Weird but true shark facts

Sharks can sense a drop of blood from 2.5 miles away. They can detect one part of blood in 100 million parts of water.

Sharks are so powerful that their bite can generate a force of up to 6 tons per square inch.

Sharks, in their 400 million years on earth, have shown an extraordinary ability to resist cancer and other diseases. This has raised hopes among medical researchers that the oceans' most feared predator might turn out to be the cancer patient's best friend. Investigators continue to study the immune system of sharks to see if it can provide the answer to stopping the spread of cancer in humans.

Sharks can live up to 100 years.

The biggest shark is the whale shark which can be up to 50 feet (15 m) long. It has approximately 300 rows of teeth, with hundreds of tiny teeth in each row. It's a filter feeder and sieves enormous amounts of plankton to eat through its gills as it swims. It is also the biggest fish in the sea. The second biggest fish and shark is the basking shark which is about 40 feet (12.3 m) long and is another filter feeder.

Sharks can generate about six and a half tons per square inch of biting force.

Sharks have no bones - a shark's skeleton is made up of cartilage.

The biggest meat-eating shark is the Great White which grows to be up to 21 feet (6.4 m) long. The smallest sharks are the Dwarf Lanternfish (6-7 inches), Spined Pygmy Shark (7 inches) and Pygmy Ribbontail Catshark (6-7 inches).

The dogfish sharks are named for their tendency to attack their prey as a pack of wild dogs would.

The ostrich is often credited with laying the largest eggs, but the largest egg in the world was actually laid by a shark, the whale shark. The egg, 14 inches (36 cm) long, was found in the Gulf of Mexico in 1953.

Sharks can go up to at least 6 weeks without feeding. The record for a shark fasting was observed in an aquarium with the Swell Shark, which did not eat for 15 months.

The world's most intelligent fish - he plays football, basketball and even limbo dances

Introducing the world's most intelligent fish - he can play football, basketball and even limbo dance under a bar.

Comet the goldfish has been trained by his owner to perform the astonishing range of aquatic activities on demand.

And that's not all - watery genius can also play fetch with a hoop, slalom around a series of poles and push a rugby ball over a set of posts.

Owner Dr Dean Pomerleau, 41, used a training technique called positive reinforcement to train two year old common goldfish Comet to carry out the tricks.

But there's nothing fishy about his claim - in fact, he says anyone can do the same with their own pet.

Fish training expert Dr Pomerleau said: "There is mounting evidence that fish are more intelligent than people give them credit for.

"With the correct tools and the basic promise of a food reward, fish can very quickly learn complex tricks - like the limbo, slalom or playing fetch. (Read more)

Post-It Notes

A sticky item that sticks better than Silly Putty is Post-it Notes. Everyone knows that Post-it notes are those little self-stick notepapers that used to only come in yellow. Just about everyone uses them and love them, but they weren’t a planned thing that someone got the idea for and then stayed up nights trying to invent. In 1970 a man named Spencer Silver was working for 3M company trying to find a strong adhesive (glue). The new adhesive Silver invented turned out to be weaker than anything they already made, instead of stronger. It would stick to things, but since it was super weak instead of super strong it could be easily lifted off. No one knew what to do with it, but the adhesive wasn’t thrown out.

About four years later another 3M scientist, Arthur Fry, was singing in his church choir. He noticed that the markers he used in his hymnal kept falling out. He remembered Silver’s weak glue and put some of it on the markers. The weak glue worked and the markers stayed in place, but they could be lifted off without ripping the hymnal pages. Ten years after Spencer Silver invented his super weak adhesive, 3M started selling the Post-it Notes nationwide in 1980. Now they are one of the most popular items for the office and people use them in all sizes and colors.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain never tasted one. That is because they died before the chocolate cookie was invented. Thanks to Ruth Wakefield, chocolate chip cookies were invented in 1930 and are available all over America today. She didn’t plan to invent a cookie that would be the country’s favorite. Wakefield was busy with the chores of running the Toll House Inn, which is between Boston and New Bedford, Massachusetts. While mixing a batch of cookies, she found out that she was out of baker’s chocolate. As a substitute, she broke some sweetened chocolate into small pieces and added them to the cookie dough. Wakefield expected the chocolate to melt and the dough to absorb them, making chocolate cookies. When she took out the pan from the oven, she was surprised to see that the chocolate had not melted into the dough, and her cookies were not chocolate cookies. Wakefield had accidentally invented the chocolate chip cookie. They are named Toll House Cookies after Ruth Wakefield’s Inn and are the most popular variety of cookie in America today. The cookies are so popular that they even provide full-time jobs; some vendors sell nothing but chocolate chip cookies.

