Did You Know? Part 1

phoenixbird (25)in #facts • 8 years ago (edited)

A list of obscure but fascinating facts:

A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second.
The earliest technical usage for jiffy was defined by Gilbert Newton Lewis (1875–1946). He proposed a unit of time called the "jiffy" which was equal to the time it takes light to travel one centimeter in a vacuum (approximately 33.3564 picoseconds).
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_(time)
The Earth gets from 60 tons to as much as 100 tons heavier every day due to falling space dust.
Until recently, scientists didn't know how much of this cosmic dust was gathering on Earth (though they know rather a lot about how much is up in space). Researchers guessed that anywhere between 0.4 and 110 tons of the star stuff entered our atmosphere every day--that's a pretty wide range. But a paper published in 2015 took a closer look at the levels of sodium and iron in the atmosphere using Doppler Lidar, an instrument that can measure changes in the composition of the atmosphere. Because the amount of sodium in the atmosphere is proportional to the amount of cosmic dust in the atmosphere, the researchers figured out that the actual amount of dust falling to the earth is along the lines of 60 tons per day.
Citation: Betz, E. (2015), Shooting stars and cosmic dust help form clouds, fertilize plankton, Eos, 96, doi:10.1029/2015EO025709. Published on 5 March 2015.
The Moon was created when a rock the size of Mars slammed into Earth, shortly after the solar system began forming about 4.5 billion years ago.
This is based on the giant-impact hypothesis, sometimes called the Big Splash, or the Theia Impact, which suggests that the Moon formed out of the debris left over from a collision between Earth and an astronomical body the size of Mars.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant-impact_hypothesis
In its ancient form, the carrot was purple not orange.
The plant was introduced into Spain by the Moors in the 8th century. In the 10th century, carrots from West Asia, India and Europe were purple. The modern carrot originated in Afghanistan at about this time.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrot
During a typical human life span, the human heart will beat more than 3 billion times.
If you use an average of 80 beats per minute, your heart beats about 4,800 times per hour. That's a whopping 115,200 times per day. Over the course of a year, your heart would beat about 42,048,000 times! If you live to be 80 years old, your heart would have beaten approximately 3,363,840,000 times!
One passionate kiss can burn up to 6.4 calories. Kissing for four minutes at a stretch might burn as much as 26 calories. A vigorous kiss that involves some petting could burn as many as 90 calories per hour, reports WomansDay.com, a figure that computes to 1.5 calories per minute.
No word in the English language rhymes with month, orange, silver or purple.
The longest one-syllable word in the English language is "screeched."
The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.
If you were to spell out numbers you would reach 1000 before finding the letter A.
Pneumonoltramicroscopicsilicovolcanicoconiosis is the longest word in the English vocabulary.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_word_in_English
French was the official language of England for over 600 years.
During the 15th century, English became the main spoken language, but Latin and French continued to be exclusively used in official legal documents until the beginning of the 18th century. Nevertheless, the French language used in England changed from the end of the 15th century into Law French.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Norman_language
Dogs only sweat from the bottoms of their feet, and the only way they can discharge heat is by panting. Dogs and wolves yawn as a sign of contentment.
Keeping a goldfish in dim light can cause it to lose its bright color. The same is true for a goldfish kept in constantly running water, like a stream. On the other hand, bright sunlight will improve a goldfish's color, brightening up soft yellows, reds and pale orange.
A shark is the only fish that can blink with both eyes.
Sharks don't blink in the way that we are used to. They have upper and lower eyelids, but these lids don't move and don't close over the eye. When biting prey, some sharks protect their eyes with a third eyelid called the nictitating membrane.
On average, there are 200 seeds on a strawberry.
Strawberries are the only fruit that wear their seeds on the outside. Strawberries aren't true berries, like blueberries or even grapes.
Apples are more efficient than caffeine in keeping people awake in the mornings.
Apples contain no caffeine but instead have about 13 grams of natural sugar. These sugars provoke a similar response to caffeine because vitamins from the apple are released slowly throughout the body, making you feel more awake.
The world's smallest mammal is the bumblebee bat of Thailand known as Kitti's hog-nosed bat (Craseonycteris thonglongyai), also known as the bumblebee bat. It gets its nickname from its size — barely over an inch long — which makes it about the size of a large bumblebee!
The largest sheep ever recorded was a Suffolk ram.
Dr. Joe Schallberger, of Boring, Ore., was certified by the Guinness Book of Records as owning the world's biggest sheep, named Stratford, which stood 43 in. high at the shoulder and tipped the scales at 545 lbs.
A blue whale can consume as many as 40 million krill per day, which ends up weighing close to 8,000 pounds of food on a daily basis. It is estimated that it would take 2,200 lbs. of food to fill a blue whale's stomach.