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Matt Damon Still Alive and Kicking
Matt Damon has quashed reports about plunging to his death on the Mountains of California by making a late night TV appearance on the Dave Letterman show.
It was alledged that actor had slipped and fallen off the Palos Verdes Mountains and rumours surfaced online on Thursday morning. He has chastised the pranksters for making such a stupid stunt as this could have very easily upset his family and friends.
What Megan Fox Wants in a Man
Well boys, you want to impress Megan Fox? Heres how……….
Respect and be kind to your mother, this is very important.
Also you need to be a gentleman, open doors, lay coats over puddles and all that, a good sense of humour is also required…
In her new horror film Jennifers Body, Megan Fox plays a possessed high schooler who eats any male classmate who gets in her way. In real life, the star says, she’s not that ferocious with her men, but they had better mind their manners.
FACT OF THE DAY
[B]All about bears:[/B]
Polar bears have been known to swim more than 60 miles without resting.
Koalas look like they could belong to the bear family and are often called bears, but they are, in fact, marsupials.
Grizzly bears are powerful, top-of-the-food-chain predators, yet much of their diet consists of nuts, berries, fruit, leaves, and roots.
The Panda was not officially considered a bear until 1995.
Bears eat a lot of food to get ready for winter. We would have to eat 50 hamburgers and 12 large orders of fries for many days to get as big as these bears.
The sun bear is a small animal that lives in the tropical rainforests of Southeast Asia
If you spray an antiseptic spray on a polar bear, its fur will turn purple.
Black bears can run up to thirty-five miles per hour.
The grizzly bear is the largest land carnivore in the world.
FACT OF THE DAY
Chemical symbol is Au from the Latin word aurum which means shining dawn .
A carat was originally a unit of mass based on the carob seed used by ancient merchants.
Gold was discovered in Ancient times and used by the ancient South Americans, Asians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Chinese. It is mentioned in the Bible.
The purity of gold is measured in Carats.The Carat is still used for the weight of gem stones where 1 carat = 200mg. Pure gold is 24 carats.
Oceans are the greatest single reservoir of gold at Earths surface, containing approximately eight times the total quantity of gold mined to date. However, the current cost of extracting it is more than the gold is worth. About 10 billion tons of gold are estimated to be held in suspension in the oceans of the world.
The oldest gold jewelery used by man is dated to 3500 BC.
Pure gold is expensive and not very practical to wear owing to its extra softness. Therefore, it is mixed with other metals mainly copper and silver.
Compared with other metals, gold is much softer. It can even be hammered so very thin that the light of the sun can shine through it.
The melting point of gold is 2,063 degrees fahrenheit.
Did you know that Platinum is one of the worlds strongest metals? It weighs 60% more than karat gold.
FACT OF THE DAY
The name volcano has its origin from the name of Vulcan, a god of fire in Roman mythology.
Earth has more than 1,500 active volcanoes.
The largest volcano in the world is Mauna Loa. It has a volume of about 40,000 cubic kilometers, and an above-sea level area of 5125 square kilometers.
The most common type of lava – called basalts – usually have eruption temperatures of about 1150-1200 C.
The highest volcano is Ojos del Salado in Chile. It is 22,589 feet (6,887 m) tall.
More than 80% of the Earths surface is volcanic in origin.
About 500 million people live close to active volcanoes!
Somewhere, around the world, there are 20 active volcanoes erupting as you are reading this. Between 50-70 volcanoes erupted last year, and 160 went off in the last decade.
The names of some famous volcanoes are: Mount St. Helens, Muana Loa, Lassen Peak, Mount Rainier, and Mount Olympus.
The oldest volcano is probably Etna and that is about 350,000 years old.
The Indonesian volcano, Tambora, which erupted in 1815 produced so much ash that world temperatures fell sharply in the following year. New England, in the eastern USA, had severe frosts in August.
The loudest sound in the history of mankind was caused by a volcanic eruption at Krakatoa, near Java in 1883. The sound was so powerful that it was heard in Australia, which is 5000 km far from Krakatoa.
