Amazing facts

 After a long break, some more facts !

In the Durango desert, in Mexico, there's a creepy spot called the "Zone of Silence." You can't pick up clear TV or radio signals. And locals say fireballs sometimes appear in the sky.

Ethernet is a registered trademark of Xerox, Unix is a registered trademark of AT&T.

Bill Gates' first business was Traff-O-Data, a company that created machines which recorded the number of cars passing a given point on a road.

Uranus' orbital axis is tilted at 90 degrees.

The final resting-place for Dr. Eugene Shoemaker - the Moon. The famed U.S. Geological Survey astronomer, trained the Apollo astronauts about craters, but never made it into space. Mr. Shoemaker had wanted to be an astronaut but was rejected because of a medical problem. His ashes were placed on board the Lunar Prospector spacecraft before it was launched on January 6, 1998. NASA crashed the probe into a crater on the moon in an attempt to learn if there is water on the moon.

Outside the USA, Ireland is the largest software producing country in the world.

The first fossilized specimen of Australopithecus afarenisis was named Lucy after the paleontologists' favorite song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds," by the Beatles.

Figlet, an ASCII font converter program, stands for Frank, Ian and Glenn's LETters.

Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

Every year about 98% of atoms in your body are replaced.

Hot water is heavier than cold.

Plutonium - first weighed on August 20th, 1942, by University of Chicago scientists Glenn Seaborg and his colleagues - was the first man-made element.

If you went out into space, you would explode before you suffocated because there's no air pressure.

The radioactive substance, Americanium - 241 is used in many smoke detectors.

The original IBM-PCs, that had hard drives, referred to the hard drives as Winchester drives. This is due to the fact that the original Winchester drive had a model number of 3030. This is, of course, a Winchester firearm.

Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than through the air.

On average, half of all false teeth have some form of radioactivity.

Only one satellite has been ever been destroyed by a meteor: the European Space Agency's Olympus in 1993.

Starch is used as a binder in the production of paper. It is the use of a starch coating that controls ink penetration when printing. Cheaper papers do not use as much starch, and this is why your elbows get black when you are leaning over your morning paper.

Sterling silver is not pure silver. Because pure silver is too soft to be used in most tableware it is mixed with copper in the proportion of 92.5 percent silver to 7.5 percent copper.

A ball of glass will bounce higher than a ball of rubber. A ball of solid steel will bounce higher than one made entirely of glass.

A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a city block.

An ordinary TNT bomb involves atomic reaction, and could be called an atomic bomb. What we call an A-bomb involves nuclear reactions and should be called a nuclear bomb.

At a glance, the Celsius scale makes more sense than the Fahrenheit scale for temperature measuring. But its creator, Anders Celsius, was an oddball scientist. When he first developed his scale, he made freezing 100 degrees and boiling 0 degrees, or upside down. No one dared point this out to him, so fellow scientists waited until Celsius died to change the scale.

At a jet plane's speed of 1,000 km (620mi) per hour, the length of the plane becomes one atom shorter than its original length.

The first full moon to occur on the winter solstice, Dec. 22, commonly called the first day of winter, happened in 1999. Since a full moon on the winter solstice occurred in conjunction with a lunar perigee (point in the moon's orbit that is closest to Earth), the moon appeared about 14% larger than it does at apogee (the point in it's elliptical orbit that is farthest from the Earth). Since the Earth is also several million miles closer to the sun at that time of the year than in the summer, sunlight striking the moon was about 7% stronger making it brighter. Also, this was the closest perigee of the Moon of the year since the moon's orbit is constantly deforming. In places where the weather was clear and there was a snow cover, even car headlights were superfluous.

According to security equipment specialists, security systems that utilize motion detectors won't function properly if walls and floors are too hot. When an infrared beam is used in a motion detector, it will pick up a person's body temperature of 98.6 degrees compared to the cooler walls and floor. If the room is too hot, the motion detector won't register a change in the radiated heat of that person's body when it enters the room and breaks the infrared beam. Your home's safety might be compromised if you turn your air conditioning off or set the thermostat too high while on summer vacation.

Western Electric successfully brought sound to motion pictures and introduced systems of mobile communications which culminated in the cellular telephone.

On December 23, 1947, Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., held a secret demonstration of the transistor which marked the foundation of modern electronics.

Some more trivia !

• The Soviet Sukhoi-34 is the first strike fighter with a toilet in it.

• S.O.S. doesn't stand for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls" -- It was just chosen by an 1908 international conference on Morse Code because the letters S and O were easy to remember and just about anyone could key it and read it, S = dot dot dot, O = dash dash dash.

