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FACT-OF-THE-DAY ARCHIVE
"Our life is what our thoughts make it."
- Marcus Aurelius

JAN 2016


Previous Archives

DATEFACT OF THE DAY
1/1/16     A full moon is about five times brighter than a half-moon. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/2/16     India is the birthplace of chess. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/3/16     The deadliest hurricane on record is the 1970 Bhola Cyclone in Bangladesh, which killed between 150,000-300,000 people. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/4/16     Fossil fuel burning currently adds nearly six billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere every year. Only half of this CO2 is removed by forests and oceans. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/5/16     One in every five people in the world is Chinese. China's population is estimated to reach a whopping 1,338,612,968 by July 2009. China's population is four times that of the United States. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/6/16     A dolphin's "sonar" or echo-location is rare in nature and is far superior to either the bat's sonar or human-made sonar. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/7/16     Hippos were considered bad omens in ancient Egypt and were associated with the evil god Seth. They were more dangerous than crocodiles and they often capsized boats traveling the Nile. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/8/16     Hurricane/Typhoon John lasted 31 days in 1994, which is longer than any other hurricane in history. It was both a hurricane and a typhoon because it passed through both eastern and western parts of the Pacific Ocean. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/9/16     Fewer than 10% of babies are born on their exact due date, 50% are born within one week of the due date, and 90% are born within two weeks of the date. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/10/16     Iraq has a dry season and a wet season. During the wet season, from November to April, the country can get almost 40 inches of rain. In the dry season, between May and October, the temperature can reach up to 125 F. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/11/16     Gray whales were once known as "devilfish," due to the ferocity with which a female gray whale will protect its young. While whalers would sometimes harpoon a humpback or bowhead calf in order to lure its mother to the same fate, the wrath of a mother gray whale was far too risky for such a trick. Enraged females were known to smash or overturn the whalers' open boats in retaliation. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/12/16     People were using garlic to repel vampires long before Bram Stoker's Dracula was published. Folklorists suggest it is because vampires have a heightened sense of smell and the garlic's strong smell was overpowering. Garlic is proven to be effective against two other bloodsuckers: mosquitoes and ticks. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/13/16     The uncoiling of the jellyfish's small stingers is one of the fastest actions in nature. Stingers shoot out even faster than a bullet from a gun. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/14/16     The phrase "tying the knot" initially came from an ancient Babylonian custom in which threads from the clothes of both the bride and bridegroom were tied in a knot to symbolize the couple's union. Literally tying some type of ceremonial knot at a wedding ceremony can be found across cultures. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/15/16     Several studies indicate that it would have been biologically impossible for humans to evolve large brains on a raw vegan diet. They conclude that meat-eating was crucial in human evolution. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/16/16     The average life expectancy on the African continent ranges from 74 years in the island nation of Mauritius to just under 32 years in sub-Saharan Swaziland. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/17/16     The shortest dialogue script since the introduction of talkies was written for Mel Brook's Silent Movie (1976), which has only one spoken word throughout: "Non." - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/18/16     In 1964, the FBI used the IRS to initiate an audit of Martin Luther King Jr. and his nonprofit, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They even went so far as to suggest that the bureau forge letters from King to donors of the nonprofit that warned of the ongoing IRS investigations, hoping to stem the group's cash flow. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/19/16     Hurricanes never form at the equator because they need the Coriolis Force, which is very weak at the equator, to spin. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/20/16     Most of Apple's annual revenue (approximately $65 billion) is generated from the products Apple has invented during the last 10 years, such as iPods, iPhones, iPads, and iTunes. Almost half of its annual revenue, or $30 billion, comes from products invented in the past 4 years. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/21/16     As the population dwindled and society crumbled during the Black Death plague, old rules were ignored. The Catholic church lost influence, creating the seeds that led to Protestantism. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/22/16     Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1848) wrote one of opera's most famous insanity scenes in Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), based on Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor. He himself later went mad due to syphilis and spent the last years of his life in an insane asylum. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/23/16     Apple's name recognition was so low in Japan in the early 1980s that refrigerated trucks were used to deliver shipments of Apple computers because workers thought that the boxes contained perishable fruit. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/24/16     More than 80% of the Earth's surface is volcanic. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/25/16     Bats are the slowest reproducing mammals in the world for their size, and pregnancy is longer in bats than in other animals of their size. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/26/16     A female dolphin will assist in the birth of another's baby dolphin, and if it is a difficult birth, the "midwife" might help pull out the baby. Other dolphins, including bulls, will swim around the mother during birth to protect her. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/27/16     White, rather than black, is the Chinese color for mourning and funerals. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/28/16     A $60 million treasure of gold plundered by Coronado is believed to be buried on an 80-acre pasture at the Sems Ranch near Clyde, Texas. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/29/16     A person is more likely to have a heart attack on Monday morning than on any other day of the week. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/30/16     A tsunami hits land with thousands of times the power of a regular wave. Regular waves are caused by wind pushing water at the surface of the ocean or other body of water. Tsunami waves are created by an event that affects the entire water column, from the ocean floor to its surface. - Provided by RandomHistory.com
1/31/16     Dogs can smell about 1,000 times better than humans. While humans have 5 million smell-detecting cells, dogs have more than 220 million. The part of the brain that interprets smell is also four times larger in dogs than in humans. - Provided by RandomHistory.com


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