10 FUN FACTS ABOUT HEARING

Fish do not have ears, but they can hear pressure changes through ridges on
their body.
The ears malleus, incus and stapes (otherwise known as the hammer, anvil

and stirrup) are the smallest bones in the human body. All three together
could fit together on a penny.
The ear continues to hear sounds, even while you sleep.
Sound travels at the speed of 1,130 feet per second, or 770 miles per hour.
Dogs can hear much higher frequencies than humans.
Ears not only help you hear, but also aid in balance.
Snakes hear through the jaw bone and through a traditional inner ear. In
essence, snakes have two distinct hearing mechanisms, which help them
hear and catch prey.
I Sitting in front of the speakers at a rock concert can expose you to 120

decibels, which will begin to damage hearing in only 7 1/2 minutes.

Thirty-seven percent of children with only minimal hearing loss fail at least
one grade.
Male mosquitoes hear with thousands of tiny hairs growing on their
antenna.

Bats
There are nearly 1,000 species of bats in the world. However, bats are
basically tropical animals and only about 40 kinds of bats live in North
America.
Bats have been around a long time, since the age of dinosaurs. Ancient bats
resembled those living today. Except for the most extreme desert and Polar
Regions, bats today live in almost every kind of habitat worldwide.
Mexican free-tailed bats can fly 10,000 feet high.
Townsends-big eared bats can pluck insects from foliage.
Hibernating little brown bats can stop breathing for almost an hour during
hibernation to reduce their energy needs.
Fishing bats have an echolocation system so sophisticated they can detect a
minnows fin as fine as a human hair.
The Honduran white bat, a colorful snow-white bat with yellow nose and ears,
cuts large leaves to make tents to protect its small colonies from drenching
jungle rains.
Bats eat a variety of foods from flower nectar to fish, small mammals, and
insects. Bats also come in an array of colors and sizes and shapes.

DNA

DNA is found inside every cell in our body (apart from red blood cells).
Each cell contains roughly 2 meters of DNA.
Humans have roughly 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion cells).
If you unraveled your entire DNA from all of your cells and laid out the DNA end
to end, the strand would stretch from the Earth to the Sun hundreds of times
(the sun is approximately 98 million miles away from Earth).
You could fit 25,000 strands of DNA side by side in the width of a single adult
hair.
The DNA is tightly coiled up and structured into 46 chromosomes.
Our chromosomes are arranged in pairs. We inherit one copy of the pair from
our Mum and one from our Dad.
When chromosomes are stained they can be quite easily recognized by their
distinctive stripy patterns. This is used to check whether people have the
right number of chromosomes and check for any rearrangements.
There are approximately 3 billion (3,000,000,000) chemical letters
(otherwise known as bases) in the DNA code in every cell in your body.
This is a massive amount of information. It would fill 200 yellow pages in
small type font.
If you tried typing the whole genetic code out (typing at 200 letters per
minute) it would take 29 years (without taking any breaks!).
The DNA is made up of 4 building blocks (an alphabet of 4 letters spelling out
the instructions to help us grow, develop and function).
The four letters in the DNA alphabet - A, C, G and T - are used to carry the
instructions for making all organisms. The sequence of these letters holds
the code - just like the order of letters that makes words mean something.
Each set of three letters corresponds to a single amino acid.
Sections of DNA that code for proteins are called genes. The complete set of

genetic information for an organism is called the genome. The latest

estimate is that there are between 20,000 and 25,000 genes in the human
genome.
We share a lot of DNA with other animals, plants and microorganisms. The
table below shows some figures on shared sequence between species
(please note that these figures are regularly revised, as more DNA
sequencing is completed).

Species How many genes do we share with them?

Chimpanzee

98%

Mouse

92%

Zebra fish

76%

Fruit fly

51%

Weed (thale cress)

Bacteria (E coli)

26%
18%

Chicken

60%

Banana

50%

Species
About 1.8 million species have been given scientific names (over 1 million are
insects).
Estimates of the total number of living species range from 10 to 100 million. It is
likely the actual number is on the order of 13 to 14 million (most being insects &
microscopic life forms). However, we may never know because many of them
will become extinct before being counted and described.
Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct

Human
You have around 10,000 taste buds on your tongue.

