Amazing-But-True Facts, part 3

Yet another chapter of trivia to help your work week go by quicker:

[ol]1. Contrary to popular belief, the white is not the healthiest part of an egg. It's actually the shell.

2. A comprehensive multi-year study using pattern-recognition software determined that Millard Fillmore is the most common identifiable U.S. president seen in cloud formations.

3. Baking soda and vinegar will make your scrambled eggs fluffier.

4. The first prototype defibrillators delivered 1,200 joules of electrical energy instead of the now standard 360, occasionally causing dead bodies to sit upright momentarily as though they were still alive.

5. Ancient Egyptians used molted cobra skins as condoms.

6. Using its anal sphincter muscle, the Mongolian tapir is capable of creating high-pitched tones that can be heard by dogs nearly 30 miles away.

7. Customs officials have dogs that are trained to distinguish between Cuban cigars and all other cigars.

8. Archimedes' screw was the basis for Max Factor's invention of the twisting lipstick holder.

9. A Tokyo inventor has developed a laptop computer whose battery is recharged by energy generated from the movement of the user's mouse, yet Sony lawyers have successfully blocked every attempt to produce a product using the technology.

10. Female black cats can actually see their shadows at night.

11. Ballpoint pens were invented by a Michigan scientist attempting to reduce the number of birds killed for their quills.

12. Glamorous movie star Brad Pitt once had a summer job posting warning signs at coal mine entrances.

13. The National Weather Service will pay $30 for the rights to any original photograph of lightning.

14. U.S. Army medics in World War I knew of the germ-fighting properties of rodent saliva and carried hamsters in their medical bags to sterilize wounds in the field.

15. An early draft of the Declaration of Independence included a line by Benjamin Franklin inviting King George to "kisse our collective arse."

16. Nearly three percent of the ice in Antarctic glaciers is penguin urine.

17. The sound made when a duck passes gas is the precise acoustic opposite of its quack; if it does both simultaneously, there's no audible sound.

18. Contrary to their popular image as spinsters, the average librarian has 5.9 random sex partners per year.

19. The rhesus monkey is the only animal that can be taught to hum a tune.

20. With the exception of a small 200-square-mile section of Antarctica, every single square kilometer of dry land on the planet has been walked on by at least one human being.

21. In the weightlessness of space a frozen pea will explode if it comes in contact with Pepsi. [/ol]

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