FACT OF THE DAY
The continent of Antarctica contains about 10 percent of all the land on earth.
Yet Antarctica is the most remote, hard-to-get-to place on our planet. Its possible to visit every continent except Antarctica without ever crossing more than about 100 miles of sea. But Antarctica is everywhere at least 600 miles from the nearest continent!
Antarctica is also the loneliest place on earth. In the Northern Hemisphere, large parts of Canada, Alaska, Russia, Greenland, and Scandinavia lie above the Arctic Circle.
Even though it’s cold, thousands of people live in this polar region. In the Southern Hemisphere, Antarctica reaches all the way to the Antarctic Circle.
In this region, there are no trees, few plants, and not a single permanent inhabitant!
FACT OF THE DAY
The first known automobile was built in 1668, it was a two foot long steam powered model constructed by Ferdinand Verbiest, a Belgian Jesuit preist.
Initially cars were steered with a tiller. Steering wheels were first introduced in 1898 by a Panhard & Levassor model.
The first car for sale in America was the Curved Dash Oldsmobile. It was priced at 650 dollars.
The fastest time for removing a car engine, and replacing it is 42 seconds for a Ford Escort, on 21 November 1985.
An airbag takes only 40 milliseconds to inflate after an accident.Airbag opening speed reaches 320 km/h ,
The first car radio was invented in 1929.
The Ford Puma is the first Ford to be entirely designed on computer.
The city with the most Rolls Royces per capital is Hong Kong.
An F1 car weighs around 550 kg.
According to research carried out by DirectLine for the Daily Mirror, satellite navigation systems are being blamed for 300,000 road accidents each year.
FACT OF THE DAY
In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies! (man thats gotta hurt)
FACT OF THE DAY
The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male’s head off.
FACT OF THE DAY
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.
FACT OF THE DAY
During the First World War, Hitler was asleep in a foxhole when he had a nightmare in which his mouth was filled with dirt. He woke up and went for a walk “to get some air” and a shell scored a direct hit on the foxhole killing all the occupants.
FACT OF THE DAY
Insect-eating bats produce high-pitched clicks to help them navigate. In a remarkable demonstration of rapid fire, some bats can generate two hundred clicks per second. Each click lasts for just one-thousandth of a second, and is followed by a short gap just long enough for the bat to hear the returning echo before the next click is produced.
FACT OF THE DAY
Auguste Rodin dreamt pictures of his finest sculptures in advance. Paul McCartney dreamt the tune of ‘Yesterday’. Mendeleyev dreamt the structure of the Periodic Table.
FACT OF THE DAY
Centuries ago, purchasing real estate often required having one or more limbs amputated in order to prevent the purchaser from running away to avoid repayment of the loan. Hence an expensive purchase was said to cost “an arm and a leg.”
Fact of the Day
23 is one of the most commonly cited prime numbers – a number that can only be divided by itself and one. Twenty three is the lowest prime that consists of consecutive digits. Primes have been described as the atoms of mathematics – the building blocks of the world of numbers.
John Forbes Nash, the Nobel Prize-winning economist who was the subject of the film, A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe, was obsessed with 23. It featured prominently in his battle with mental illness. His breakdown began when he claimed that a photograph of Pope John XXIII on the cover of Life magazine was in fact him, the proof being that 23 was his favourite number. Nash published 23 scientific articles.
In the disaster movie, Airport, the bomber has seat 23. The number of crosses on Calvary at the end of the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian, is 23. In Die Hard With A Vengeance, a train derails in subway station 23. The lead characters in the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski always used Lane 23 at the bowling alley. In the television series Lost, one of the combination of six numbers that haunt the characters and they have to input to a computer to avoid an unknown fate is 23.
Each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to the start of human life. The nuclei of cells in human bodies have 46 chromosomes made out of 23 pairs. Egg and sperm cells in humans have 23 chromosomes which fuse and divide to create an embryo.
