FastFacts

March 9, 2006

Babies up to 7 months old can breathe and swallow at the same time.

Seals have been known to swim for as long as eight months and as far as 6,000 miles without touching land.

Honey is used in antifreeze mixes.

The dead outnumber the living by more than 30-to-1.

A frog has to close its eyes in order to swallow.

A college professor conducted a study of fingernail biting in 1978 and found that up to 15 percent of Americans also chewed their toenails.

The federal withholding tax taken out of your paycheck was enacted as a “”temporary”” wartime measure.

There are five times as many rats in Lima, Peru, as there are people.

Walter Cronkite was a college dropout. He left the University of Texas in his junior year to work for the Houston Post.

President Andrew Johnson’s wife taught him how to read and write.

Rabbits talk to each other by thumping their feet.

The oldest known vegetable is the pea, used by the Chinese as far back as 2,000 B.C.

Elephants are taught to like peanuts. There are no peanuts in the wild.

It takes four hours to hard-boil the 30-pound egg of an ostrich.

There are 11 time zones in Russia.

A flea can jump more than a foot – comparable to a human leaping over the Washington Monument with plenty to spare.

The Daily Wildcat