The Here Zone, because wherever you go, you're always Here
Useless Facts
A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
A fingernail or toenail takes about 6 months to grow from base to tip.
A human being loses an average of 40 to 100 strands of hair a day.
A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
A sneeze can exceed the speed of 100 mph.
According to German researchers, the risk of heart attack is higher on Monday than any other day of the week.
After spending hours working at a computer display, look at a blank piece of white paper. It will probably appear pink.
An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
An average human scalp has 100,000 hairs.
An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.
Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our bodies.
Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.
By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.
By the time you turn 70, your heart will have beat some two-and-a-half billion times (figuring on an average of 70 beats per minute.)
Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
Fingernails grow faster than toenails.
Fingerprints serve a function - they provide traction for the fingers to grasp things.
Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour - about 1.5 pounds a year. By 70 years of age, an average person will have lost 105 pounds of skin.
Humans shed and regrow outer skin cells about every 27 days - almost 1,000 new skins in a lifetime.
If it were removed from the body, the small intestine would stretch to a length of 22 feet.
If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.
If you go blind in one eye, you'll only lose about one-fifth of your vision (but all your depth perception.)
In a lifetime the average US resident eats more than 50 tons of food and drinks more than 13,000 gallons of liquid.
In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful.
It takes 17 muscles to smile --- 43 to frown.
Jaw muscles can provide about 200 pounds of force to bring the back teeth together for chewing.
Lab tests can detect traces of alcohol in urine six to 12 hours after a person has stopped drinking.
Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.
Most men have erections every hour to hour and a half during sleep.
The ashes of the average cremated person weigh nine pounds.
The average duration of sexual intercourse for humans is 2 minutes.
The average human body contains enough: iron to make a 3 inch nail, sulfur to kill all fleas on an average dog, carbon to make 900 pencils, potassium to fire a toy cannon, fat to make 7 bars of soap, phosphorous to make 2,200 match heads, and water to fill a ten-gallon tank.
The average human produces 25,000 quarts of spit in a lifetime, enough to fill two swimming pools.
The average person releases nearly a pint of intestinal gas by flatulence every day. Most is due to swallowed air. The rest is from fermentation of undigested food.
The body's largest internal organ is the small intestine at an average length of 20 feet
The feet account for one quarter of all the human bodies bones.
The human body has enough fat to produce 7 bars of soap.
The human body has over 600 muscles, 40% of the body's weight.
The human brain is about 85% water.
The largest cell in the human body is the female ovum, or egg cell. It is about 1/180 inch in diameter. The smallest cell in the human body is the male sperm. It takes about 175,000 sperm cells to weigh as much as a single egg cell.
The largest cell in the human body is the female reproductive cell, the ovum. The smallest is the male sperm.
The largest human organ is the skin, with a surface area of about 25 square feet.
The left lung is smaller than the right lung to make room for the heart.
The little lump of flesh just forward of your ear canal, right next to your temple, is called a tragus.
The longest muscle in the human body is the sartorius. This narrow muscle of the thigh passes obliquely across the front of the thigh and helps rotate the leg to the position assumed in sitting cross-legged. Its name is a derivation of the adjective "sartorial," a reference to what was the traditional cross-legged position of tailors (or "sartors") at work.
The most common blood type in the world is Type O. The rarest, Type A-H, has been found in less than a dozen people since the type was discovered.
The Neanderthal's brain was bigger than yours is.
The only bone in the human body not connected to another is the hyoid, a V-shaped bone located at the base of the tongue between the mandible and the voice box. Its function is to support the tongue and its muscles.
The permanent teeth that erupt to replace their primary predecessors (baby teeth) are called succedaneous teeth.
The sound of a snore (up to 69 decibels) can be almost as loud as the noise of a pneumatic drill.
The tips of fingers and the soles of feet are covered by a thick, tough layer of skin called the stratum corneum.
There are 45 miles of nerves in the skin of a human being.
Three-hundred-million cells die in the human body every minute.
Women burn fat more slowly than men, by a rate of about 50 calories a day.
Women's hearts beat faster than men's.
The average cost of rehabilitating a seal after the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska was $80,000. At a special ceremony, two of the most expensively saved animals were released back into the wild amid cheers and applause from onlookers. A minute later, in full view, they were both eaten by a killer whale.
A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her with an ax leaving her mentally retarded.
A woman came home to find her husband in the kitchen, shaking frantically with what looked like a wire running from his waist towards the electric kettle. Intending to jolt him away from the deadly current she whacked him with a handy plank of wood by the back door, breaking his arm in two places.Until that moment, he was happily listening to his walkman.