• Many years ago, in Scotland, a new game was invented. It was ruled "Gentlemen Only...Ladies Forbidden"..and thus the word GOLF entered into the English language

• The shoestring was invented in England in 1790. Prior to this time, all shoes were fastened with buckles.

• A polar bears skin is black. Its fur is not white but actually clear.

• There are over 600 muscles in the body which account for 40% of the body's weight.

• Income tax was first introduced in India in 1860 by James Wilson, who became India's 1st finance member.

• Snakes that live or spend most of their time in trees are called Arboreal.

• In 1974, Lata Mangeshkar became the First Indian to have performed in the Royal Albert Hall, London.

• It has been calculated that in the last 3,500 years, there have only been 230 years of peace throughout the civilized world.

• "Freelance" comes from a knight whose lance was free for hire, i.e. not pledged to one master.

• The average adult stands 0.4 inch taller in the morning than in the evening because the cartilage in the spine compresses during the day.

• Fingernails grow four times faster than toenails - about two hundredths of an inch per week.

• The hyoid bone, in your throat, is the only bone in the body not attached to another bone.

• The inventor of chewing gum, a dentist named William Semple, intended it mainly as a means of exercising the jaws.

• The rings of Saturn are made up of primarily water ice, with particles or rock.

• Air conditioning wasn’t invented to cool homes or offices. It was invented to control humidity in a printing plant.

• The Associated Press introduced the first system for routinely transmitting "wire photos" in 1934.

• Venice in Italy is built on 118 sea islets joined by 400 bridges.

The word denim comes from 'de Nimes', or from Nimes, a place in France.

• A large cumulonimbus cloud can hold enough water for 500,000 baths. Most of the water droplets in a cloud re-evaporate and never reach the ground, only one-fifth actually falling as rain.

• The first diamond engagement ring was presented in 1477 by Archduke Maximillian of Austria to Mary of Burgundy.

• Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.

• The pound cake got its name from the pound of butter it contained.

• Neck ties were first worn in Croatia. That's why they were called cravats (CRO-vats).

• The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova, from the USSR, in June 1963.

• When Albert Einstein left Germany in 1933, the Nazis put a price of 20,000 marks on his head.

• Without any greenhouse effect, Earth would be cold and lifeless with an average temperature of 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit.

• If you cut a redwood tree, its root system will create "angel rings" around the stump and as many as 100 trees will grow around it in a circle.

• The Kiwi, national bird of New Zealand, can't fly, lives in a hole in the ground, is almost blind and lays only one egg each year. Yet it has survived for 70 million years.

• Levi Strauss made the first pair of blue jeans in 1850. They were intended as work trousers for American miners looking for gold.

• The abdomen of the ant contains two stomachs. One stomach holds the food for itself and second stomach is for food to be shared with other ants.

• Kissing releases the same neurotransmitters as intense exercise, like parachuting or distance running. The heart beats faster and breathing becomes deep and irregular.

• If you stop getting thirsty, you need to drink more water. For when a human body is dehydrated, its thirst mechanism shuts off.

• The first manned spacecraft to be launched was the Soviet’s Vostok 1, which left Earth in 1961.

• As we get older the brain loses almost one gram per year because its nerve cells die and cannot be replaced.

• Agalmatophilia is an attractions to statues or mannequins.

• The world's tallest mountains, the Himalayas, are also the fastest growing. Their growth - about half an inch a year - is caused by the pressure exerted by two of Earth's continental plates (the Eurasian plate and the Indo-Australian plate) pushing against one another.

• Walt Disney got the idea for Mickey Mouse from watching mice play in a garage, where he was forced to work, because he could not afford to rent an art studio

The bow used by Olympic archers measures a max of 6ft for men, 5¼ ft for women. It is made of laminated wood, and is coated with graphite or fiberglass.

• According to scientific tests on cricketers the batsmen who are most likely to hit a cricket ball for six are those who watch it for the shortest period of time.

• Fat has nine calories per gram, while protein and carbohydrate have four, Alcohol has seven.

• Napoleon's christening name was Italian: Napoleone Buonaparte. He was born on the island of Corsica one year after it became French property. As a boy, he hated the French.

• The first Olympic Games were held in 776 BC. They began as a religious festival, were held every four years and continued for a thousand years.

• The most sensitive parts of the body are the fingers and lips whilst the least sensitive part is the middle of the back.

New Facts !

