Bet You Didn't Know

• If a fire starts, hope that it has to go downhill to travel.  That’s because most of the time fire goes faster when it’s headed uphill than down.
• In some parts of Mexico when someone loses a tooth they don’t get a visit from the tooth fairy.  Instead the Tooth Mouse comes.  It takes the tooth and leaves some kind of treasure. 
• Easter baskets didn’t always look like they do now. Before they had handles and candy, Easter baskets were made to look like bird nests.
• Every year in the United States, more than 17 tons of gold are used to make wedding rings for future brides and grooms. 
• When you’re tired, you may yawn.  And if you do, it will probably last about six seconds.  That’s the average length of a yawn.
• When a comet passes away from the sun, its tail gets shorter and shorter, and sometimes it almost disappears. 
• Most of the mirrors in your house are just a piece of glass with a thin sheet of aluminum on the back, to reflect your image back to you. 
• In ancient times, people used to burn olive oil in their lamps for light.  The Romans came up with the idea for candles made of wax.
• A sinkhole happens when the water from an underground stream wears away the earth beneath the surface, and causes the ceiling of a cave to collapse.
• Many people think London’s Big Ben was named for a giant clock on a bell tower.  But actually Big Ben sits inside the clock.  It’s the name given to the actual bell.
• Video games have been around since 1962.  The first one was called Spacewar.  It was played on a minicomputer about the size of a dresser.
• The famous newspaper, The New York Times, helped create the rules for Scrabble.  Scrabble’s creator studied the paper’s front page to see how many times each letter is used.  That’s how “Q” and “Z” got the most points.
• You probably think of dinosaurs as giants, but the first dinosaurs were actually not that big.  The average early dinosaur was no longer that 15-feet.
• If you’re ever boating around in the Pacific Ocean and come upon a very small island, what you could really be looking at is the top of a volcano.  That’s how the Hawaiian Islands came to exist, through the eruption of underwater volcanoes.
• The most powerful earthquake to ever strike the United States was centered in Missouri.  It was the 1811 quake along the New Madrid fault.  It could be felt for up to a thousand miles away. 
• 7-UP was created in 1929; It was named 7-UP because the original containers held 7 ounces and the bottle stood up.
• Spray on repellents keep mosquitoes from biting you, but do you know why?  It’s because the spray keeps the bugs from being able to sense you. 
• Have you ever noticed that most car horns sound alike?  That’s because American car horns beep in the tone of F. 
• If you see acorns on an Oak tree, you know it’s at least 20-years-old.  They have to be that old before they make acorns.
• You know how products in stores have that black bar code on the back?  The first item to ever have it was Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum. 
• Of all the planets people have discovered, there’s only one that rotates clockwise.  It’s Venus. 
• Did you know the Barbie doll has a middle and last name too? Her full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.
• After taking a nap you might feel hungry, but probably not as hungry as a snail does after its nap.  Snails can sleep for 3 years without eating.
• When making a dollar out of change, you have a lot of options. There are 293 ways to make change for a dollar.
• Ice tea was invented in Missouri.  It first appeared at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904. 
• The first successfully landed parachute jump from a moving plane happened in Missouri.  It was over St. Louis in 1912.
• The tallest man in history lived in St. Louis.  It was Robert Pershing Wadlow, who was just over 8-feet-11-inches tall.
• Thank goodness air is light.  If it wasn’t we might never get off the couch.  Humans breathe in more than 3,000 gallons of air a day. 
• You probably think of the Earth as being round.  But scientists say the Earth’s measurements are more like that of a pear. 
• One row of teeth like humans have isn't good enough for some sharks. Some types of sharks have several rows. That way when the front row wears out, they are just replaced by the next row.
• Your second set of teeth aren't finished growing in until you're in your late teens or twenties. During that time, almost everybody will get four new molars in the backs of their mouths. They're called wisdom teeth, even though they don't make you smarter.
• Hearing is all about moving bones. Whenever the ear canal brings sound to the ear drum, the drum vibrates tiny bones in the middle ear to send a message to your brain that there's something you should be listening to.
• Just because something is far away doesn't always mean it's harder to see it. For some people it's the exact opposite. When you're far sighted you can see things in the distance but have trouble seeing things near by.
• When you’re tired, you may yawn.  And if you do, it will probably last about six seconds. That’s because the average length of a yawn is six seconds.
• Have you ever had the hiccups and couldn’t seem to get rid of them?  Well you’re probably better off than Charles Osborne.  He had the hiccups for sixty-five years straight.
• Every year in the United States, more than 17 tons of gold are used to make wedding rings for future brides and grooms.
