Armored knights raised their visors to identify themselves when they rode past their king. This custom has become the modern military salute.
At the height of its power, in 400 BC, the Greek city of Sparta had 25,000 citizens and 500,000 slaves.
Christmas became a national holiday in the US in 1890.
Members of the Nazi SS had their blood type tattooed on their armpits.
Seven of the eight US Presidents who have died in office - either through illness or assassination - were elected at precisely 20-year intervals.
The Titanic was the first ship to use the SOS signal. It was adopted as the international signal for distress in 1912, and the Titanic struck the iceberg in April of that year.
A cough releases an explosive charge of air that moves at speeds up to 60 mph.
A fetus acquires fingerprints at the age of three months.
A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.
An average human drinks about 16, 000 gallons of water in a lifetime.
Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his lifetime.
Blondes have more hair than dark-haired people.
Blood sucking hookworms inhabit 700 million people worldwide.
By age sixty, most people have lost half of their taste buds.
Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.
Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.
Every person has a unique tongue print.
Every square inch of the human body has an average of 32 million bacteria on it.
Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.
Fingernails grow faster than toenails.
Fingerprints serve a function - they provide traction for the fingers to grasp things.
Humans have 46 chromosomes, peas have 14 and crayfish have 200.
If it were removed from the body, the small intestine would stretch to a length of 22 feet.
If you are locked in a completely sealed room, you will die of carbon dioxide poisoning first before you will die of oxygen deprivation.
In the late 19th century, millions of human mummies were used as fuel for locomotives in Egypt where wood and coal was scarce, but mummies were plentiful.
Laughing lowers levels of stress hormones and strengthens the immune system. Six-year-olds laugh an average of 300 times a day. Adults only laugh 15 to 100 times a day.
A diamond will not dissolve in acid. The only thing that can destroy it is intense heat.
A lump of pure gold the size of a matchbox can be flattened into a sheet the size of a tennis court.
10 percent of all human beings ever born are alive at this very moment.
A Saudi Arabian woman can get a divorce if her husband doesn't give her coffee.
Catholic Popes who died during sex: Leo VII (936-9) died of a heart attack, John VII (955-64) was bludgeoned to death by the husband of the woman he was with at the time, John XIII (965-72) was also murdered by a jealous husband, Pope Paul II (1467-71) allegedly died while being sodomized by a page boy.
Humans are the only animals that copulate face to face.
In 1894 there were only 4 automobiles in the US.
In 1900 the average age at death in the US was 47.
Julius Caesar and Napoleon Bonaparte both suffered from epilepsy.
Men commit suicide three times more frequently than women do. But women attempt suicide two to three times more often than men.
Midgets and dwarfs almost always have normal-sized children, even if both parents are midgets or dwarfs.
The kiss that is given by the bride to the groom at the end of the wedding ceremony originates from the earliest times when the couple would actually make love for the first time under the eyes of half the village!