The Skeletal System

The largest bone is the pelvis, or hip bone. In fact it is made of six bones joined
firmly together.
The longest bone is the 'femur', in the thigh. It makes up almost one quarter of
the body's total height.
The smallest bone is the 'stirrup', deep in the ear. It is hardly larger than a grain
of rice.
The ears and end of the nose do not have bones inside them. Their inner
supports are
Cartilage or 'gristle', which is lighter and more flexible than bone. This is why the
nose and ears can be bent.
After death, cartilage rots faster than bone. This is why the skulls of skeletons
have no nose or ears.

The Muscular System

There are about 60 muscles in the face. Smiling is easier than frowning. It takes
20 muscles to smile and over 40 to frown.
The longest muscle in the body is the sartorius, from the outside of the hip, down
and across to the inside of the knee. It rotates the thigh outwards and bends the
knee.
The smallest muscle in the body is the stapedius, deep in the ear. It is only 5mm
long and thinner than cotton thread. It is involved in hearing.
The biggest muscle in the body is the gluteus maximus, in the buttock. It pulls
the leg backwards powerfully for walking, running and climbing steps.

The Circulatory System

The heart beats around 3 billion times in the average person's life.
About 2 million blood cells die in the human body every second, and the same
number are born each second.
Within a tiny droplet of blood, there are some 5 million red blood cells, 300,000
platelets and 10,000 white cells.
It takes about 1 minute for a red blood cell to circle the whole body.
Red blood cells make approximately 250,000 round trips of the body before
returning to the bone marrow, where they were born, to die.
Red blood cells may live for about 4 months circulating throughout the body,
feeding the 60 trillion other body cells.

The Nervous System

The brain looks like a giant, wrinkled walnut.
Unlike other body cells, brain cells can not regenerate. Once brain cells are
damaged they are not replaced.
The brain and spinal cord are surrounded and protected by cerebrospinal fluid.

The Immune System

The skin secretes antibacterial substances. These substances explain why you
don't wake up in the morning with a layer of mold growing on your skin - most
bacteria and spores that land on the skin die quickly.
Tears and mucus contain an enzyme (lysozyme) that breaks down the cell wall of
many bacteria.
Lymph nodes contain filtering tissue and a large number of lymph cells. When
fighting certain bacterial infections, the lymph nodes swell with bacteria and
the cells fighting the bacteria, to the point where you can actually feel them.
Swollen lymph nodes may therefore be a good indication that you have an
infection of some sort.

Water
The Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park, USA, can spout water
52 meters in the air
70% of the Earths surface is water
Water is the only substance on Earth that can be found in three different forms
solid, liquid or gas
An elephant can smell water up to 5 kilometers away
60% of household water is used to flush toilets or take baths and showers
We each use an average of 180 liters of water a day
66% of our body is made of water
All foods contain water
The hottest sea water is in the Persian Gulf. It is 35 degrees centigrade
A rat is the animal that can last the longest without water
It takes 25 liters of water to make 1 liter of beer
Almost all the freshwater on Earth is frozen in huge blocks of ice or glaciers
It takes 1900 liters of water to make 1kg of rice
The smallest ocean is the Arctic Ocean and the largest is the Pacific Ocean
A person can survive without food for more than 30 days but less than week
without water
An iguana can stay underwater for 28 minutes
A Seagull can drink saltwater as it has special glands to filter out the salt
The highest waterfall is the Angel Falls in Venezuela. It has a total drop of 980
meters
It takes 100,000 liters of water to make 1 kilogram of beef. (Most of the water is
used to grow animal food not for the animals to drink!)
Agriculture uses worlds 70% of water.

Speed
Light travels 18 million times faster than rain

iss
The ISS effort involves more than 100,000 people in space agencies,
at 500 contractor facilities, and in 37 U.S. states. Thats almost half of
the entire population of the U.S. state of North Dakota.
As of June 2006, the number of crewmembers and visitors who have
traveled to the ISS included 116 different people representing 10
countries.
Living and working on the ISS is like building one room of a house,
moving in a family of three, and asking them to finish building the
house while working full time from home.
As of June 2006: including the launch of the first moduleZarya at
1:40 a.m. e.s.t. on November 20, 1998there have been 55 launches
to the ISS (37 Russian flights and 18 U.S./ Shuttle flights).
The 38 Russian flights include 3 modules (Zarya, Zvezda, and Pirs), 13
Soyuz crew vehicles, and 22 Progress resupply ships.
At Assembly Complete, 80 space flights will have been scheduled to
take place using five different types of launch vehicles.
As of August 2006: Spacewalks (EVAs): 69 (28 Shuttle based, 41
ISS-based) totaling 410 hours.
Building the ISS in space has been compared to changing a spark
plug or hanging a shelf while wearing roller skates and two pairs
of ski gloves with all your tools, screws, and materials tethered to
your body so they dont drop.
Mass

