New Contest Prize is cherrypickers guide

Okay, so I haven't had a contest in a while, so here it is. The prize is mentioned in the title, and is a cherrypickers guide to rare die varieties. To enter, post an interesting science fact. For example, Redwood trees are not the tallest recorded tree. The tallest tree was an Australian Eucalyptus tree that measured 435 feet tall. Whoever posts what is in my opinion the most interesting fact wins. This contest ends on midnight May 05.

 

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If we could shrink the Earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look like this:

There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans, 14 from the Americas (North and South) and 8 Africans.
51 would be female; 49 would be male.
70 would be non-white; 30 white.
70 would be non-Christian; 30 Christian.
50% of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people and all 6 would be citizens of the United States.
80 would live in substandard housing.
70 would be unable to read.
50 would suffer from malnutrition.
1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth.
Only 1 would have a college education.
No one would own a computer.

 

While in space, astronauts cannot belch - there is no gravity to separate liquid from gas in their stomachs.

Somewhere in the flicker of a badly tuned TV set is the background radiation from the Big Bang.

If every star in the Milky Way was a grain of salt they would fill an Olympic sized swimming pool.

Our oldest radio broadcasts of the 1930s have already travelled past 100,000 stars.

 

The San Andreas fault, which runs north-south, is slipping at a rate of about 2 inches (5 centimeters) per year, causing Los Angeles to move towards San Francisco. Scientists forecast LA will be a suburb of the City by the Bay in about 15 million years.

 

Rubies, Sapphires, Amethysts, and topaz are all made up of the same material corundum, they are all just pure translucent varieties

 

Too much laughter can kill you by causing heart failure.

Plastic contains 50% seaweed.

If you put Mentos in cola it the cola shoots up really high. (This one is not very good)

The screwdriver was invented before the screw.

The Voyager spacecraft will gather five trillion bits of data, which is enough to:
- encode over 6000 complete sets of Encyclopedia Britannica
- give each person on earth 1000 bits a piece

On a standard multiple choice test: (10 Questions, 4 Choices each), if every answer is randomly guessed, there is a one over 1099511627776 or 0.000000000000909494% chance of getting a 100%.

An electric eel can produce a shock containing 650 volts.

There is a chance of a human to be born with a fully-functioning tail which can be from one to five inches long and grow as time goes on. A Muslim baby with a tail was believed to be a reincarnation of a Hindu god.

A cell in your stomach only lives for about two days, while a cell in your brain can last your entire lifetime.

The cigarette lighter was invented before matches.

If the sun were to die out now it would take about eight minutes and seventeen seconds for us on earth to realize it.

Every second, about 100 lightning bolts hit the earth.

If, proportionally, humans had the jumping ability of a flea, we could jump from the front to the back of the Titanic.

By the way, when does this contest end?

 

Updated the contest to indicate when it ends.

 

Speaking of Redwoods, each tree produces about 40 cubic feet of wood every year.

Pearls dissolve in vinegar.

 

A Butterfly flapping it's wings in Kansas has an affect on the Weather in Washington D.C. as well as the remainder of the Earth! The flapping of it's wings, sends little waves or eddies through the atmosphere that are similar to the ripples on a lake or pond when a rock is tossed in the water. These waves or eddies collide and interact with weather systems such as low pressure troughs, high pressure ridges, low pressure systems, high pressure systems, cold fronts, warm fronts, occluded fronts, (low level, mid level and high level) jetstreams, tropical waves, hurrcanes and typhoons and may hinder or increase their' formation and effects. This is one reason out of many, why the Weather is so difficult to Forecast and the forecast is wrong so often! Now, multiply these affects by the trillions of Butterflys and other flying insects that inhabit the Earth and you multiply the difficulty of Forecasting Weather and why that the Earth's Weather is so chaotic.


Frank

 

A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a thin sheet of gold the size of a tennis court!

 

There are more trees in the US now than when Columbus arrived in the Western hemisphere.

 

A donkey will sink in quicksand but a mule will not.

A hummingbird weighs less than a penny

Americans, on average, eat 18 acres of pizza in one day

Antarctica has only one ATM machine

 

one of the alligator lizards favorite foods are black widow spiders. they are also immune to there poison.

 

Another Entry

Here's another one:

The corn we eat daily is mutated. The mutation causes the straight rows.
Not mutated corn looks like what we think would be mutated.

That may be confusing, so look at the attached picture and you'll understand.

 

The male platypus is poisonous.
For some reason when I tell someone this they dont belive me. Must be the way I say it

 

Not only is the world experiencing global warming, but it is also experiencing global dimming due to the amount of pollution in the air. Some areas have experieced 10% or more darkness than there was 50 years ago.

