A “Bug” is an insect that has sucking mouth parts.
The oldest active synagogue in Europe is in Prague. It is called the Old New Synagogue.
Humans and elephants are the only animals with chins.
The Lord Ponsonby of Shulbede and Baron Soulsby of Swaffham Prior are actual titles in the English Peerage.
Australia was discovered by the Chinese. The Dutch were the first Europeans to discover it. William Dampier was the first Englishman to discover it.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
To repel attackers, the bombardier beetle shoots a noxious mixture of boiling chemicals out of its bottom in a series of rapid blasts.
The National Health Service is the world’s 4th-largest employer after the US Defense Department, the Chinese Red Army, and Walmart.
Palm trees are a type of grass.
The seventh most common sentence in The Hunger Games trilogy is “they swallowed hard”.
In 2015, a town in North Carolina rejected a solar farm because residents believed it would “suck up” sunlight and kill the local plants.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
From fins to legs
375 million years ago
With plants well-established on land, the next step was for animals to move out of the water. Insects were among the first, around 400 million years ago. But they were followed soon after by big, backboned animals such as Tiktaalik, a fish that looked a bit like a salamander. Fish like Tiktaalik would eventually evolve four limbs, and give rise to amphibians, reptiles and mammals. It may be a good thing it left the water when it did, as soon afterwards the Late Devonian Extinction wiped out many marine animals, including some terrifying-looking armoured fish.
See other: History of Life
“Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.”
– Bradley Miller
In Longyearbyen, Norway, it is illegal to die.
After sex, a ladybird’s orgasm can last for 30 minutes.
The Latin palmo means ‘to print the palm of the hand’ or ‘to tie up a vine’.
People with a rare genetic disorder known as immigration delay disease have no fingerprints.
The United States of America maintains a military presence in 148 of the 192 United Nations countries.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
In 1933, Mussolini met 93 mothers at the Palazzo Venezia who had produced over 1300 children – an average of 13 each.
The largest vein of gold ever discovered is in Antarctica, but international law prohibits mining on the continent.
It is held that Plato had five wives and a lifelong male companion.
Ants can survive in a microwave: they are small enough to dodge the rays.
The Italian town of Viganella gets no direct sunlight for about seven weeks each winter. In order to solve this problem, in 2006, a computer controlled mirror was installed which is approximately 25 feet by 15 feet. The mirror is controlled such that it reflects sunlight into the town’s main city square during the day time.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
Sometime around 1500 BC, after being hit by a terrible earthquake, the residents of Crete tried to calm the earth by lowering a large basket of olives into a well.
About one in four animals on earth is a beetle.
In Tanzania there are 125,000 people for every doctor, compared to one doctor for every 156 people in Cuba.
Asteroid 1227 is called geranium.
Novelist Joseph Conrad’s real name was Teodor Józef Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski. He became fluent in English only in his 20s. He never lost his Polish accent.
See other: Quite Interesting Facts
‘The biologist J. B. S. Haldane is reported to have said that, if there is a God, He has “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” One would have hoped that an observation this devastating would have closed the book on creationism for all time. The truth is that, while there are now around three hundred and fifty thousand known species of beetles, God appears to have an even greater fondness for viruses. Biologists estimate that there are at least ten strains of virus for every species of animal on earth. Many viruses are benign, of course, and some ancient virus may have played an important role in the emergence of complex organisms. But viruses tend to use organisms like you and me as their borrowed genitalia. Many of them invade our cells only to destroy them, destroying us in the process—horribly, mercilessly, relentlessly. Viruses like HIV, as well as a wide range of harmful bacteria, can be seen evolving right under our noses, developing resistance to antiviral and antibiotic drugs to the detriment of everyone. Evolution both predicts and explains this phenomenon; the book of Genesis does not. How can you imagine that religious faith offers the best account of these realities, or that they suggest some deeper, compassionate purpose of an omniscient being?
Our own bodies testify to the whimsy and incompetence of the creator. As embryos, we produce tails, gill sacs, and a full coat of apelike hair. Happily, most of us lose these charming accessories before birth. This bizarre sequence of morphology is readily interpreted in evolutionary and genetic terms; it is an utter mystery if we are the products of intelligent design. Men have a urinary tract that runs directly through the prostate gland. The prostate tends to swell throughout life. Consequently, most men over the age of sixty can testify that at least one design on God’s green earth leaves much to be desired. A woman’s pelvis has not been as intelligently designed as it could have been to assist in the miracle of birth. Consequently, each year hundreds of thousands of women suffer prolonged and obstructed labor that results in a rupture known as an obstetric fistula. Women in the developing world who suffer this condition become incontinent and are often abandoned by their husbands and exiled from their communities. The United Nations Population Fund estimates that more than two million women live with fistula today.[6]
[6] The cure for obstetric fistula is, as it turns out, a simple surgical procedure—not prayer. While many people of faith seem convinced that prayer can heal a wide variety of illnesses (despite what the best scientific research indicates), it is curious that prayer is only ever believed to work for illnesses and injuries that can be self-limiting. No one, for instance, ever seriously expects that prayer will cause an amputee to regrow a missing limb. Why not? Salamanders manage this routinely, presumably without prayer. If God answers prayers – ever – why wouldn’t He occasionally heal a deserving amputee? And why wouldn’t people of faith expect prayer to work in such cases? There is a very clever Web site devoted to exploring this very mystery: http://www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com.
Examples of unintelligent design in nature are so numerous that an entire book could be written simply listing them. I will permit myself just one more example. The human respiratory and digestive tracts share a little plumbing at the pharynx. In the United States alone, this intelligent design feature lands tens of thousands of children in the emergency room each year. Some hundreds choke to death. Many others suffer irreparable brain injury. What compassionate purpose does this serve? Of course, we can imagine a compassionate purpose: perhaps the parents of these children needed to be taught a lesson; perhaps God has prepared a special reward in heaven for every child who chokes to death on a bottle cap. The problem, however, is that such imaginings are compatible with any state of the world. What horrendous mishap could not be rationalized in this way? And why would you be inclined to think like this? How is it moral to think like this?’
– Harris. S. 2006. Letter To A Christian Nation p. 24-25
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