Interesting Facts

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization over a billion tourists travelled abroad in 2014. (That's 51 million more than in 2013. The biggest growth destinations were the Americas, with 7% more tourists, followed by Asia and the Pacific at 5%, and Europe with 4% growth. The world is on the move!)

Scientists from Norway's University of Oslosay, say the Black Death may not have been caused by rats. (The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hypothesises that it could have been spread by gerbils who arrived from Asia. Poor rats. They always get the blame for everything.)

According to Cisco, mobile internet devices 'will outnumber humans by the end of this year'. (Seemingly the growth in the use of smartphones and tablets will see more than 7bn – the world's current population – in use.  Growth in Asia, the Pacific and Africa is driving this phenomenal increase. The downside is the existing internet infrastructure is coming under increasing strain.)

American-based organisations accounted for nearly half of all applications for new net address endings, according to  The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann), the organisation in charge of the expansion. (They received 884 requests for new suffixes from the US, out of a total of 1,930.  The breakdown of requests is as follows:- North America: 911 applications Europe: 675 applications Asia-Pacific: 303 applications Latin American and the Caribbean: 24 applications Africa: 17 applications 116 of the applications were for non-Latin alphabets.) Source

The Asian Tiger mosquito lays up to 300 eggs at a time and one female can average 1,000 to 3,000 offspring during her lifetime. (It must get hectic around Christmas.)