Friday, 6 May 2016

16 Facts For Curious Minds

A curious mind needs nourishment. It's hungry for information. Facts feed the brain and keep it spinning along, healthy and happy.

The are a couple of great things about having the kind of mind that hunts down and soaks up information. First, you never know when and how you'll use that information later. It can show up at the least expected time and build on an idea or shed light on a problem.

Secondly, great information wants to be shared. It binds us together when we can all agree on established facts.

Mind you, agreement seems to be in short supply on the Internet. But facts are facts!

If you have an insatiable thirst for knowledge, SHARE this article on Facebook!

1. Mirrors are slightly green in color.

You can see the green when you look into a "mirror tunnel".

2. The artificial sweetener sucralose was discovered by accident when a test subject thought he was signing up for "taste tests"

3. The spacesuits worn by the Apollo astronauts were designed by Playtex.

The aerospace companies bidding to make the suits spent years trying come up with a workable design. Playtex's winning design was thrown together in six weeks.

4. To make a pound of honey, bees need to visit more than two million flowers and fly around 50,000 miles.

5. In Britain, you won't get food poisoning from eating chicken.

Well, at least not salmonella. They've vaccinated their chickens against the bacteria.

6. So many people died or were left Ireland during the Great Irish Famine that its population still hasn't recovered more than 150 years later.

The population isn't expected to go back up to the level it was before the Famine until 2046.

7. Nobody remembers being born because the brain hasn't developed enough at that point to form long-term memories.

Babies that young don't have a sense of self yet, either. Most people have no memories from before the age of two, but some form memories as early as five months.

8. The pink corner of your eye, the plica semilunaris, comes from a point in our evolutionary development when we had inner eyelids like birds and reptiles.

9. Disney produced a propaganda film in World War II starring Donald Duck in a Nazi uniform.

10. The platypus lays eggs and produces milk, which means it can make its own custard.

11. The Soviet Union had to cancel history exams for 53 million students in 1988.

The reason? Premier Gorbachev's reforms uncovered so many lies from the Stalin era that experts had trouble figuring out "what was correct, what was fantasy, and what was a cover-up of crimes in the material taught to Soviet students."