The mass of the ISS currently is 186,000 kg (410,000 lb)

(equivalent to about 132 automobiles) At Assembly Complete, the
ISS will be about four times as large as the Russian space station
Mir and about five times as large as the U.S. Skylab.

 At Assembly Complete, the ISS will have a mass of almost 419,600

kg (925,000 lb). Thats the equivalent of more than 330
automobiles.
The entire 16.4-m (55-ft) robot arm assembly will be able to lift
99,790 kg (220,000 lb), which is the mass of a Space Shuttle
orbiter.
Habitable Volume

The ISS has about 425 m3 (15,000 ft3)of habitable volumemore

room than a conventional three-bedroom house.
There are 9 research racks on board plus 16 system racks and 10
stowage racks.
At Assembly Complete, more than 120 telephone-booth-size rack
facilities will be installed in the ISS for operating the spacecraft
systems and research experiments.
When completely assembled, the ISS will have an internal
pressurized volume of 935 m3 (33,023 ft3), or about 1.5 Boeing
747s, and will be larger than a five-bedroom house.
Physical Dimensions

ISS solar array surface will be large enough to cover the

U.S. Senate Chamber more than three times over at
Assembly Complete.
A solar arrays wingspan of 73 m (240ft) is longer than that of a
Boeing 777, which is 65 m (212 ft).
At Assembly Complete, the ISS will measure 110 m (361 ft) end to
end. Thats equivalent to the length of a U.S. football field,
including the end zones.
Electrical Power

 The solar array surface area currently on orbit is 892 m2 (9,600

ft2), which is large enough to cover 75% of the U.S. House of
Representatives Chamber (42 m x 28 m = 1,176 m2) (139 ft x 93 ft =
12,927 ft2).
At Assembly Complete, 12.9 km (8 mi) of wire will connect the
electrical power system. Currently, 26 kW of power is generated.
At Assembly Complete, the solar array surface area is 2,500 m2
(27,000 ft2), an acre of solar panels.
At Assembly Complete, there will be a total of 262,400 solar cells.
At Assembly Complete, a maximum 110 kW of power, including 30
kW of long-term average power for applications, is/will be
available.
Thermal Control

Currently, there are 21 honeycombed aluminum radiator panels,

each measuring 1.8 m x 3 m (6 ft x 10 ft), for a total of 156 m2 (1,680
ft2) of ammonia tubing-filled heat exchange area.
At Assembly Complete, there will be 42 honeycombed aluminum
radiator panels, each measuring 1.8 m x 3 m (6 ft x 10 ft), for a total
area of 312 m2 (3,360 ft2) of ammonia-tubing-filled heat
exchange area.
Module Berthing

To ensure a good seal, the Common Berthing Mechanism

automatic latches pull two modules together and tighten 16
connecting bolts with a force of 8,618 kg (19,000 lb) each.
Meals

Crews have eaten about 23,000 meals and 20,000 snacks, which
equals 18,150 kg (40,000 lb) of food.

 Approximately 3,630 kg (4 tons) of supplies are required to

support a crew of three for about 6 months.
Based on input from ISS crew members, the most popular onorbit foods are shrimp cocktail, tortillas, barbecue beef brisket,
breakfast sausage links, chicken fajitas, vegetable quiche,
macaroni and cheese, candy-coated chocolates, and cherry
blueberry cobbler.
The favorite beverage to wash it all down? Lemonade.
Crew Hours

While a year of Space Shuttle operations (seven crew members,

11-day missions five flights per year) results in 9,240 total crew
hours, 1 year of ISS operations26,280 total crew hours (three
crew, 365 days)is almost three times that amount.
Environmental Control

ISS systems recycle about 6.4 kg (14 lb) or 6.42 L (1.7 gal) of crewexpelled air each day. 2.7 kg (6 lb) of that comes from the U.S.
segment.
The processed water is then used for technical or drinking
purposes.
The ISS travels an equivalent distance to the Moon and back in
about a day. Thats equivalent to crossing the North American
continent about 135 times every day.
Data Management

Fifty-two computers will control the systems on the ISS. The data
transmission rate is 150 Mb per second downlink with
simultaneous uplink.

