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In 1972 when Gordon Brown (British Chancellor of the Exchequer) was 21, he won a Daily Express competition for "A Vision of Britain In The Year 2000."

 
It is said, grapefruit scent makes middle age women seem six years younger to men (but it does not work the other way round).

The average elephant produces 50lb of dung a day.

The dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park came from slowing down the sounds of elephants, geese and horses.

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Some of the most popular lipstick shades in Renaissance England were named, Rat, Horseflesh, Turkey, Blood and Puke.

When Thomas Eddison died in 1941, Henry Ford captured his dying breath in a bottle.

Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was the first Hollywood film that showed a toilet flushing - thereby generating many complaints.

The first flying-trapeze circus act was performed by Frenchman Jules Leotard at the Circus Napoleon on Nov 12th 1859. He invented the garment now known as the leotard.

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Walt Disney World generates about 120,000 pounds of garbage every day.

Turtles can breath through their bottoms. 

Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts.

The buzz generated by an electric razor in America is in the key of B flat. In the UK, it is in the key of G.

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Paraskevidekatriaphobia, is a morbid, irrational fear of Friday the 13th. Therapist Dr. Donald Dossey, whose specialty is treating people with irrational fears, coined the term. He claims, when you can pronounce the word you are cured. Friggatriskaidekaphobia has the same meaning.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first class

Titan arum is probably the world's smelliest flower. Originating in the tropical rain forests of Sumatra, this huge, extremely rare flower is a giant lily. It seldom blooms, but when it does the smell is described as something like the dead carcass of an animal 

A Viking tribe once raided England because they had run out of beer

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Film stars originally wore sunglasses, not to look mysterious, but to relieve their eyes from the dazzling glare of the early studio lights.

If you take any number, double it, add 10, divide by 2, and subtract your original number, the answer will always be 5. 

Over a 12 day period your body generates a whole new set of taste buds. (This process continues until you are in your 70's.)

Greyhounds can reach their top speed of 45 mph in just 3 strides
 
There is more sugar in 1kg of lemons than in 1kg of strawberries.

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Beethoven was extremely particular about his coffee , he always counted 60 beans per cup.

In 1943, Navy officer Grace Hopper had to fix a computer glitch caused by a moth, hence the term 'computer bug'.

Jupiter is large enough to contain the other major 7 planets in our solar system.

The water pressure inside every onion cell would be sufficient to explode a steam engine.

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The average person has walked 100,000 miles by the time they reach the age of 85.

Your hearing is less sharp after eating too much.

In the course of a lifetime, the average person spends 2 years on the phone (I bet cell phones/mobiles were not taken into consideration when that fact was worked out!!).

In a lifetime, the average clean-shaven man will spend five months shaving and will remove 28ft of hair.

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A Boeing 767 airliner contains 3,100,000 parts.

Belief in the existence of vacuums used to be punishable under Church law.

Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain. 

An owl can see a mouse moving from over 150ft away by a light no brighter than candlelight.

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A cubic mile of ordinary fog contains less than a gallon of water.

If you think of the Milky Way as being the size of the continent of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.

The chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex Myth or fact??

 
The average driver will be locked out of their car nine times during their life time (yes, men are in the stats).

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Termites are affected by music; the termites will eat your house twice as fast if you play them loud music.
Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the extreme fear of Friday the 13th.

One gallon of used motor oil can ruin approximately one million gallons of fresh water!

 
Christopher Trace, the first presenter of Blue Peter, was the body double for Charlton Heston in the film Ben-Hur.

Thomas Edison got patents for a method of making concrete furniture and a cigar which was supposed to burn forever.

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The Chinese used fingerprints as a method of identification back in 700.

 
Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than it does through the air.

A greenfly born on a Tuesday can be a grandparent by Friday.

 
There are more mobile phones in UK than there are people.

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You use an average of 43 muscles for a frown and you use an average of 17 muscles for a smile, and they say every two thousand frowns creates one wrinkle.

 
Baby robins eat 14 worms per day and parent robins make around 100 food visits to the nest every day!

 
The first man to die during planning & construction of the Hoover Dam was the father of the last man to die during its construction. December 20, 1922 with J.G. Tierney a Bureau of Reclamation employee who was part of a geological survey and drowned when he fell from a barge. Exactly 13 years later, in 1935, his son Patrick W. Tierney, fell to his death from an intake tower.

You will have to walk 80 kilometers for your legs to equal the amount of exercise your eyes get daily.

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In England during World War I, many German names and titles were changed and given more English-sounding names, including the royal family's from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Kaiser Wilhelm II countered this by jokingly saying that he was off to see a performance of 'The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.'
 
Both turdoid and turdine mean "belonging to the family turdus," Turdus musicus is the song thrush & Turdus viscivorus is the mistletoe thrush.

Nearly a quarter of all mammals can fly; with a huge 985 known species, bats make up 23.1% of all known mammals by species.

January is National Soup Month in the United States, January is the seasonal equivalent to July in the Southern Hemisphere; & on Jan 14th, 90% of New Year resolutions will be broken!

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Iceland, Europe's second largest island following Great Britain, boasts of having the world's oldest 'active' parliamentary body, Althing, which first met in 930AD.

The Turkish football club, Galatasaray, has an A for every other letter.

The tongue of a mature Blue Whale has approximately the same mass as that of an entire adult elephant.

The study, which tested telephones, desks, water coolers, doorknobs, and toilet seats, compiled 7,000 samples from major centers across the country. What they found, was that while phones ranked highest in bacteria levels, the office desk was a close second.

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If you suffer from geophagia then you have a compulsive urge to eat soil.

The African baobab tree (adansonia digitata) blossom opens only to moonlight and it is pollinated by bats .. the fruit bats. 

 
Clint Eastwood's roll of Dirty Harry was turned down by Paul Newman, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra.

According to sales, 17,000 individual 'smarties' are eaten every minute in the UK. (2006)

The life of an eyelash is about 6 weeks.

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 Hyperpolysyllabicomania is a fondness for big words.

The first genuine French kiss in a Hollywood movie was between Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in the film "Splendor In The Grass".

 

The Great Barrier Reef is composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs, 900 islands stretching for 2,600 kilometres and has more than 1,500 species of fish living on it.

 Tottenham Hotspur didn't have a single player sent off in a Football League match between October 27th 1928 and December 4th 1965.

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Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Margret Mitchell's 'Gone With The Wind' was originally named Pansy.
 
In ancient China, criminals who attacked travellers had their noses cut off.

In the early days of film making, the people who worked on the sets were called movies. The films were called motion pictures.

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Some 30% of local residents in Shanghai say cycling is their main means of transport and 60% of locals pedal to work every day. With the possible exception of China, the Netherlands boasts more bicycles per capita than any other country - at least 16-million bikes for the 16-million Dutch. Roughly 30% of all urban trips in the Netherlands are on bicycles, compared with 2% in the UK.

Their are at least 250,000 species of insects constituting the order Coleoptera or beetles, making it the largest order in the animal kingdom. Among the approximately 5,000 widely distributed beetles of the family Coccinellidae is the Ladybird; the name originated in the Middle Ages, when this little beetle was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and called "beetle of Our Lady".

In the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill , Jack represented the French King, Louis XVI who "Lost his Crown" in the Revolution, while Jill who (or rather her head) came tumbling after, was Marie Antoinette

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When looking at statues of a person on a horse, if the horse has both front hooves in the air, the person died in battle. If the horse has one front hoof in the air the person died as a result of wounds received in battle. If the horse has all four hooves on the ground, the person died of natural causes. 

Out of 268 stations, there are only two stations on the London Underground that have all five vowels in them - Mansion House and South Ealing. (year 2009)

A scallop has 35 eyes and they are all blue. Their eyes can't see shapes, but can detect light and motion.

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 'Allegedly' the earliest identified use of the exact phrase "the whole 9 yards" dates from 1942, in the Investigation of the National Defense Program: Hearings Before a Special Committee Investigating the National Defense Program, by Admiral Emory Scott Land, who said "You have to increase from 7.72 to 12 for the average at the bottom of that fifth column, for the whole nine yards". This use refers to the total output statistics for the nine new shipyards that produced "Liberty Ships" with unprecedented speed, crucial to the course of World War II. I don't know what gave rise to the phrase.
 
  The most frequently quoted explanation of the term "the whole 9 yards" came from WWII fighter pilots in the South Pacific. When arming their airplanes on the ground, the .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts measured exactly 27 feet, before being loaded into the fuselage. If the pilots fired all their ammo at a target, it got "the whole 9 yards." There are several claims for this phrase. The yard is quite an old measurement.
 
The whole 9 yards... In early Scotland, a gentleman wore a kilt. There were two types of kilts, one for casual wear, and one for formal affairs. The formal one took 9 yards of tartan. The tailor would inquire to which kilt was needed, and the reply…if it was for a formal one was “I’ll take the whole 9 yards” This one could be fairly old.

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Did you know that David Cameron's father was born at Blairmore house?

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*In ancient times January and February didn't exist, since the Romans originally considered winter a monthless period. They were added by Numa Pompilius about 713 BC. .
*Sir Winston Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, FRS, PC, statesman and Prime Minister was offered the Dukedom of London, but declined in order to remain in the House of Commons.
*The Killer Whale, commonly referred to as the Orca, and less commonly as the blackfish, is the largest member of the Dolphin family.

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A World Toilet Summit has been held every year since 2001; also in 2001, the World Toilet Organization aka WTO, declared its founding day, November 19th, as World Toilet Day (The venue for the 2011 World Toilet Summit has yet to be announced)

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In 1937 brothers Dick and Mac McDonald open a hamburger stand called "The Airdrome" at the airport in Monrovia, California.  

On May 15th 1940 the McDonalds opened their first McDonald's restaurant, on U.S. Route 66, at 14th and E St. In 1972, The McDonald's system generated $1 billion in sales through 2200 restaurants; in 1980 the 6000th McDonald's restaurant opened in Munich, Germany; by 2009 McDonalds had 31,000+ outlets worldwide.

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The Great Barrier Reef formed around 18 million years ago, is made up of approximately 900 islands and 3000 coral reefs, and is visited or home to 30 species of whales, 215 species of beautiful birds, 6 species of sea turtles, 125 species of sharks and stingrays, 49 species of pipefish, 17 species of sea snakes and around 1,500 types of fish! Also some of the largest populations of Dudongs visit the Great Barrier Reef, Dudongs are classified as marine mammals and are related to the elephants.

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Presently there are about 500 active volcanoes in the world – the majority following along the Pacific 'Ring of Fire' – and around 50 of these erupt each year. The United States is home to 50 active volcanoes. There are more than 1,500 potentially active volcanoes, and an estimated 500 million people live near active volcanoes.

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*May is the official Zombie Awareness Month of the Zombie Research Society. Supporters of Zombie Awareness Month wear a gray ribbon to signify the undead shadows that lurk behind our modern light of day. Also many films important to the evolution of the modern Zombie are set in the month of May, from the original Night of the Living Dead, 1968, to the Dawn of The Dead remake of 2004.