• Celery has negative calories. It takes more calories to eat a piece of celery than the celery has in it to begin with.
• The flea can jump 350 times it’s body length. It’s like a human jumping the length of a football field.  Bet you didn’t know that!
• If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months, and 6 days you would have produced enough sound energy to heat up one cup of coffee.
• You may think having big muscles on your arms will make you strong. It's true. But those muscles aren't the strongest.   The strongest muscle in your body is your tongue.
• How many bats have you seen in your life?   Maybe none, but that's surprising since there are over 900 different kinds.  All of them are blind and use sound to help them figure out where they are going.
• Elephants aren't actually scared of mice.  That's because they don't know they're there.  Mice are too small for elephants to see.
• It may seem like bowling is something that was made up recently but that's not the case. People have bowled nine pins just for the fun of it since way back in medieval times.
• Pencils didn't always look like they do now.  At first pencils were just a bunch of sticks made of graphite held together by string.  Eventually someone decided to put the graphite into wood.
• The first bicycle was made in 1817, but that's not the interesting part.  The first bicycle didn't have pedals.  People just pushed it along.  Bet you didn't know that!
• If you've ever been to a major league baseball game you know that a lot of baseballs end up i the stands going home with fans.  But how often?  The average baseball only gets pitched 5 to 7 times.
• You've probably heard that vitamin C is good for you.  And most people think oranges are the best way to get it.  But actually, one serving of broccoli has twice the vitamin C of an orange.
• Just like most animals, some snails are faster than others.  But if you watched a bunch of snails crawl for a mile, it would take the average snail 33 hours.
• To most people, flowers are beautiful.  They like their smells and the way they bloom.  But some people are creeped out by them.  They have what's called Anthophobia, the fear of flowers.
• Bet You Didnt Know That - bigCoca cola was originally distributed in green glass bottles that could often be traded back to the store empty for money.
• Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than for the U.S. Treasury.
• The smartest dogs are 1) border collie 2) poodle 3) German shepherd.
• Alaska has the highest average number of people who walk to work.
• The first roller coaster was the LA Thomson Switchback Railway.  It was built in 1890 at Coney Island.
• The fully mature human body contains enough ingredients and raw materials to make a perfectly functional miniature bicycle.
• A crocodile can’t stick its tongue out.
• More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
• Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over million descendants.
• If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck.
• Kansas City is one of the biggest cities in Missouri.   It’s celebrated for many things and one of them is that is has more fountains than any other city in the world besides Rome.
• There are more chickens in the world than any other domesticated bird.  More than one chicken for every human on the face of the Earth.
• The original color of the White House was gray, which was the color of sand it was made of.  It was painted white after it was burned during the war of 1812.
• The Baby Ruth candy bar is named after former President Grover Cleveland’s daughter.
• 80 percent of all life on Earth is found under the ocean surface.   And the oceans contain nearly 99 percent of the living space on the planet.
• The speed of sound in water is nearly five times the speed of sound in air.  So if your listening while your swimming,  you might get the message sooner.
• The symbol on the "pound" key is called an octothorpe.  It has eight points which is where the octo-part came from and the Thorpe came from a former olympic athlete.
• The ridges on the sides of coins are called reeding or milling.  People used to know if their coins came from precious metal by checking for milled edges.  Lesser valued coins edges are smooth like the penny.
• The two lines that connect your top lip to the bottom of your nose are known as the philtrum.  The length and size of your philtrum is genetic.
• The ZIP in Zip-code stands for "Zoning Improvement Plan."  Your zip-code makes it much easier for the postal service to sort and deliver mail.
• The correct response to the Irish greeting, "Top of the morning to you," is "and the rest of the day to yourself."
• The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog," uses every letter in the alphabet. But it's not quite as fun as the song.
• It is impossible for most people to lick their own elbow. Try it!
• There are over 40,000 muscles and tendons in an elephant's trunk. This lets them pick up a single flower or lift a huge log.
• A long time ago, people used to think bats were birds without feathers.  But now we know that there is no such thing as a featherless bird.  We know that bats are MAMMALS, just like people.
• Between staying warm, raising chicks, finding food and avoiding predators, a penguin's life may not sound like much fun.  But penguins have some playful pastimes -- many of which are surprisingly similar to human hobbies! Tobogganing:  Penguins lie on their belly and toboggan through the ice and snow.  This helps them move quickly.  Surfing:  Penguins are often seen surfing through the waves onto land.
• The Little Mermaid is a national symbol of the country of Denmark. She is a Disney story that was originally a book by Hans Christian Andersen.