 Currently, 2.8 million lines of software code on the ground will

support 1.5 million lines of flight software code, which will double
by Assembly Complete.

Brain

 Your brain is approximately 75% water, but you should never drink
it, even if youre really thirsty, and anyway it probably wouldnt
taste very nice
Your brain only weighs about 3lbs, yet the greedy bastard uses
between 20% and 25% of your energy supplies each day, so make
sure you stay hydrated and eat high quality food.
There are approximately 10 to the power of 60 atoms in the
universe. Your brain laughs in the face of that figure however; as it
has 10 to the power of 1,000,000 different ways it can wire itself
up.
Thats the number 10 followed up with 1 million zeroes, which is to
all intents and purposes (for anybody not called Stephen
Hawking), is an infinite amount of ways.
Speaking of large numbers, there are approximately 1.1 trillion
cells and 100 billion neurons in the average human brain.
A piece of brain tissue the size of a grain of sand contains
approximately 100,000 neurons and 1 billion synapses.
The slowest speed information passes around your brain is
approximately 260 mph.
A child builds up to 1 trillion synapses in his or her first year of
life.
Your sensory system sends about 11 million bits of information to
your unconscious brain per second. However, the conscious part
of your brain is not aware of more than 16 to 50 of those bits and
the lightweight can only deal adequately with about 3 or 4.
You are completely unaware of about 95% of the activity that is
going on inside your brain. If you werent, your brain would freeze
up quicker than a Windows PC running ME.

 If you dont take care of your brain, you can lose up to 85,000 brain
cells a day and thats a large part of what causes aging. With
appropriate forethought however, you can reverse that trend and
slow the aging process.
Until relatively recently, scientists thought that the brain was the
only area of the human body that didnt generate new cells. We
now know thats not true and the brain does reproduce shiny new
cells for you to use or abuse and lose (bearing in mind the last
point).
If you lose blood flow to your brain, you will last about 10 second
before you pass out.
Your brain has no pain receptors, which is why if I managed to
remove the top of your skull without you noticing, I could poke
around all day without you feeling a thing. The skull removal may
hurt a bit though
The reason why rats can sometimes beat humans in certain
laboratory tests is because they have no prefrontal cortex to plan
with. So they listen exclusively to their unconscious mind and the
associated electrical responses or gut feelings. Whereas
humans can get all wrapped up in trying to plan their best way out
of the maze and end up cheese less.
There are over 100,000 miles of blood vessels in your brain. So if
you pulled all yours out we could stretch them round the earth
over 4 times. Unfortunately, you wouldnt be around to see your
amazing achievement, but you probably would make the Darwin
Awards, and thats no mean achievement.
Your brain doesnt want you trying to fly when youre asleep after
you went to see Spiderman, so in effect it paralyses your body
with a hormone designed to keep you from living out your dreams.

 The reason blind people often have other enhanced senses is

because the brain thinks Huh. I guess were not using that 30%
for vision after all, we may as well use it for something else and
thus builds new neural pathways for the other senses.
The reason you cant tickle yourself is because your cerebellum
knows its you doing the tickling and sends a message to the rest
of your brain to ignore the sensation and refuses to laugh. The
miserable bastard
Unless you have done this test before, youll probably fail
miserably at counting the Fs in the following sentence:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY
COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.
There are actually six Fs but your brain will have struggled to
spot the ones in the word of as it tends to disregard that word for
reasons best known to itself
Your brain is so soft that you could probably spread it on toast if
you were completely insane and liked eating human brains and
dying all at the same time.
When it comes to the brain, SIZE MATTERS. The stegosaurus brain
was about the size of a walnut. The adult human brain weighs
about 1,300 to 1,400 grams. The average cat brain weighs only
about 30 grams, which is why theyre really not that very curious
at all, they just sometimes seem that way when balls of wool are
involved.
After about the age of 25 and just as we reach peak development,
the brain starts slowly shrinking. Some research has suggested
that the male brain shrinks faster than the female one (not a
surprise to the female population).

