Interesting Facts

According to linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer Disney films are dominated by men when it comes to dialogue. (Pocahontas, Mulan and The Little Mermaid were all named after the main female character, but that didn't help: In Pocahontas 76% of the dialogue was from the men, it was 77% in Mulan  and 68% in The Little Mermaid. Beauty and the Beast had male characters speaking 71% of the time, while in Aladdin it was 90%. Early Disney films such as Snow White had fewer speaking roles but spread them equally between male and female characters, and in Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty women seemingly had more dialogue than men. To be fair it's not just Disney. In the film The Avengers, none of the female characters talked to each other at any point.)

We know walking is good for us, but it seems where you walk makes a difference. (Various studies have found that urban dwellers with little access to green spaces are at a higher risk of developing psychological problems, but a recent study carried out at Stanford university found that volunteers who walked for 90 minutes through a lush, green portion of the Stanford campus were more attentive and happier afterward than volunteers who strolled for the same amount of time near heavy traffic. The volunteers were allowed to walk at their own pace, but they were not allowed to have companions or listen to music. The results suggest that getting out into natural environments could be an easy and almost immediate way to improve your mood. So, let's build more parks.) Source

According to a report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, the Saturday job is dead. (In the 90s, nearly half of sixth-formers (16-17-year-old students) in the UK had a Saturday job, but that number had fallen to 18% by 2014. Now, before you say it's because youths of today are a bunch of lazy so and sos, it seems it's because they prefer to spend their time studying.  And they could well be right for doing so, as research from the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of Essex found that taking a part-time job  while studying for exams, helped students gain work skills and pocket money for those teenage essentials, but had a negative impact on their exam results. I would still take a Saturday job.  No one cares about your exam results after a few years, but people always value experience.) Source

Over the last 50 years short-sightedness amongst children in the UK has doubled. ( In the 1960s just 10% of British 12 and 13-year-olds had myopia, today that is 23%. Experts are blaming this increase on our increasingly indoor lifestyles and use of computers.   And it's not just happening in the UK, in the US in the 1970s 25% of children were diagnosed myopic, by the year 2000 this had risen to over 40%.  In China The journal Nature reported that around 90% of China's teenage and young adult population are short-sighted, up from 10 to 20% of the total population 60 years ago. One Chinese city is so worried, they are experimenting with transparent classrooms to expose children to more sunlight. How about giving them more time and space to play outside?)

According to research carried out at Saarland University in Germany, a short nap at the office or in school significantly improves recall, they found that a nap 'produces a five-fold improvement in information retrieval from memory'. (Participants in the study learned 90 single words and 120 unconnected word pairs.  Some students then watched a DVD while others slept.   When they were then retested, those who had slept remembered more word pairs. I'm just going to close my eyes for a few minutes now.)

90 is the new 70 (For women). According to experts women can now expect to live 4 scores years and 10, instead of the biblical 3 score years and 10. (The latest official life expectancy projections for England and Wales now show that in a growing number of areas it is already the norm for people to live until they are almost 90, and that trend is set to grow, and although women still outlive men overall, it seems men are catching up; in the last 4 years the life expectancy gap between men and women has narrowed by 10 per cent. So, it's good news all round. As long as you've got your health.)