FACT OF THE DAY
In Gulliver’s Travels in 1726, Jonathan Swift predicted the two moons of Mars – along with uncannily accurate estimates of their sizes and orbital periods – 151 years before they were proven to exist. Isaac Asimov called this ‘undoubtedly the luckiest guess in literature’.
FACT OF THE DAY
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.
Modern Wonders
A list of the seven wonders of the modern world was compiled after World War One (after 1918). The motorcar was omitted from the list, instead naming: (1) the radio; (2) the telephone; (3) the aeroplane; (4) radium; (5) anaesthetics and antitoxins; (6) spectrum analysis; and (7) X rays. An updated list undoubtedly will include the car, television, computer, nuclear energy and nanotechnology.
New Seven Wonders
At a decleration on 07/07/07 in Lisbon, Portugal, after worldwide online polling, SMS and telephone voting the New Seven Wonders were declared as being:
1) The Great Wall, China
2) Petra, Jordan
3) Christ Redeemer, Brazil
4) Machu Picchu, Peru
5) Chich
FACT OF THE DAY
The human head contains 22 bones, consisting the cranium and the facial bones. The cranium is formed by 8 bones: the frontal bone, two parietal bones, two temporal bones, the occipital bone in the back, the ethmoid bone behind the nose, and the sphenoid bone. The face consists of 14 bones including the maxilla (upper jaw) and mandible (lower jaw). (The skull has many little holes in its base which allow the cranial nerves to travel to their destinations.)
The cranium protects the brain, which, for an average adult male weighs about 1400 gram (49oz). The brain of Russian novelist Turgenev, weighed 2021g (71oz), Bismarck’s brain weighed 1807g (64oz), while that of famous French statesman Gambetta was only 1294g (46oz). Female average brain mass is slightly less than that of males. The largest woman’s brain recorded weighed 1742g (6oz). Einstein’s brain was of average size.
It is estimated that the mental capacity of a 100-year old human with perfect memory could be represented by computer with 10 to the power of 15 bits (one petabit). At the current rate of computer chip development, that figure can be reached in about 35 years. However, that represents just memory capacity, not the extremely complex processes of thought creation and emotions.
But consider this: for all the complexity of the brain, you still have only one thought at a time. Make it a positive thought
FACT OF THE DAY
Several British kings went mad as a result of a blood disorder that causes gout and mental derangement. The most famous was Mad George III, who ruled England in the 18th Century. George was afflicted with porphyria, a maddening disease which disrupted his reign as early as 1765. Several attacks strained his grip on reality and debilitated him in the last years of his reign. Keeping it in the family, in 1776 his sister, Princess Caroline Mathilda married, at age 15, the deranged Christian VII of Denmark. George III died blind, deaf and mad at Windsor Castle on January, 29 1820.
FACT OF THE DAY
Forks were first used in the Middle Ages, but eating with one was considered scandalous. In the 11th Century, when a Greek princess died shortly after introducing forks at her wedding with a Venetian Doge (chief magistrate) Domenico Selvo, it was perceived as divine punishment.
While forks were a regular feature on the tables of nobles in Italy since the 11th Century, and used in France in the 14th Century, it was introduced in England only in 1611 by Thomas Coryat through his book “Coryat’s Curdities Hastily gobbled up in Five Months Travels in France, Savoy, Italy, &c.” Even then, he was mocked about promoting the use of forks and called “Furcifer,” meaning fork-bearer.
The upper classes of Spain were using forks in the 16th Century, as could be told from a large assortment of forks that were recovered from the wreck of La Girona, which sank off the coast of Ireland in 1588. In 1630, Governor Winthrop of Massachusetts had the first and only fork in colonial America.
So what did people eat with before using forks? They used wooden spoons, knives and, of course, their hands.
Forks, mostly being two-tined, were known as “split spoons”. Although there are examples of four- and five-tined forks from the before the 1600s, the four-tined fork became popular only in the late 1800s.