 When whole body scans are performed on people, the brain is so

active, compared to the rest of the body, that it looks like a small,
powerful heater, while everything else appears almost ghostlike.
Your neocortex (the weird looking bit on the outside of the brain)
is only about as thick as a dinner napkin and is made up of 6
layers. However, if you were to pull yours out and stretch out the
folds, it would be over 3 feet square.
Unfortunately your planning skills would diminish rapidly and
your ability to put it back in properly would be less likely than
assembling a bed from IKEA correctly without an intimate
knowledge of Swedish and schematics drawn up by an excited 8
year-old.
Very strangely you are about 4 times more likely to marry
somebody with the same last name as yourself. And Im not
referring to marrying another member of your family. Your brain
just loves familiarity even to the point of preferring people with
the same name as you. Weird eh?
And by the way that familiarity extends way past names. You are
more likely to prefer somebody who does the same job as you,
supports the same sports team, is the same nationality, belongs
to the same club or group or even has the same type of dog.
If you were to get up off the couch and sprint hard for 20 seconds
or so, you would increase the workload on your muscles by about
100x. However, if you sat down with Gary Kasparov after recklessly
challenging him to a chess match after one too many beers, no
matter how hard you concentrated youd only require your brain to
increase its workload by about 1%. Youd also lose.
Youre 40 - 60% more likely to buy food you can reach out and
touch than food somebody describes to you or places behind a

counter. The old fashioned sweet trolleys really do generate more

sales and top restaurants know this.
You spend roughly one-third of your life asleep. No human can go
without it for more than a few days, which is why sleep deprivation
is a weapon of choice for armies the globe over when trying to
break soldiers wanting to enter the special services. But even
though you spend so much time asleep and it has been the
subject of thousands of scientific studies, we still dont know a fat
lot about it. We do know that its the time when your brain does a
lot of its necessary maintenance work, including the production
of chemicals needed to get you through the following day. Also,
several theories point to sleep as a state vital to memory and
learning. It may help ingrain memories into long-term storage,
and it also may simply give us some time off from our mental
waking activities.
Your brain was disproportionately large compared to other
organs when you were born. Thats why babies look a bit like
aliens. Not yours of course, yours are cute, just other peoples
babies.
You may (or indeed you may not) know that you need to blink to
clear away dust particles and spread lubricating fluids across
your eyeballs to keep them functioning properly. But why on earth
doesnt the world go black for about the one tenth of a second it
takes you to blink?
This is similar to the fact that your brain makes up pictures from
tiny fragments of information as previously discussed. Only this
time your brain is clever enough to ignore the blink and maintain
the image of what you were looking at prior to your eyelids
closing.

 Your brain is very poor at concentrating for long periods of time

and needs to clear its head so to speak about every 90 minutes or
so. Which is why if youre delivering training and you want to
maximize results, you should steer clear of immersion training
and allow people to take lots of mini breaks rather than one long
break for lunch as is often the case?
Your peripheral vision improves at night, which is why airline
pilots are taught to use their peripheral vision when looking for
traffic.
Your brain finds it very easy to create false memories largely
because of the above and the fact that it spends so much time
guessing whats happening.
When scientists exposed people to Photoshopped images of
themselves at various events years prior, they were soon able to
explain what they were doing and recall the event with clarity
even though they were never there.

Recycling

METALS

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for

three hours -- or the equivalent of a half a gallon of gasoline.
350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute!
More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.
Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can
within six weeks. Because so many of them are recycled,
aluminum cans account for less than 1% of the total U.S. waste
stream, according to EPA estimates.
During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12ounce aluminum cans are made.
An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years
from now!
There is no limit to the amount of times aluminum cans be
recycled.
Aluminum can manufacturers have been making cans lighter -- in

1972 each pound of aluminum produced 22 cans; today it yields 29

cans.
We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.
At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold!
A 60-watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of
energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel. In one year in the
United States, the recycling of steel saves enough energy to heat
and light 18,000,000 homes!
Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,000 of
coal, and 40 pounds of limestone.