Two animal rights protesters were protesting at the cruelty of sending pigs to a slaughterhouse in Bonn.Suddenly the pigs, all two thousand of them, escaped through a broken fence and stampeded, trampling the two hapless protesters to death.
Iraqi terrorist, Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was blown to bits.
The most played song on American radio during the twentieth century was You've Lost That Loving Feeling which was written by Barry Mann, Phil Spector, and Cynthia Weil. Although recorded by different artists, the song is the only one in history to be played over 8 million times on the radio. That amounts to about 45 years if the song was played back to back! Three songs were played 7 million times: Never My Love, Yesterday, and Stand By Me (in that order).
"Weird" Al Yankovic received a Bachelor's degree in Architecture in 1981. He also served as valedictorian of his high school at age 16.
There are approximately ten million bricks in the Empire State Building.
The lightning that we see actually goes from the ground to the sky in what is known as the "return stroke" at 1/3 the speed of light. We can't see the initial "stepped leader" that passes from the sky to the ground.
From space, the brightest man-made place is Las Vegas, Nevada.
Janis Joplin's will called for a party for 200 people at her favorite pub in San Alselmo, California at a cost of $2,500.00.
Contrary to common belief, elephants are not afraid of mice. Go to any zoo and chances are that the mice are living in the same quarters as the elephants. The mice eat the grain and nest in the hay that is so common to elephant habitats.
The Carpenters signature song, We've Only Just Begun, was originally part of a television commercial for a California bank. The music played in the background of a scene in which a newlywed couple had, of course, just begun their lives together. Richard Carpenter saw the commercial and sculpted it into the classic song that we know today.
Actress Cheryl Ladd started her career as the singing voice of the character Melanie on the 1970's cartoon Josie and the Pussycats.
The most common invention of the 19th century was the washing machine. Between 1804 and 1873, at least 1676 patents were issued by the United States Patent Office for various forms of this device.
The five most stolen items in a drugstore are batteries, cosmetics, film, sunglasses, and, get this, Preparation H. Apparently people are just too embarrassed to purchase the last item. And, just in case you are curious, one of Preparation H's main ingredient is shark liver oil. The oil not only helps shrink hemorrhoids, but will shrink any tissue. As a result, many older women in Florida use the stuff to help reduce the appearance of wrinkles!
It's widely known that Alexander Graham Bell beat Elisha Gray to the patent office by a mere two hours with his application to patent the telephone. However, ten years after Bell's patent was issued, patent examiner Zenas Wilber admitted in a sworn affadavit that he had taken a $100 bribe from Bell, had taken a loan from Bell's patent attorney, and had given Bell the complete details of Gray's caveat. Hmmmm....
Why do ostriches bury their heads in the sand? They actually don't. In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of eighty years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand (or attempted to do so).
Charles Lindbergh achieved great fame for being the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean. What most people don't know, however, is that two men had achieved the same goal eight years earlier! Flying for sixteen and a half hours from June 14 to June 15, 1919, Captain John Alcock and Lieutenant Arthur Whitten-Brown had copiloted a Vichers-Vimy twin-engine plane nonstop from Newfoundland across the Atlantic to Ireland. Lindbergh was just the first person to do it alone.
Contrary to popular belief, only one alligator has ever been found in the New York City sewer system. The 125 pound (57 kilogram) alligator was pulled out by four boys way back in 1935.
A South Korean movie theater owner decided that the movie The Sound of Music was too long. His solution? He shortened the movie by cutting out all of the musical scenes!
In four separate instances between October 1987 and February 1988, small pink frogs rained down from the sky on to various parts of Great Britain. Scientists are still uncertain as to where these frogs originated, although some have traced them back to the Sahara desert.
The Malaysian government decided to solve their disease-carrying mosquito problem by spraying the infested areas with DDT. This worked, but the cockroaches then devoured the dead mosquitos. This was followed by the region's gecko lizards consuming the roaches. The geckos did not die from the residual poison (surprisingly), but their central nervous systems were greatly affected, causing the lizards to slow down. Moving up the food chain, the cats ate the slow-moving lizards and started to die off in large quantities. Of course, fewer cats means more rats, and the country's rat population soared. As a result, the World Health Organization was forced to step in and ban the DDT. In an effort to restore the ecological balance, they flew in planeloads of cats to kill the rats.
Two hundred and twenty six soldiers lost their lives way back in 1850 when they crossed a suspension bridge that spanned the Maine at Angers, France. It turns out that they were all marching in step and had caused an increased resonance (vibration) to the bridge. Ever since, troops are ordered to rout step (march out of step) when crossing a bridge.