• On the average a fart is composed of about 59% nitrogen, 21% hydrogen, 9% carbon dioxide, 7% methane, and 4% oxygen. Less than 1% is what makes them stink.

• Queen Isabella of Spain was the first woman to be featured on a U.S. postage stamp. (1893)

• The name Reebok was named after the African Gazelle.

• Alexander the Great made his troops eat onions as he believed it would prove their vitality.

• A quality, fully-faceted round brilliant diamond has at least 58 facets. These are important for the maximum sparkle and brilliance of the stone.

• A shark must keep moving forward to stay alive.

• The average rainfall around the world is 40 inches per year.

• There was no punctuation until the 15th century.

• Leonardo da Vinci spent twelve years painting the Mona Lisa's lips.

• "Hallow" is an old word meaning holy, while "e'en" is Scottish for evening.

• On February 17, 1959, Vanguard II was the first satellite to send weather information back to Earth.

• Orange and black became Halloween colors because orange is associated with harvests and black is associated with death.

• The full name of the Titanic ship is R.M.S. Titanic, which stands for Royal Mail Steamship.

• It takes about five years for an oyster to produce a medium-sized pearl.

• The adult human body requires about 88 pounds of oxygen daily.

• The average diameter of a one-carat diamond is 6.42 mm

• The real name of the Bill Gates is William Henry Gates III.

• "Peladophobia" is the fear of becoming bald.

• The white part of your fingernail is called the Lunula.


• It's physically impossible for you to lick your elbow.


• If you keep a Goldfish in the dark room, it will eventually turn white.


• The note with the most zeros is a Yugoslavia 500,000,000,000 Dinara, issued in 1993 with 11 zeros

 *Bombay Duck is not actually duck at all, but dried fish called bummalo.

• One thousand Americans stop smoking every day - by dying.

• Dogs only see shades of grey and most of them are short-sighted.

• In the early days of motion pictures, movies were the people who worked on films.

• A woman's arthritic pain will almost always disappear as soon as she becomes pregnant.

• A puff of smoke, such as that produced when someone smokes a pipe, is called a "lunt."

• Most oysters are ambisexual. They begin life as males, then become females, and change back and forth many times.

• The metal cesium will melt in your hand and catch fire due to the temperature of your skin.

• The first man to die during construction of the Hoover Dam was the father of the last man to die during its construction.

• With few exceptions, birds do not sing while on the ground. They sing during flight or while sitting on an object off the ground.

• The first competition in the world's first Olympic games, 776 B.C., was a foot race. The participants were all males, and ran in the nude.

• Roulette was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. The popular game of chance was a byproduct of his experiments with perpetual motion.

• The average 60-minute audio cassette tape has 562.5 feet of tape in it.

• Only men were allowed to eat at the first self-service restaurant, the Exchange Buffet in New York, opened in 1885.

• In 200 BC, when the Greek city of Sparta was at the height of its power there were 20 slaves for every citizen.

• If you could count the number of times a cricket chirps in one minute, divide by 2, add 9 and divide by 2 again, you would have the correct temperature in celcius degrees.

• The standard escalator moves 120 feet per minute.

• The Nobel Peace prize was first awarded in 1901 to Jean Henry Dunant, who was the founder of the Swiss Red Cross.

• A rainbow can only occur when the sun is 40 degrees or less above the horizon.

• The heart of a peanut, that little nub that holds the two halves together, contains a high amount of a chemical that is know to cause migraine headaches in some people.

Termite queens are fertilized regularly by the same mate for life, unlike bee and ant queens, whose male partners die after the first and only mating.

Some More Interesting Facts !

Continuing with some more amazing facts, collected from the net. Enjoy !

• In France, Christmas is called Noel.

• It is a British Christmas tradition that a wish made while mixing Christmas pudding will come true only if the ingredients are stirred clockwise.

• Christmas trees are grown much like any other agricultural crop. About 112,000 acres in the northwest United States are planted with about 11 million trees.

• Roulette was invented by French mathematician Blaise Pascal. The popular game of chance was a byproduct of his experiments with perpetual motion.

• "Hybristophilia" is arousal derived by having sex with people who have committed crimes.

• According to international definition, fog occurs when visibility is 600 feet (200m) or less.

• The symbol on the "pound" key (#) is called an octothorpe.

• The blueprints for the Eiffel Tower covered more than 14,000 square feet of drafting paper.

• The little hole in the sink that lets the water drain out, instead of flowing over the side, is called a porcelator.