PAPER

 To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must

be cut down.
Recycling a single run of the Sunday New York Times would save
75,000 trees.
If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about
250,000,000 trees each year!
If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we
would save about 25,000,000 trees a year.
During World War II when raw materials were scarce, 33% of all
paper was recycled. After the war, this number decreased sharply.
If you had a 15-year-old tree and made it into paper grocery bags,
you'd get about 700 of them. A Supermarket could use all of them
in under an hour! This means in one year, one supermarket goes
through 60,500,000 paper bags! Imagine how many supermarkets
there are in the U.S.!!!
The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and
other products made from trees. This amounts to about
2,000,000,000 trees per year!
The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is
enough to heat 50,000,000 homes for 20 years.
When you smell a dump, what you actually smell is the paper in
the dump!
Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away
every year in the U.S.
Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year; about 680 pounds
per person.
The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of
paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.

 In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic

yards of landfill space.
In 1993, nearly 36,000,000 tons of paper was recovered in the
U.S.--twice as much in 1980.
27% of the newspapers produced in America are recycled.
Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380
gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of
energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy
savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!
The 17 trees saved (above) can absorb a total of 250 pounds of
carbon dioxide from the air each year.
Burning that same ton of paper would create 1500 pounds of
carbon dioxide.
The construction costs of a paper mill designed to use waste
paper is 50 to 80% less than the cost of a mill using new pulp.
PLASTIC / STYROFOAM

Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them

are thrown away!
Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill
as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic beverage bottles every
hour!
Recycling plastic saves twice as much energy as burning it in an
incinerator.
American throw away 25,000,000,000 Styrofoam coffee cups
every year.
GLASS

 Every month, we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill up a
giant skyscraper. All of these jars are recyclable!
The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution
and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from
raw materials.
A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to
decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.
Mining and transporting raw materials for glass produces about
385 pounds of waste for every ton of glass that is made. If recycled
glass is substituted for half of the raw materials, the waste is cut
by more than 80%.
TRASH / LANDFILLS

Although 75% of our trash can be recycled, the EPA set a national
goal of 25% for 1992.
The first real recycling program was introduced in New York City in
the 1890s. The city's first recycling plant was built in 1898.
By 1924, 83% of American cities were separating some trash ite to
be reused.
About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging
material!
Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of
organic garbage that can be composted.
New Jersey has the highest recycling rate of all the states--56%!
The United States is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at
1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the
world's people generate 40% of the world's waste.
The highest man made point in Ohio is said to be "Mount Rumpke,"
which is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary
landfill!

 The United States population discards each year 16,000,000,000

diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades,
220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US
commercial air fleet four times over.
Speaking of diapers, a cloth diaper washed at home costs 3 per
use. A disposable diaper costs 22 per use. The difference can add
up; a typical baby will use about 10,000 diapers!
Between 5 and 15% of what we throw away contains hazardous
substances.
Out of every $10 spent buying things; $1 (10%) goes for packaging
that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65% of
household trash.
On average, it costs $30 per ton to recycle trash, $50 to send it to
the landfill, and $65 to $75 to incinerate it.
Americans generate and throw away 9 times as much waste as
does a person in Africa or Central
America, but we also generate two to three times the amount of
waste as people living in industrial countries with a comparable or
better standard of living as us.
MISCELLANEOUS

More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day,

using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not
many people realize it.
McDonald's saves 68,000,000 pounds of packaging per year just
by pumping soft drink syrup directly from the delivery truck into
tanks in the restaurant, instead of shipping the syrup in cardboard
boxes!
The largest environmental organization in the world is the National
Wildlife Federation. It has
5,600,000 members!
Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!

 One-third of the water used in most homes is flushed down the

toilet.
A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can
contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
You can walk 1 mile along an average highway in the United States
and see about 1,457 pieces of litter.
The Washington, DC-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance
calculates that recycling creates 36 jobs per 10,000 tons of
material recycled compared to 6 jobs for every 10,000 of tons
brought to traditional disposal facilities.
A typical family consumes 182 gallons of pop, 29 gallons of juice,
104 gallons of milk, and 26 gallons of bottled water a year. That's a
lot of containers -- make sure they're recycled!