What Is the Most Expensive Food in the World?

Truffles hold that honor. Like the mushroom, the truffle is a fungus. Some truffles are just the size of a pea, while others are as big as an orange. These black fungi grow in parts of France and Italy. They are used most often in small amounts to give a flavor to certain dishes, especially sauces.

It's a good thing that truffles are used in small amounts, because they are the single most expensive food item in the world. Truffles usually cost more than $100 a pound, with the best truffles costing well over $200 a pound!

Truffles grow underground, and are very hard to find. Farmers use trained pigs to locate truffles. The pigs sniff around until they pick up the scent of a truffle, then begin to dig. The farmer chases the pig away and digs up the truffle for himself. If he's not fast enough, though, the pig will dig up the truffle and eat it. And at $200 a pound, that's an expensive meal for a pig!

Though truffles are the most expensive food in the world, they have no vitamins or other nutritional value!

Who Invented Potato Chips?

According to a story that may or may not be true, the first potato chips were 'invented around 1865 by a chef in Saratoga, New York.

The chef made a batch of thin-sliced potatoes for the diners at a guest house, but one of the guests kept sending the potatoes back and asking for thinner slices. So the chef cut a potato into the thinnest slices he could, dropped them into oil, and produced America's first potato chips!

The first factory in America built solely to produce potato chips opened in Albany, New York, in 1925.

What Is the Most Common Vegetable in the World?

The vegetables that are grown in the largest quantities around the world are the tomato and the potato. But the most widely used vegetable is the onion!

The onion appears in more dishes and in more countries than any other vegetable. In some places, the onion is used to flavor dishes, while in other countries it's eaten by itself as a vegetable.

The ancient Egyptians ate onions both ways, for the onion was the most common vegetable in Egypt 5,000 years ago. During the Middle Ages, the onion and a relative of the onion, the leek, were the only common vegetables in Europe.

Today, more than 20 billion pounds of onions are produced around the world each year!

Emperor Nero of Rome ate leeks because he thought they would improve his singing voice!

How Companies Got their Name

Apple Computers

It was the favourite fruit of founder Steve Jobs. He was three months late in filing a name for the business, and he threatened to call his company Apple Computers if the other colleagues didn’t suggest a better name by 5 O’clock.

CISCO

It is not an acronym as popularly believed. It is short for San Francisco.

Compaq

This name was formed by using COMp, for computer, and PAQ to denote a small integral object.

Corel

The name was derived from the founder’s name Dr.Michael Cowpland. It stands for COwpland REsearch Laboratory.

Google

The name started as a joke boasting about the amount of information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named ‘Googol’, a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros.After founders - Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page presented their project to an angel investor, they received a cheque made out to ‘Google’

Hotmail

Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world.When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in ‘mail’ and finally settled for hotmail as it included the letters “html” - the programming language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective uppercasing.

Hewlett Packard

Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard tossed a coin to decide whether the company they founded would be called Hewlett-Packard or Packard-Hewlett.

Intel

Bob Noyce and Gordon Moore wanted to name their new company ‘Moore Noyce’ but that was already trademarked by a hotel chain so they had to settle for an acronym of INTegrated ELectronics.

Lotus (Notes)

Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from ‘The Lotus Position’ or ‘Padmasana’. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

Microsoft

Coined by Bill Gates to represent the company that was devoted to MICROcomputer SOFTware. Originally christened Micro-Soft, the ‘-’ was removed later on.

Motorola

Founder Paul Galvin came up with this name when his company started manufacturing radios for cars. The popular radio company at the time was called Victrola.

ORACLE

Larry Ellison and Bob Oats were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or something such). The project was designed to help use the newly written SQL code by IBM. The project eventually was terminated but Larry and Bob decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine. Later they kept the same name for the company.

Sony

It originated from the Latin word ’sonus’ meaning sound, and ’sonny’ a slang used by Americans to refer to a bright youngster.

SUN

Founded by 4 Stanford University buddies, SUN is the acronym for Stanford University Network. Andreas Bechtolsheim built a microcomputer; Vinod Khosla recruited him and Scott McNealy to manufacture computers based on it, and Bill Joy to develop a UNIX-based OS for the computer.

Yahoo!

The word was invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book ‘Gulliver’s Travels’. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! Founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos

Albert Einstein Facts

Einstein declined the presidency of the state of Israel when it was offered to him in 1952 by state leaders. The element einsteinium, discovered in 1952, was named in honor of Albert Einstein. Picture of Einstein sticking his tongue was taken on his 72nd birthday by annoying press photographer Arthur Sasse. Albert loved the photo so much that he cut his image out and send it to all his friends.

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