There is an elephant on the loo! - Page 27

[Ene Uran]

Your brain is most active when you sleep.
The smarter you are, the more you dream.
Despite its often amazing computational power the brain only requires about 10 watts of power to operate.

[Lardmeister]

The 400 richest Americans have the combined wealth of the next 150 million Americans.

Guess who really needs a tax break?

[vegaseat]

St. Paul, Minnesota, was originally called Pig's Eye after a man named Pierre 'Pig's Eye' Parrant, who set up the first business there.

[vegaseat]

Istanbul, Turkey, is the only city in the world located on two continents.

[vegaseat]

Damascus, Syria, is the oldest continuously inhabited city in existence.

[vegaseat]

Woodward Avenue in Detroit, Michigan, carries the designation M-1, so named because it was the first paved road in the USA.

[vegaseat]

Brazil got its name from the nut, not the other way around.

[vegaseat]

Ninety percent of the world's ice covers Antarctica. This ice also represents seventy percent of all the fresh water in the world.

[GrimJack]

Acetaminophen is so toxic that taking 8 tablets in a day (2 tablets 4 times a day or 4 grams) can cause liver damage. The additional problem is that most opiate medication like percocet and vicodin along with many over the counter cough and cold medication contain half a gram of Acetaminophen.

[vegaseat]

A new drug-resistance gene, known as NDM-1, named for New Delhi, is widely circulating in the environment there — and could potentially spread to the rest of the world.

Bacteria that adopt this gene can only be treated with a few highly toxic and expensive antibiotics.

[vegaseat]

Blueberry Jelly Bellies were created especially for Ronald Reagan.

[vegaseat]

Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.

[vegaseat]

In 75% of American households, women manage the money and pay the bills.

[woooee]

Easter eggs dyed and inscribed with a person's name and birth date were honored in courts of law as birth certificates in Germany.

In Czechoslovakia during Easter week it’s good luck to beat your wife or the girl you fancy with a pomlázka, or a braided whip. While this may sound strange It’s not meant in a demeaning way or as an insult, in fact pomlázka, means “make young.” The idea behind the tradition is that anyone hit with the whip will be healthy and happy during the upcoming year.

A Seattle school has renamed Easter Eggs because of political correctness. They are now "Spring Spheres". That's not even a decent name.

[vegaseat]

An actual crucifixion – Kalbaryo (Calvary) is scheduled to happen on Friday, April 22, 2011 at San Pedro Cutud in the City of San Fernando, Pampanga, Philippines.

[vegaseat]

The US Internal Revenue Service has paid out more than a half-billion dollars in "first time home buyer tax credits" to people who probably didn't qualify. Folks like prison inmates, taxpayers who bought homes before the credit was enacted and people who did not actually buy homes or already had a home.

[woooee]

There are so many (tax) breaks that 45 percent of U.S. households will pay no federal income tax for 2010, according to estimates by the Tax Policy Center, a Washington think tank.

[vegaseat]

States where people vote for conservative candidates buy more porn than states in which people vote for progressive candidates.
-- Journal of Economic Perspectives Volume 23, Number 1

[vegaseat]

The $28 trillion credit default swaps market is only a small part of the huge and opaque $600 trillion off-exchange derivatives market that has crated much of the financial chaos in recent years.

[GrimJack]

Henrieta Lacks, though dead, is immortal and lives on (so to speak). Before she died at age 31 the doctors at Johns Hopkins took a cell sample from her cervical cancer. These cells were so successful at living in petri dishes that almost every cancer research in the world use clones of the HeLa cells. If all the HeLa cells in the world were gathered in one place, they estimate it would weigh approximately 600 metric tons. These cells are so well adapted to living in the lab that very rigorous protocols have to be used because if the HeLa cells infect other cell lines, they usually completely take over the cell line.

[vegaseat]

Let's hope the HeLa cells stay in vitro!

[Lardmeister]

Canadian scientists detected drug-resistant staph bacteria (MRSA) in bedbugs from three hospital patients from a downtrodden Vancouver neighborhood.

[Lardmeister]

Math wizard David X. Li invented a formula to price collateral debt obligations. Many Wall Street 'experts' wrongly adopted it, ultimately spurring the collapse of the financial sector.

[vegaseat]

The Daily Beast looked at major US cities and counted the number of college graduates above the age of 25 working in those cities. The major cities with the lowest percent of college graduates were:
Las Vegas, Nevada
San Antonio, Texas
Fresno, California
Houston, Texas

Yet, each of those cities is a successful and vibrant place to live in. Could that mean that college graduates are boring folks?

[vegaseat]

The city with the highest number of graduates is bean town
Boston, Massachusetts

[vegaseat]

The huge snowfalls during the 2010/2011 winter season have created a large hydroelectric power surplus in the Northwest United States, Many of the wind farms in that area have to be shut down, since the power grid there cannot use the extra electricity generated.

Where are electric cars when you need them?

[woooee]

NICOSIA (Reuters) – A court in Cyprus jailed three men for up to 20 months Monday for snatching the remains of late Cypriot President Tassos Papadopoulos from his grave.

The court ruled one of the defendants had asked his brother to dig up the remains, hoping he could negotiate his own release from prison where he is serving two life sentences for murder.

[vegaseat]

In some locations dammed up water is used for temporary energy storage.

[vegaseat]

In a recent AP poll, 99.3% of US adults surveyed indicated that they believe North Dakota is real.

[vegaseat]

China, India and South Korea expect to use 262 gigawatts from nuclear power by 2030, more than what the U.S., Japan, Germany and France produce together.