capable of going around the world.
Dung beetles, or scarabs, eat poop.
There are more people in the borough of Queens in New York City than in the entire country of Togo in West Africa.