 

1. A foreign coin was the main coin in use for decades in the American colonies. The Spanish milled silver dollar, commonly known as the "pillar dollar" or "piece of eight" was legal currency in the U.S. until 1857.

2. The word "dime" is derived from the Latin word "decima", which means the "tenth part".

3. The Kennedy half dollar has been issued in three different mettalic composition varities, namely: .900 Fine Silver in 1964, .400 clad silver from 1965 and 1970, and cupro-nickel clad copper since 1971.

4. The motto IN GOD WE TRUST first appeared on a U.S. coin in 1864, during the Civil War. In particular, the two-cent piece, first minted in that year, was the first coin with the slogan.

5. The smallest monetary denomination coin ever issued in the U.S. was the half cent, minted from 1793 through 1857.

6. The Booker T. Washington Memorial Half Dollar was the first coin to feature a portrait of an African-American. It was minted from 1946 to 1951.

7. Calvin Coolidge was the first and only President to have his portrait appear on a coin minted while he was still alive.

8. Since gaining independence, the U.S. has minted coins in denominations that today may seem odd. For example, the U.S. has minted half cents (1793-1857), two-cent pieces (1864-1873), three-cent pieces (1851-1889), twenty-cent pieces (1875-1878), $2.50 gold pieces (1796-1929), $3.00 gold piece (1854-1889), $4.00 gold pieces (1879-1880), $5.00 gold pieces or half eagles (1795-1929), $10.00 gold pieces or eagles (1795-1933), and $20.00 gold pieces ("double eagles") (1849-1933).

9. The Liberty Head Nickel, when first minted in 1883, did not have the word "cents" inscribed on it. Enterprising individuals illegally gold plated the coins and attempted to pass them off as $5 gold pieces, often successfully. The U.S. Mint soon caught on to the scam and added the word "cents" to the nickels shortly thereafter.

10. The inscription "E Pluribus Unum," meaning "One from Many" (e.g. one nation comprised of a union of many states) was first used on the 1795 Liberty Cap-Heraldic Eagle gold $5 piece.

11. The U.S Mint estimates that the average life expectancy of a circulating coin is about 30 years, whereas paper currency usually only lasts for as little as 18 months.

12. The Mint produced its first circulating coins (a "whopping" $111.78 worth) in 1793. This consisted of 11,178 copper cents. Today there is more than $8 billion worth of coins circulating in the US and, in the past 30 years, the US Mint has minted over 300 billion coins, worth in excess of $15 billion.

13. If you have three quarters, four dimes, and four pennies in your possession, you have the largest possible amount of money in U.S. coins without being able to make change for a dollar.

14. The slang term for a dollar ("buck") is thought to have originated in the early US frontier days when the hide of a male deer (a buck) was a common currency, due to the scarcity of coinage.

 

Oh man, I am learning some cool stuff. Keep em coming!

 

15. Gold is so ductile that an ounce of gold can be stretched to a length of over fifty miles or beaten into a sheet to cover a hundred square feet.


16. A cubic foot of gold weighs approximately half a ton.


17. Gold can be made into thread and used in embroidery.


18. The word gold derives from the Old English word 'gelo' meaning yellow.


19. Precious metals are measured in troy ounces. This comes from the French town of Troyes where this unit of measurement was first used. A troy ounce is approximately 10% heavier than an avoirdupois ounce.


20. A carat was originally a unit of mass based on the carob seed used by ancient merchants.


21. Since the 1880s South Africa has been the source for a large proportion of the world's gold supply. Production in 1970 accounted for 79% of the world supply, producing about 1,000 tonnes, however production in 2004 was 342 tonnes. This decline was due to the increasing difficulty of extraction and changing economic factors effecting the industry in South Africa.


22. A single gram of gold can be beaten into a sheet of one square metre, or an ounce into 300 square feet.


23. During the 19th century, gold rushes occurred whenever large gold deposits were discovered, including the California, Colorado, Otago, Australia, Witwatersrand, Black Hills, and Klondike gold rushes.


24. Because of its historically high value, much of the gold mined throughout history is still in circulation in one form or another.


25. 75% of all gold ever produced has been extracted since 1910. It has been estimated that all the gold in the world that has ever been refined would form a single cube 20 m (66 ft) a side.

 

The USDA allows a certain percentage of pus, antibiotics, and growth hormones in cow's milk meant for human consumption.

Researchers at Yale University found that the countries with the highest dairy consumption rates - including the United States, Sweden, and Finland - also have the highest osteoporosis rates. Countries where a majority of the population ate little to no dairy had far fewer osteoporosis cases, even when population ratios were considered.

8.8 BILLION animals were killed in the U.S. for human food in 2000 alone.

Not to be a killjoy, but those are the facts! And they're quite interesting, I might say, unless you're a PR firm for the mean-and-dairy industry. :whistle: