Fact of the Matter...part 3

1. Due to a retinal adaptation that reflects light back to the retina, the night vision of tigers is six times better than that of humans.
2. Glaciers occupy 5.8 million square miles, or 10 percent of the world's land surface - an area as large as South America.
3. The colours in a hummingbird's feather are created by tiny platelets, called interference colours, and are much like the shimmering colours seen in a soap bubble or in a drop of oil.
4. The only part of the human body that has no blood supply is the cornea, It takes its oxygen directly from the air.
5. Playing cards were invented by the Chinese as early as 1120.
6. A person's nails and hair continue to grow throughout his or her life, and even after death.
7. Butterflies cannot fly if their body temperature is less than 86 degrees.
8. The world's fastest reptile (measured on land_ is the spiny-tailed iguana of Costa Rica. It has been clocked at 34.7 kmph.
9. A snake's stomach is located in the front one-fifth portion of its body.
10. The North Atlantic Deep Water Current is an oceanic 'river' that carries twenty times more water than all the rivers of the world put together.
11. Lemon sharks grow a new set of teeth every two weeks. They grow more than 24,000 new teeth every year.
12. A thousand tons of meteor dust fall to Earth every day.
13. The Sun provides our planet with 126,000,000,000,000 horsepower of energy every day. This means that 54,000 horse power is delivered to every person in each 24-hour period.
14. Pet parrots can eat virtually any common 'people-food', except for chocolates and avocados. Both of these are highly toxic for the parrot - can even by fatal.
15. The 1988 movie Titanic lasts 3 hours and 14 minutes. The actual ship took 2 hours and 40 minutes to sink after hitting an iceberg.
16. Rubies and sapphires are made of corundum - the hardest known rock after diamond.
17. If you were to rub garlic on the heel of your foot, it would be absorbed by the pores and eventually show up on you breath.
18. Rivers in the northern hemisphere scour their right-hand banks more severely than their left-hand banks. This effect is due to the rotation of the Earth.
19. The height of the 984-foot-tall Eiffel Tower varies, depending on the temperature, by as much as 6 inches.
20. The Dead Sea is not a sea, but a landlocked salt lake, 72 km long by 14.5 km wide.
21. On the stone temples of Madurai, there are more than 30 million carved images of gods and goddesses.
22. The owl parrot can't fly, and builds its nest under tree roots.
23. In the time it takes to turn a page of a book, we lose about 3 million old red blood cells and our bone marrow produces the same number of new ones.
24. The pupil of an octopus' eye is rectangular.
25. Lightning bolts generate temperatures five times hotter than the 6,000 degrees Celsius found at the surface of the sun.
26. Jupiter is the largest planet, and it has the shortest day. Although Jupiter has circumference almost 11 times that of Earth, it makes one turn in 9 hours and 55 minutes.
27. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables contains one of the longest sentences in the French language - 823 words without a period.
28. The average adult stands 0.4 inch (1 cm) taller in the morning than in the evening, because the cartilage in the spine compresses during the day.
29. When a person dies, hearing is generally the last sense to go. The first sense lost is usually sight. Then follows taste, smell, and touch.
30. The phrase 'a red letter day' dates back to 1704, when holy days were marked in red letters in church calendars.