Some Interesting Facts

1) There are about 500 different kinds of cone snails around the world. All have a sharp, modified tooth that stabs prey with venom like a harpoon. Most cone snails hunt worms and other snails, but some eat fish. These are the ones most dangerous to people. The nerve toxin that stops a fish is powerful enough to also kill a human.

2) The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, written by Mark Twain, was the first novel ever to be written on a typewriter.

3) No one can say just when Walt Disney began to think about undertaking his biggest project to date, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but by the summer of 1934, his ideas were beginning to take concrete form. An exploratory outline that he distributed to his animation staff, dated August 9, 1934, included the following discussion of the dwarfs' names: "The names which follow each suggest a type of character and the names will immediately identify the character in the minds of the audience." Some of the names that were considered then discarded included Scrappy, Doleful, Crabby, Wistful, Dumpy, Soulful, Tearful, Snappy, Helpful, Gaspy, Gloomy, Busy, Dirty, Awful, Dizzy, Shifty, and Biggy-Wiggy.

4) The biggest frog is the appropriately named Goliath frog (Conraua goliath) of Cameroon. They reach nearly 30 cm (a foot) and weigh as much as 3.3 kilograms.

5) The state of Pennsylvania (USA) can lay claim to some dubious firsts. The first woman governor. The zipper. Toilet paper. And the autogiro, ancestor to the helicopter.

6) A female pharaoh was unknown in Egypt before Hatshepsut, who had herself portrayed in male costume, with a beard and without breasts.

7) Astronaut and moon-walker James Irwin's NASA name tag, coated with lunar dust, sold at auction for $310,500. The cloth keepsake, a 6- by 12-inch rectangle, was cut from the insulated jacket worn by Irwin during the 1971 flight of Apollo 15. Lunar dust, which created a dark gray tint around the tag's edges, became embedded into the tag during three separate moonwalks Irwin took. His jacket and other equipment were left on the Moon to lighten the spacecraft’s load on the return trip home, but Irwin cut out and kept his NASA tag as a memento.

8 ) There have been 262 popes since Saint Peter.

9) There are more insects in one square mile of rural land than there are human beings on the entire earth.

10) Each year, approximately 250,000 American husbands are physically attacked and beaten by their wives.