The phrase "Often a bridesmaid but never a bride" actually comes from an advertisement for Listerine mouthwash. The text was written by Milton Feasley and first appeared in 1925. The advertisement was so successful that it ran for more than ten years.
A man named Angus McDonald was a lookout man for an explosives company in Johannesburg, South Africa. One April Fool's Day, he decided to pull the ultimate prank. He put on an oversized uniform and hid his head inside. To the casual passerby, it appeared that his head had been blown off. McDonald's joke blew up in his face, however. The story (and photo) was picked up by the newswires and McDonald was fired from his job.
Did you ever wonder what the WD in WD-40 stands for? WD is an abbreviation for Water Displacer.
Back in 1956 recording artist Johnny Mathis was forced to make the decision between trying out for the United States Olympic team (his specialty was track) or recording his first album for Columbia Records. He chose the latter and went on to become the eighth biggest selling album artist of all time. His 1958 album, Johnny’s Greatest Hits, was the first Greatest Hits album ever marketed, spending three weeks at #1 and 490 consecutive weeks on Billboard’s Pop Album chart (that’s almost 9 ½ years!).
The Bank of Vernal, in Vernal, Utah (where else?) is the only bank in the world that was built from bricks sent through the mail. Way back in 1919 the builders realized that it was cheaper to send the bricks through the United States Postal System (seven bricks to a package) than to have them shipped commercially from Salt Lake City.
Before the invention of anesthesia, speed was a highly regarded trait in a surgeon. Dr. Robert Liston of London was among the fastest. But, speed comes with some cost. In one particular operation, Liston killed three people. The patient actually survived, but later died of gangrene. During the operation, Liston accidentally cut of the fingers of his surgical assistant, who soon died from an infection. Liston even managed to slash through the coattails of a colleague who was observing the operation - he was so sure that his vital organs had been punctured that he died of fright!
Way back on August 13, 1903, police entered the Liverpool, England home of William and Emily Shortis. Worried friends had contacted the authorities because the couple had not been seen for several days prior. There they found William near death. Oddly, he was pinned under the dead body of his 224 pound wife. Did she die during a moment of passion? Not at all. The coroner concluded that William was following Emily up the stairs of their home when she lost her balance and tumbled down the steps, pulling him down with her. Emily immediately died from a blow to the head, trapping William under her body for over three days. Sadly, William did not survive his injuries, either.
Frenchman Michel Lotito has a very unusual diet. Born on June 15, 1950, he has been consuming large quantities of metal and glass since he was nine years old. To date, he has eaten supermarket carts, television sets, bicycles, chandeliers, razor blades, bullets, nuts and bolts, lengths of chain, phonograph records, computers, and an entire Cessna 150 light aircraft (which took him nearly two years to consume). It seems that his body has adjusted to this unusual diet, as he eats nearly two pounds of metal every day. His technique includes lubricating his digestive tract with mineral oil, cutting the parts into bite-size pieces, and then consuming a large quantity of water while eating this junk. Most people would prefer a nice glass of wine with their dinner.
Madame Marie Curie was the first person ever to win two Nobel Prizes. Her first was in Physics (1903) and the second in Chemistry (1911). So what did she do with the money? She used part of the prize to both change the wallpaper and to put a modern bathroom into her Paris home.
Marijuana was not illegal in the United States until October 1, 1937, when Congress passed the "Marijuana Tax Act". Total debate time on the House of Representatives floor concerning this issue: 90 seconds. This act did not actually ban the substance - it simply said that one could not sell marijuana without a license. Of course, Congress refused to issue any licenses. Congress finally banned marijuana outright in 1970.
Everyone knows that spinach is loaded in iron and makes you stronger - Just look what it has done for Popeye's career. Well, Popeye was wrong. So were all of those parents that stuffed it down their kids' throats. In reality, spinach has no more iron in it than any other vegetable. This spinach misconception dates back to the 1950's when a food analyst made an error while calculating the iron in spinach. His decimal place was off by one place, suggesting that spinach had ten times as much iron content than it really did.
& (the ampersand) was once a letter of the English alphabet.
Dolphins sleep with one eyes open!
Dentists invented gum and cotton candy!
By age 10,the average American kid has worn down 730 crayons.
A man had the hiccups for 69 years since the age 28 to the day he died!
A quarter has 119 grooves on its edge!
A humming bird weighs less than a penny!
Everytime you lick a stamp, you are consuming 1/10 of a calorie!
Los Angeles's full name is "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula".
Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.
111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321
Your stomach has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself.
It takes a week to make a jelly bean.
Dr. Seuss coined the word "nerd" in his 1950 book "If I Ran the Zoo."
It takes 3000 cows to supply the NFL with enough leather for a year's supply of footballs.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
There are an average of 178 sesame seeds on a McDonald's Big Mac bun.