• The nest in which spiders or other insects deposit their eggs is called a ‘nidus’

• The word "toast," meaning a wish of good health, started in ancient Rome, where a piece of toasted bread was dropped into wine.

• Joseph Priestley, the English chemist, invented carbonated water. It was a by-product of his investigations into the chemistry of air.

* In 1935, Jesse Owens set six track and field world records in less than one hour.

• The metal part of a lamp that surrounds the bulb and supports the shade is called a harp.

• Guinness is considered an aphrodisiac in some African countries, and is marketed under the slogan "a baby in every bottle."

• In ancient Egypt, the only person who was allowed to wear cotton was the High Priest.

• During World War II, Russians used dogs strapped with explosives to blow up German tanks. They trained the dogs to associate the tanks with food and ended up destroying about 25 German tanks using this method.

• The distance between an alligator's eyes, in inches, is directly proportional to the length of the alligator, in feet.

• A chemical (isothiocyanates) found in cabbages may lower the risk of lung cancer in smokers by as much as 38%.

• In fourth century Sparta, in Greece, males 20 years of age and over were required by law to eat 2 pounds of meat a day. It was believed to make one brave.

• The origins of the soldier term "G.I." is an abbreviation for "Government Issue," which was stamped on all government kits supplied to recruits in the US Army during World War II.

• In the Middle Ages, young men and women drew names from a bowl to see who their valentines would be. They would wear these names on their sleeves for one week. Thus the origin of the phrase “to wear your heart on your sleeve.”

• Limousines originally got their name because they were first built in the Limousin region of France.

• The reason most mosquito bites itch is because mosquitoes inject saliva into the persons skin before they suck your blood. They take it out once they are done, but if they are forced to fly away, they don't get a chance to draw the saliva out. And it is their saliva that causes the itch.

• Rattlesnakes gather in groups to sleep through the winter. Sometimes up to 1,000 of them will coil up together to keep warm.

Some interesting facts !

I am sharing some interesting facts , collected on the net. Enjoy!

Adobe - Came from name of the river Adobe Creek that ran behind the house of founder John Warnock.

Apache - It got its name because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA’s httpd daemon. The result was ‘A PAtCHy’ server -– thus, the name Apache.

Apple Computers - Steve Jobs was three months late in filing a name for the business because he didn’t get any better name for his new company. So one day he told to the staff: “If I’ll not get better name by 5 o’clock today, our company’s name will be anything he likes…” So at 5 o’clcok nobody come up with better name, and he was eating Apple that time… so he keep the name of the company ‘Apple Computers’.

CISCO - Its not an acronym but the short for San Francisco.


Google - The name started as a jokey boast about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. After founders – Stanford grad students Sergey Brin and Larry Page resented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’

Hotmail - Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

Hewlett-Packard (HP) - Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett, and the winner was NOT Bill…the winner was Dave.

Intel - Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain, so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics = INTEL

Lotus (Notes) - Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft - Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-‘ was removed later on.

Motorola - Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE - Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). Acronym for: One Real A****** Called Larry Ellison??

Red Hat - Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. He lost it and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return his Red Hat if found by anyone!

SAP - “Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing”, formed by 4 ex-IBM employees who used to work in the ‘Systems/Applications/Projects’ group of IBM.

Sony - From the Latin word ’sonus’ meaning sound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN - Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network.

Xerox - The inventor, Chestor Carlson, named his product trying to say dry’ (as it was dry copying, markedly different from the then prevailing wet copying). The Greek root `xer‘ means dry.

Yahoo! - The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.


The Titanic's whistles could be heard from 11 miles away.
• A "quidnunc" is a person who is eager to know the latest news and gossip

• The fear of Friday the 13th is called paraskavedekatriaphobia.
• A cosmic year is the amount of time it takes the Sun to revolve around the center of the Milky Way, about 225 million years.

• The praying mantis is the only insect that can turn its head.
• Virga are streaks of water drops or ice particles falling out of a cloud and evaporating before reaching the ground.

• A snowflake can take up to a hour to fall from the cloud to the surface of the Earth.
• "Jingle Bells" was originally written as a song for Thanksgiving

Twenty Twenty cricket

Looking forward to the 2o-20 world cup. Its high time cricket was less than nine hours.It will make the game more interesting and save a lot of productive time. Hope it will erase the dredful memory of the last world cup.

favourite characters in Harry potter

My two favourite harry potter characters are Sirius Black and Dobby. I like them for their selflessness and bravery. Black was brave enough to go against his familys historical leanings and Dobbys first attempt to get away from slavery.