Fast Facts
April 26, 2006
- The telescope on Mount Palomar in California can see a distance of 7,038,835,200,000,000,000,000 miles.
The Marine Corps was originally a branch of the British Army in the American colonies. The corps was organized in 1740 in New York and was incorporated into the U.S. military after the American Revolution.
More than 99.9 percent of all the animal species that have ever lived on Earth were extinct before the coming of man.
Turtles, water snakes, crocodiles, alligators, frogs, porpoises, dolphins, whales and several other watergoing creatures will drown if kept underwater too long. Unlike fish, these animals require a certain amount of air in order to survive.
The Venetian painter Tintoretto (1518- 1594) once painted a picture of paradise that was 72 feet long. It was made for the Doge’s Palace in Venice.
Before 1800, only two women achieved fame as artists. Both were painters. One was an Italian named Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), who popularized the use of pastels in Paris; the other, Marie Anne Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (1755-1842), was a French portraitist who gained fame for her paintings of European royalty.
In 1924, a Ford automobile cost $265.
In medieval China, it was not unusual for a mother to breastfeed a child until the child was 7 years old.
In a single human cell, there are between 10,000 and 100,000 coded messages known as genes. If all the directions contained in all these genes were written down, the words would fill the equivalent of 10,000 volumes of the “”Encyclopedia Britannica.””
According to the Television Code of Decency, a beer advertisement can never show a person actually drinking beer. Next time you see such an advertisement, notice that while the beer itself is prominently displayed, the subject always stops short of imbibing it.