The world's termites outweigh the world's humans 8 to 1.
Pound for pound, hamburgers cost more than most new cars.
When Heinz ketchup leaves the bottle, it travels at a rate of 25 miles per year.
It's possible to lead a cow upstairs...but not downstairs.
On average, 100 people choke to death on ballpoint pens every year.
Average lifespan of a major league baseball: 5 pitches.
Elephants are the only mammals that can't jump.
Five Jell-O flavors that flopped: celery, coffee, cola, apple, and chocolate.
Money isn't made out of paper, it's made out of cotton.
The 57 on Heinz ketchup bottle represents the number of varieties of pickle the company once had.
A rat can last longer without water than a camel.
The dot over the letter 'i' is called a tittle.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
The 'spot' on 7UP comes from its inventor who had a red eyes. He was albino.
315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.
On average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.
John Wilkes Booth's brother once saved the life of Abraham Lincoln's son.
Most lipstick contains fish scales.
Orcas (killer whales) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.
Donald Duck comics were banned from Finland because he doesn't wear pants.
Dr. Seuss actually pronounced Seuss such that it sounded like Sue-ice.
Ketchup was sold in the 1830s as medicine.
The number of possible ways of playing the first four moves per side in a game of chess is 318,979,564,000.
There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.
There are no words in the dictionary that rhyme with: orange, purple, and silver!
The very first bomb dropped by the Allies on Berlin during World War II killed the only elephant in the Berlin Zoo.
Leonardo Da Vinci invented scissors, also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.
If one places a tiny amount of liquor on a scorpion, it will instantly go mad and sting itself to death.
The average person will spend two weeks over their lifetime waiting for the traffic light to change.
More than 2500 left handed people are killed every year from using right handed products.
During an average lifetime, a man will spend 3,350 hours removing 8.4 meters of stubble.
Multiply 37,037 by any single number (1-9), then multiply that number by 3. Every digit in the answer will be the same as that first single number.
The collecting of Beer mats is called Tegestology.
The infinity charecter on the keyboard is called a "lemniscate".
There is a sea squirt (found in the seas near Japan) that digests its own brain. When the sea squirt is mature it permanently attaches itself tyo a rock. At this oint it does not need to move anymore and has no need for a brain. So, waste not want not, it eats it.
1 in 5,000 north atlantic lobsters are born bright blue.
An ant's sense of smell is as good as a Dog's.
Even though cockroaches have been on the earth for 250,000,000 years they have not changed at all
A polar bears skin is black. Its fur is not white, But actually clear.
Canadian researchers have found that Einstein's brain was 15% wider than normal. Scientists at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada have discovered that the part of Einsteins's brain thought to be related to mathematical reasoning - the inferior parietal region - was 15 percent wider on both sides than a normal brain.
Barbie's full name is Babara Millicent Roberts
No piece of square dry paper can be folded more than 7 times in half!
A 'jiffy' is an actual unit of time for 1/100th of a second!
The placement of a donkey's eyes in its' heads enables it to see all four feet at all times!
Camels have three eyelids to protect themselves from blowing sand!
A hippo can open its mouth wide enough to fit a 4 foot tall child inside!
A cockroach can live several weeks with its head cut off - it dies from starvation!
Over 10,000 birds a year die from smashing into windows!
There are more plastic flamingos in the U.S, than real ones!
Slugs have 4 noses!
Owls are one of the only birds who can see the color blue!
The starfish is one of the only animals who can turn it's stomach inside-out!
Q is the only letter in the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any of the United States!
Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying!
Bats always turn left when exiting a cave!
Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms every day!
Men are 6 times more likely to be struck by lighting than women!
A toothpick is the object most often choked on by Americans!
Ernest Vincent Wright wrote a novel, "Gadsby", which contains over 50,000 words -- none of them with the letter E!
Apples are more efficient than caffeine in keeping people awake in the mornings!
A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court!
The poison-arrow frog has enough poison to kill about 2,200 people!
A hard working adult sweats up to 4 gallons per day. Most of the sweat evaporates before a person realizes it's there, though!
Smelling bananas and/or green apples (smelling, not eating) can help you lose weight!
Because radio waves travel at 186,000 miles per second and sound waves saunter at 700 miles per hour, a broadcast voice can be heard sooner 13,000 miles away than it can be heard at the back of the room in which it originated
The E. Coli bacterium propels itself with a 'motor' only one-millionth of an inch in diameter, a thousand times smaller than the tiniest motors built to date by man. The rotation of the bacterial motor comes from a current of protons. The efficiency of the motor approaches 100 percent.