10 best amazing facts
1. According to hospital figures, dogs bite an average of 1 million Americans a year.
2. The last animal in the dictionary is the Zyzzyva, a tropical weevil.
3. Honeybees have hair on their eyes.
4. The only continent without reptiles or snakes is Antarctica
5. The study of ants is called Myrmecology.
6. The biggest ant colony was found on the Ishikari Coast of Hokkaido: 306 million worker ants and 1 million queens lived in 45,000 interconnected nests over an area of 2.7 square kilometres (1.7 square miles). A worker ant will live for up to 5 years; while a Queen will live up to 25 years.
7. The fingerprints of koala bears are virtually indistinguishable from those of humans, so much so that they could be confused at a crime scene.
8. The tallest dog on record was named Shamgret Danzas. He was 42 inches tall (at the shoulder!) and weighed 238 lbs.
9. The first dog show was held in England in 1859.
10. Dolphins sleep with one half of the brain at a time, and one eye closed.
Thomas Edison filed 1,093 patents, including those for the light bulb, electric railways and the movie camera. When he died in 1931, he held 34 patents for the telephone, 141 for batteries, 150 for the telegraph and 389 patents for electric light and power.
One hour before Alexander Graham Bell registered his patent for the telephone in 1876, Elisha Gray patented his design. After years of litigation, the patent went to Bell.
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The Great Pyramid of Giza is the only one of the Seven Wonders of the World that still survives. Can you name the other six?
They are:
1) The Hanging Gardens of Babylon, which were built on the banks of the Euphrates river by King Nebuchadnezzar II.
2) The gigantic gold statue of Zeus was built by the sculptor Pheidias at Olympia.
3) The temple of Artemis was erected in the Asia Minor city of Ephesus in honour of the Greek goddess of hunting and wild nature.
4) The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was a huge tomb constructed for King Maussollos, Persian satrap of Caria.
5) The Colossus of Rhodes was a massive statue erected by the Greeks in honour of Helios the sun-god.
6) The Lighthouse of Alexandria was built by the Ptolemies on the island of Pharos.
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built near the ancient city of Memphis for Pharaoh Khufu in the period of the Fourth Dynasty, between 2613 and 2494BC. The Greeks refered to it as the Pyramid of Cheops. A true wonder, it is immense: according to Mysteries of the Unknown, it covers a ground area of 13.1 acres (32,4 hectares), composed of some 2.3 million limestone blocks average two-and-a-half tonnes each, enough stone to build a wall of foot-square cubes two-thirds around the globe at the equator, a distance of 16,600 miles (26 500km).
The oldest statue in the world is the Great Sphinx of Egypt. Carved out of limestone, it stands 19,8 metres (65 ft) high and is 73 metres (240 ft) long.
NOSTRADAMUS, the French Christian Jew who lived in France in the 16th century, made many accurate forecasts, including the two World Wars. 18 of his 950 quatrains refer to a third world war. Some Nostradamus experts had given the date for the start of such a war as mid-1999, referring to the Balkan conflict surrounding Kosovo. They obviously misinterpreted the quatrains. Their attention then turned to the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York.
Born Michel de Notredame on 14 December 1503 in St Remy, France, he was the oldest of five sons. His grandfather, Jean, taught him Latin, Greek, Hebrew, mathematics and astrology at an early age. Nostradamus received a medical degree in 1529 and became physician-in-ordinary to Charles IX during the bubonic plague. He is said to have had extraordinary healing abilities.
Nostradamus was in his late 40s when, it is told, he frequently went into a meditative state and had visions of the future. He began to document the visions in a mixture of Lain, French, and Greek quatrains, publishing his famous "Centuries" in 1558.
Nostradamus was married twice, losing his first wife and two children to the plague. He died on 2 July 1566. "Centuries" was translated into English in 1672. In 1781 it was banned by the Roman Catholic Church. Ironically, in 1553, when Nostradamus encountered a group of Franciscan monks he threw himself on his knees, clutching at the garment of one of the monks, Felice Peretti. When asked why he had done this he replied that he must yield "before his Holiness." Nineteen years after the death of Nostradamus, Peretti became Pope Sixtus V.
TOP PAID YOUNG CEO'S
Forbes recently released the top-paid young CEOs list that features two Indians (or should I say Indian origin) - Adobe’s Shantanu Narayen and Cognizant’s Francisco D’Souza.
The list that features 15 top-paid young CEOs ranks Narayen at 5th and D’Souza at the 15th position. In terms of age, D’Souza is the youngest of the 15 CEOs at 39.
The top spot is taken by Pakistiani origin Nabeel Gareeb, who is the CEO of chip-maker MEMC Electronic Materials (Interestingly, Gareeb in hindi means Poor – what a Oxymoron :). He takes home annual pay package of 79.6 million dollars (roughly 315 crore rupees) !
UNKNOWN FACTS ABOUT INDIA AND INDIANS
- India is one of only three countries that makes supercomputers (the US and Japan are the other two).
- India is one of six countries that launches satellites.
- The Bombay stock exchange lists more than 6,600 companies. Only the NYSE has more.
- Eight Indian companies are listed on the NYSE; three on the NASDAQ.
- By volume of pills produced, the Indian pharmaceutical industry is the world’s second largest after China.
- India has the second largest community of software developers, after the U.S.
- India has the second largest network of paved highways, after the U.S.
- India is the world’s largest producer of milk, and among the top five producers of sugar, cotton, tea, coffee, spices, rubber, silk, and fish.
- 100 of the Fortune 500 companies have R&D facilities in India.
- Two million people of Indian origin live in the U.S.
- Indian-born Americans are among the most affluent and best educated of the recent immigrant groups in the U.S.
- Thirty percent of the R&D researchers in American pharmaceutical companies are Indian Americans.
- Nearly 49% of the high-tech startups in silicon Valley and Washington, D.C. are owned by Indians or Indian-Americans.
- India sends more students to U.S. colleges than any country in the world. In 2004-2005, over 80,000 Indian students entered the U.S. China sent only 65,000 students during the same time.
- In a case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, an Indian-American woman scientist, Dr. Ananda Chakrabaty, won the argument that persons may be granted patents for useful manufacture of living organisms. She defeated the U.S. Patent Office, that argued that living things may not be patented, thus establishing the legal foundation for the biotech industry, (Diamond vs. Chakrabaty, 1980). Dr. Chakrabaty invented a microbe that eats oil spills.