Albatross

 Albatrosses pair for life and take many years to find a new mate if
their partner is killed if they find a new partner at all.
Nature intended the albatross to be long-lived: they live to 60
years and beyond. However, extreme longevity has become rare
the birds face deadly peril in the face of logline fishing.
Once albatross chicks fledge, they do not return to land for many
years. In the case of great albatrosses this may be up to 5 years,
but they may not start breeding until they up to 10 years old.
Albatrosses have a low reproductive rate (one egg per breeding
season) and many species only breed every other year.
These long-lived birds, with low reproductive rates, are dying
faster than they can re-populate.
Albatross fl ight

Wandering and royal (great) albatrosses have the largest

wingspans of any bird in the world, reaching up to 3.5m (11ft).
Albatrosses are among the largest flying birds, weighing up to 10
kilograms (25 lbs).
Albatrosses are miracles of natures engineering their long,
narrow wings enable them to glide for thousands of miles on wind
currents without flapping their wings.
Albatrosses are the great ocean wanderers, often flying
thousands of kilometers on a single trip to feed their chick.
The wandering albatross flies up to 10,000 kilometers (6,250
miles) to find food for its chick.
A grey-headed albatross from South Georgia has been recorded
circumnavigating the globe in a mere 46 days!
Albatrosses depend on strong winds to fly efficiently so the
equatorial doldrums acts as a barrier.

 The first evidence of the vast distances covered by albatross was

collected in the 1960s when wandering albatross were painted
pink and at-sea sightings were recorded.
Where albatrosses are found

Albatrosses occur in all but one of the worlds oceans (the North
Atlantic).
Seventeen of 21 albatross species are restricted to the Southern
Ocean.
The problem

Nineteen of the 21 species of albatross are globally threatened

with extinction.
Albatrosses are being needlessly slaughtered by logline fishing
vessels: the birds are attracted to the bait, get hooked, dragged
under and drowned.
Loglines kill more than 100,000 albatrosses and 200,000 other
seabirds every year.
Albatrosses are dying at a rate of around one every five minutes.
The ancestors of albatrosses evolved 50 million years ago, but it
has taken only three decades of logline fishing for many albatross
populations to start disappearing.

Grass
Grasses Can be VERY Old A large plant of Sheeps Fescue, about 25
feet in diameter might be 1,000 years old!
Theyre everywhere! There are about 10,000 types of grass.
Grasses come in a wide range of sizes and types including:
Turf grass
Rice
Wheat
Corn
Sugar cane
Bamboo Long
Nearly all habitats have some type of grasses.
Grass conserves water and cleans the air. Grass traps water and
reduces soil erosion.
The average grassed yard can absorb more than 6,000 gallons of
rainwater.
All plants help clean the air. Grass areas trap about 12 million tons
of dust and dirt from the air each year.
One acre of grass can absorb hundreds of pounds of sulfur
dioxide in a single year.
Bamboo is a tropical grass. Some types can reach to over 100 feet
high.
Grass helps keep your home cooler. It lowers the surface
temperature around your home by 30-40 degrees compared to
bare soil, and it is 50-70 degrees cooler than streets and
driveways.
Researchers calculated the landscapes of eight suburban homes
have the cooling effect equal to 70 tons of air conditioning.

 Grasses feed people and other animals.

Worldwide, grasses are a main part of peoples diet. Grasses
provide all of our cereal crops, the grazing for our domesticated
cattle and sheep, and most of the worlds sugar.
Grasses are the main food of an amazing range of herbivores.
From tiny caterpillars, to deer and elk, or Pandas which depend
entirely on bamboo.

Turtle

 Plastic bags and other plastic debris account for of all deaths of
leatherback sea turtles
In a 2009 report in Marine Pollution Bulletin it was shown that
plastic was in the gut of37% of leatherback turtles from a sample
of over 350 autopsied since 1968.
Leatherback turtles, currently on the critically endangered list,
feed on jellyfish. Plastic blocks the digestive tract of turtles,
leading to starvation and eventual death. It has often been
thought that leatherbacks may mistake floating plastic bags for
jellyfish

Oil spill

 There are 1.3 million tones of oil discharged into the sea,
worldwide, each year. This is equivalent to three of the worlds
largest supertankers discharging their entire cargo.
The worlds largest supertankers, called Ultra Large Crude
Carriers, can carry 430,000 tones of crude oil.
The 1979 Atlantic Empress oil spill was the worst ever, involving
over 250,000 tones of oil - much more than the 37,000 tones
estimated to have been spilled from the infamous Exxon Valdez in
1989.
Most marine oil pollution does not originate from major spills, but
rather from natural seepage from rocks, numerous small spills
from oil production rigs, ships and pipelines, and spills on land
that are carried into the sea via rivers.

