Random Facts - Page 5

[Reverend Jim]

The majority of US presidents have been Republicans.

Keep in mind that today's Republicans would probably denounce any Republican president before 1960 as a commie traitor.

[<M/>]

Orcas (killer whales aka Shamu) kill sharks by torpedoing up into the shark's stomach from underneath, causing the shark to explode.

[<M/>]

Saltwater crocodiles, Nile Crocodiles, Mike Tyson, and Luis Suarez have the hardest/deadliest bite in the animal kingdom ;)

[Reverend Jim]

New York will spend 735 million dollars to settle lawsuits over police abuse this year. Source

[Reverend Jim]

The Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most rapidly and widely ratified international human rights treaty in history. Only two countries have refused to sign on. One is Somaila. The other is the US.

[vegaseat]

In a study involving older adults (with an average age of 76 years), 12 weeks of daily blueberry consumption was enough to improve scores on two different tests of cognitive function including memory.

[ddanbe]

Aliens are among us!
Read this.

[Reverend Jim]

A can of albacore tuna has 700 times the mercury that is present in one compact fluorescent bulb. If you break an old mercury thermometer you are releasing 6000 times as much as one bulb.

[vegaseat]

Consumption of whale and dolphin meat, as is the practice in Japan, is a source of high levels of mercury poisoning.

Common symptoms of mercury poisoning include itching, skin discoloration, shedding or peeling of skin, and memory impairment.

[Agilemind]

Arctic peoples (Inuit, Eskimos, etc..) have the highest exposure to persistent organic pollution (POPs) such as DDT of the whole world eventhough those products were never used there. POPs evaporate in more temperate/tropical regions and are carried through the air to the polar regions where they condense and settle on the ground and into the oceans. They then bioaccumulate up the food chain reaching high concentrations in the seal, walruses, and fish eaten by the indigenous people.

http://www.panap.net/issues/pesticides-health-and-environment/persistent-organic-pollutants-pops-and-indigenous-people-arctic

http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/essay_calder.html

[ddanbe]

Is it possible to get exact data on how much mercury (Hg) is contained in one fish? Does anybody here on earth has any idea?
By exact, I mean EXACT. How much micro-, nano-, pico- gram per dry fish weight?
And what was the analytic method used?

Random fact: The uniforms of the mighty Prussian Army where stained with prussian blue,
an iron-cyanide complex,
According to current environmatenl laws, they probably would die before they even started a battle.

[Agilemind]

Is it possible to get exact data on how much mercury (Hg) is contained in one fish? Does anybody here on earth has any idea?

Yes, many groups and institutions do regular tests on mercury in fish, they usually test for inorganic mercury, methylmercury or both. I know one way to do it is using Mass Spectrometry (you can only test a little bit at a time but they take multiple sameples from different tissue types and then weight the resulting amounts by the proportion of the fish that is that tissue). There are probably other ways too (eg. chemical reactions involving mercury that produce destinctive products). ETA: Indeed, Diphenylcarbazone reacts with mercury to produce a distinctive colour.

The EPA uses this method to test for inorganic mercury and this one for methyl mercury which are much more sensitive. They are based on excitation patterns of the electrons present in mercury atoms.

Here is a table from the FDA on mercury in different kinds of fish: http://www.fda.gov/food/foodborneillnesscontaminants/metals/ucm115644.htm
here is a more detailed one:
http://www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/Metals/ucm191007.htm

According to current environmatenl laws, they probably would die before they even started a battle.

Um no, it is actually approved to be used as a medicine by the USDA to treat meavy metal poisoning but is no longer the preferred treatment so no longer available.

[vegaseat]

An interesting Mercury story ...
http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/motm/dimethylmercury/dmmh.htm

[Reverend Jim]

Dalmatians are the only breed of dog that gets gout (because they are the only mammals, other than humans, which produce uric acid).

[Reverend Jim]

There have been 1700 cases of ebola confirmed since February and the world is in a panic (according to or because of the media). Forgotten in all this is that over 300,000 people have died from malaria and over 600,000 from tuberculosis in that same period.

[heidi.dum]

Oregon is the number 1 growers of Christmas trees in the United States.
in 2012 they harvested approx 6,500,000 trees roughly 30% more than the number 2 grower in the US North Carolina, approx 4,300,000. Michigan and Pennslyvania are slowly losing their competitive edge with these two power house harvesting only 1,700,000 and 1,000,000 respectively. Since 2002 when these 4 states were considered to donimate with 3 others, Winconsin is holding down the #5 spot at 610,000 and Washington is holding tight to #6 with just under 600,000 in 2012 and California has dropped from the top 7 to #16 at 109,000 trees.
Link 2002
Link 2012

[Reverend Jim]

Heroin was originally marketed by Bayer as a drug suitable for helping morphine addicts to kick their addiction.

[Agilemind]

Brazil nuts contain both radioactive potassium-40 (half-life > 1billion years) and radium (half-life 1600 years). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_equivalent_dose

[heidi.dum]

Ritalin has the same chemical make up as the street drug Speed. Thus why it's a class three medication and requires ID and signatures.

In an individual who truly has ADHD one will notice a significant difference in behavior when they do and do not take their medication.
An individual who has ADHD essentially, their brain is attempting to proccess information so fast that it's like they are already on speed. Hensforth the speed counter acts this and allows them to track their thoughts.