• The British Prime Minster always lives at 10 Downing Street, in the Westminster area of London. The exception is the current Prime Minister, Tony Blair who lives in 11 Downing Street because Number 10 is too small for his family.
• There are 6 laces on a professional football. The football is sometimes called a "pigskin" but is not actually made from pig skins.
• At Christmas, your parents may buy a pot of poinsettias to decorate the house. The Aztecs used poinsettias as medicine and dye. The poinsettia was named for the man who discovered them, Joel Poinsett. The word "poinsettia" is often misspelled "poinsetta".
• Reptiles are cold blooded but that doesn't mean they don't need heat.  They  need heat from the sun to keep them warm. This is why lizards and crocodiles love to lie in the midday sun.
• Exercising Turkey's are advancing science. Researchers at Harvard have been letting the birds run on treadmills to study how their muscles work.
• Rats giggle. Scientists have discovered that a high pitch sound the animals let out is not for distress, but laughter.
• Scientists in Illinois are trying to come up with new dishes. The kind you can eat. They will be made from a part of corn. They probably won't taste very good to us, but animals might love them and they'll cut down on waste.
• Kids need to eat more calories than adults. That's because we burn them up a lot faster. But everybody can have a few more calories in winter. Calories are burned easier in that season than they are in summer.
• Chalk is made from tiny plankton fossils.
• Astronauts from Texas don't have to worry about missing election day. Texas is the only state that allows people to cast their votes from space. It happened when astronaut David Wolf voted by e-mail from space.
• The military salute, where people put their flat hand up to their head comes from back in medieval times. Back then knights in armor raised their visors to let other people know who they were.
• 60 percent of our body weight comes from water. Of that amount, 8 percent is in our blood, 25 percent in the spaces between cells, and 67 percent inside our cells.
• Hot water weighs more than cold water.
• There are only three countries in the world whose names begin with "Z". They are Zambia, Ziare and Zimbabwe. They're all in Africa.
• Although the speed of raindrops is different depending on size and wind speed, the average raindrop falls at about 7 miles per hour.
• The crocodile doesn't chew its food, but swallows it whole. And it has several pounds of small stones in its stomach to help grind up all the stuff it eats.
• The Animal Crackers box has a string handle because when they were first made, the box was meant to hang on the Christmas trees.
• Even though the camels back is shaped with a  big hump, it has a straight spine.  The hump is used for storage.
• Invertebrates are animals that don't have a backbone. Most animals are invertebrates.  For every 100 animal species 98 of them don't have backbones.
• There is a town in the Country of Chile called Calama.  It's located in the Atacama Desert and it has never ever rained there.
• If you've never heard of the  "spring up, fall out" phenomenon, here's what it is.  It means children grow twice as fast in the spring as they do in the fall, but they gain more weight in the fall.
• The sound heard by a person when holding a seashell to his ear does NOT come from the shell itself. It is the echo of the blood pulsing in the personwho's listening's ear.
• The average adult stands 0.4 inch (1 cm) taller in the morning than in the evening, because the cartilage in the spine compresses or gets tighter during the day.
• A bird's eye takes up about 50 percent of its head; That's half.  Our eyes take up about 5 percent of our head. That means to be comparable to a bird's eyes, the eyes of a person would have to be the size of baseballs.
• Celery has negative calories - it takes more calories to eat and digest a piece of celery than the celery has to begin with.
• Animals know their language from the day they're born. Even if an animal has never been around another animal of its kind it will know how to make the correct grunts and noises to communicate.
• You may think singing was the first form of music but actually it was the forest. Man use to listen to bubbling brooks and the rain on rooftops. That's where we got the idea of making up songs.
• The color red has nothing to do with making a bull charge. They're color blind. It's the movement of the cape that gets the bull mad. The red cape is just tradition.
• If it weren't for dust the sunset and dawn wouldn't be very pretty. Dust in the upper air reflects the sun's rays which makes it's red light visible longer than all the other colors. And in the morning it makes red the first color you can see.
• The eyelids are the same as windshield wipers. They're used to help our eyes stay clean. Most people blink every six seconds and over a lifetime we blink about a quarter of a billion times.
• Every time you lick a stamp, you're taking in 1/10 of a calorie. Sooo, licking a stamp can make you gain weight.
• If you ever see a porcupine in water, you might think he's swimming. But he's not. All porcupines float in water.
• If you're ever walking around at night, you might want to have a girl lead you. It's a proven fact that girls see better than boys in the dark.
• Most animals use their tongues to taste there food. Not the butterfly. Butterflies taste with their feet.