Wealth

 The distribution of wealth throughout the world is desperately

unbalanced, with the richest two percent owning more than half
of all global assets. Almost every indicator of wealth shows that
the richest twenty percent of the global population control almost
all of the worlds resources. The situation is not improving for
developing nations, as their progress is hindered by inequalities
in international trade.

TOP 10 MOSQUITO FUN FACTS

An adult mosquito can live as long as 5 months.
It may take several months for a larva to develop to the adult
stage in cold water.
Eggs of floodwater mosquitoes may remain dormant for several
years, and hatch when they are covered with water.
An adult female mosquito weighs only about 1/15,000 ounce

(about 2.0 milligrams).

An adult female mosquito consumes about 5-millionths of a liter
in a single blood meal.
A mosquito wing beats from 300 to 600 times per second.
Male mosquitoes find female mosquitoes by listening to the
sound of their wings beating. The males can actually identify the
correct species by the pitch of the females wings.
Mosquitoes can fly about 1 to 1.5 miles per hour.
Most mosquitoes do not fly very far from their larval habitat, but
the salt marsh mosquito migrates 75 to 100 miles over the course
of its life.
A mosquito can smell the carbon dioxide you exhale from about

60 to 75 feet away.
Some people are more attractive to mosquitoes than others. It is
not clear why, but probably has something to do with the 300 odd
chemicals produced by the skin.
In the interest of science, Arctic researchers uncovered their
chests, arms, and legs and reported as many as 9000 mosquito
bites per person, per minute. At this rate, and unprotected human
would lose one half of his blood supply in approximately reported
as many as 9000 mosquito bites per person, per minute. At this

rate and unprotected human would lose one half of his blood
supply in approximately in 2 hours.

Micro-organisms

 Micro-organisms cannot be seen by the naked eye (micro means

tiny and organism means a living creature); many hundreds of
them would fit on the full stop at the end of this sentence.
Typically there are between 10,000 and 10 million bacteria on
each hand.
Damp hands spread 1,000 times more germs than dry hands.
The number of germs on your fingertips doubles after you use the
toilet.
Bacteria 40 million years old have been extracted and
successfully grown from a fossilized bee.
In 1918 more people died from the influenza virus (approximately
30 million) than died in the First World War (10 million).
When you cough germs can travel about 3 meters if you do not put
your hand or a handkerchief over your nose and mouth.
Studies show only about 70% of people wash their hands after
using a public toilet.
Bacteria double their number every 20 minutes. Students can be
asked to calculate how many there are after 1, 7 and 24 hours.
Almost one million bacteria can be created by one person in a
school day.

Personality

 George W. Bush and Saddam Hussein had their shoes hand-made by

the same Italian cobbler.
The designer of Saddams bunker was the grandson of the woman
who built Hitlers bunker.
Churchills secret bunker was in Neasden. It was so horrible he only
went there once
In his first year at Harrow, Winston Churchill was bottom of the whole
school.

Poet painter
The Irish poet Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of
eight.
Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa for 15 years. By the time
he died in 1519, he still didnt consider it finished.
When the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, one of the
suspects was Picasso.

octopus
Octopuses have three hearts.

Heart
Heart The human heart pumps enough blood in a lifetime to
fill three supertankers.

Internet
The worlds population spends 500,000 hours a day typing Internet
security codes.

Human behavior
If you get really annoyed or angry, your limbic system has taken over
your critical thinking and it can actually become impossible to
access higher reasoning. Which is why some people can go postal
and nothing anybody can say can calm them down? Fortunately if
you remove the source of their anger, the Limbic system returns to
normal after about 20 minutes. So dont count to 10 when youre mad,
count to 1,200.

Photo
10% of all the photographs in the world were taken in the last 12
months.
Between 1838 and 1960, more than half the photos taken were of
babies.

Person
The average person walks the equivalent of three times around the
world in a lifetime.

Book
The first book ever printed in Oxford had a misprint on the first page:
they got the date wrong.

Social networking
The words written on Twitter every day would fill a 10-million-page
book.

Word
The word time is the most commonly used noun in English.