Similarly...Answers the mystery why so many kids who are so good or so addictive to high action video games. Those games push individuals to make desisions, ie process infomation at unbelievably fast speeds. For individuals with ADHD this actually calms their brain, which in turn allows them to relax. [weird, ironic and interesting all at the same time]
They are no longer trying to slow down their thought processes. They are no longer trying to reign themselves in. The games are asking them to function on a level and at the speed that their brain naturally wants to function. In many instances these games and often what others considered to be complicated logic problem solving puzzles, including Suduko-especially the more advanced ones, people with ADHD work through in a nearly thoughtless manner. The logic puzzles especially Suduko ones that seem to drive half the world crazy. As a few people who do them a lot what their method is and how long it takes them to do an easy versus a hard one. It's really interesting to look at the results. There's a pattern between the average time it takes to complete and the methods used especially as the puzzles get harder. That pattern will clearly divide people into a couple different areas. The ones with the most severe ADHD will most often tell you something to the effect that they scan the whole page at once, glance back to check to determine where a number goes.

[heidi.dum]

Oregon is the number one producer of Blackberries.
In reality though, it is the Marion Berry that is exported and sold as Blackberries. 90% of all black berries are Marion Berries. Oregon sells 30 million pounds of blackberries [give or take 3 million poounds] from it's 4-6 week harvest period each year.

Though in reality even few Oregonians can tell you the difference between a blackberry, a boisenberry, a logan berry and a Marion Berry, and those are only the top 5 varieties.

Oregon tried to make the Marion Berry it's official state berry in 2009. All 90 legislaters voted in favor. However, there is a single farmer, who grows a massively large crop of another type of blackberry who objected.
He stated that as it's alreadly the number one selling blackberry making it the official berry the sales of marion berries would increase dramatically, and the sales of other types would be hurt. Legislaters have tabled it at this time not pressuring the issue.
Me personally, wonder what will happen when he goes to the the big blue sky.

The Marion Berry is a cross breed between two types of blackberries that few have ever heard of who are breeds from the Logan Berry and the Pacific Blackberry. [note the Logan Berry is a cross between a blackberry, a raspberry and dewberry when unless you grew up in a rural area few have heard of a dewberry].
The Marion Berry was born in the agraculture research development center at Oregon State University initially in 1945. Testing and research contunied and plot tests began growning in the williamette valley located in Marion County Oregon within two. About ten years later, something like 1956 or 58 it gained it's name after it's growing location Marion County.

[vegaseat]

Personal data of about 4.5 million patients were stolen from U.S. hospital operator Community Health Systems Inc computer systems. This includes social security numbers.

[mattster]

Only 4% of the energy in a standard light bulb is light, the rest is heat

West Virginia (USA) holds an annual "Roadkill Cook-off"

Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address was only 237 words long

A typical bed houses over 6 billion dust mites

.. could go on forever ..

  I pick up a lot of useless junk aha

[heidi.dum]

Pugs are not a natural breed of dogs. If left to their own they would not survive as in order to give birth they must have a C-section everytime. They cannot have natural Births.

Chihuahua's commonly only have 2-3 puppies, however, 4 is not uncommon, and though rare they have been known to have up to 8.

[My 7lb Chihuahua gave birth to 6 just 15 months ago, all natural without any assistance. It is not often that Chihuahiua's need assistance regardless of how many they have]

[Reverend Jim]

Technically, no breed of dog is a natural breed. Suggested viewing is the 2009 documentary, Pedigree Dogs Exposed.

[Agilemind]

Pugs are not a natural breed of dogs. If left to their own they would not survive as in order to give birth they must have a C-section everytime. They cannot have natural Births.

There are lots of breeds where they almost always need a C-section: bulldogs, [American] Staffordshire Terriers, Corgis, etc...

Plus several that are physically unable to hunt their own food: Pekingese, English Bulldogs, Bassett Hounds, ...

And most are mentally unable to hunt their own food.

[Reverend Jim]

The Cavalier King Charles breed can suffer from a condition where its brain continues to grow beyond the size of the containing skull. Dogs with this condition must be put down because of the extreme pain that this causes. This condition is a result of bad breeding practices.

[sneekula]

The American News Media can only handle three major events at a time.

[vegaseat]

Pharmacy chain Walgreen Co suffered a system outage yesterday, taking all of its 8,200 pharmacy outlets offline. Some prescription orders may have been lost.

[Reverend Jim]

The first telephone in a private residence was installed in the house of Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) in 1876.

[heidi.dum]

The internet beggan as a government project under the US department of defence within their research agency. They first collaborated with MIT (Massachuttes Institute of Technology) in developing the initial work using phone lines to connect computers that lead to University California Berkeley developing ARPANET, using nodes and switches to connect systems initial among UCLA, UC Berkeley and Standford in 1969. In 1972 the first email message was sent which crashed the netwrok.
However, Berners-Lee recieves the credit for the claim of inventing the web, or the internet as we know it "today". Web pages, using a client server relationship with HTTP.
Today the terms Web, or world wide web (www) and internet, are used interchangerable, however, in reality, the internet is really what allows the ability to access the web.
http://www.tech-faq.com/who-invented-the-internet.html

Some claim that the interactive web we have today is not what Berners-Lee intended the web to ever do, while others claim it is. Those who claim it was not often refer to what we have today as WWW2, or web2, and speak of things like wikipeadia were user are able to access and edit as web3.