Interesting Facts

Jamaica and Mauritania are the only countries whose flags have no red, white, or blue in them. (The Jamaican flag is black, green and gold, and the Mauritanian flag is green and yellow.)

Microsoft has redesigned its logo for the first time since February 1987. (The new logo will still be the familiar red, blue, yellow and green colours we are used to, but the colours will be square boxes instead of the curvy ones, and the Microsoft name will be a lighter font called Segoe. I just want to know how much it's costing them.)

According to a recent study carried out at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, has concluded that our hair can't turn white overnight. (The study, called "Sudden Whitening Of The Hair: An Historical Fiction?" concluded that people's hair, does not all of a sudden turn white. It just doesn't. Hair whitening – "canities" in medical lingo – takes longer than days or even weeks. So all those stories of Queen Marie Antoinette of France and Sir Thomas More of England turning whitehaired the night before being beheaded are just historical urban myths. Or maybe the study just didn't scare any of its subjects sufficiently.)

The traditional orange carrot was cultivated in the Netherlands in the 17th century. (The carrot originated in Iran but it was a purple/violet colour. The Dutch cultivated it to be more orange in colour as an emblem of the House of Orange and the struggle for Dutch independence. The orange colour results from abundant carotenes in these cultivars. While orange carrots are the norm in the UK, you can still buy purple carrots. )

According to research from the University of Rochester in the US, men prefer women in red. (Seemingly this doesn't just apply to clothing - even women in photographs with a red frame were rated as more attractive. The conclusion was that men are driven by primal instincts. No surprises there then.)

A study by the Food Standards Agency has found that in the UK a quarter of takeaway curries contain illegal levels of potentially harmful chemicals. (The law currently allows curry sauces to contain up to 500mg/kg of artificial colour but one sample was found to contain five times this level. Basically a cocktail of tartrazine (E102), sunset yellow (E110), ponceau 4R (E124), carmoisine (E122) and allura red (E129). And yet if you served up a brown or light yellow curry, customers would probably complain.)

The colours of the Irish flag are orange, green and white. Each stripe has significance :- orange = Irish Protestants green = Irish Catholics and republicans white = hope for peace

Blue and white are the most common school uniform colours. (My school decided on blue and yellow - yuck!)

While 7 men in 100 have some form of colour blindness, only 1 woman in 1,000 suffers from it. (And here was me thinking that all men were colour blind!)