Interesting Facts

According to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , humans started drinking alcohol about 10 million years ago. (They discovered that a single genetic mutation 10 million years ago endowed our human ancestors with an enhanced ability to break down ethanol, probably from eating fermenting fruit. I guess it was their superpower.) 

Dogs are loyal to anyone, or even anything, that feeds them. (A new study, led by  Gabriella Lakatos,  has found that dogs will even bond with robots as long as they are holding a can opener. So much for man's best friend! They'll be anyone's friend, as long as there's something in it for them. Hmmm - a bit like humans really.) Sources: Daily Mail  | Springer Publishing

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.)

According to philosopher Professor Roger Steare, we reach the "peak of our intellectual and moral powers" in our early 60s. (I presume he means age and not the decade.)

A piece of upper-jaw discovered in Kents Cavern, Devon, southern England, suggests that humans were living in England as long as 44,000 years ago. (This is the earliest indication of human habitation in the UK, and proves that homo-sapiens and Neanderthals coexisted for about three to five thousand years in this part of the world. A nice part of the world too, they obviously had good taste.)

The tiny water flea has more genes than you or I do. (It was the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced, and if you don't believe that it could be more complex than magnificent you, the average human has about 20,000 to 25,000 genes, whereas this little critter has  31,000 genes.  Which makes it the animal with the most genes to date.  As if that wasn't enough.  more than a third of the genes in the water flea are unique, and have never been seen before.  You see size really doesn't count, it's the actual count that matters.)

Researchers at Harvard University have deduced that early humans cooked up their first hot meals more than 1.9m years ago. (They base their findings on tooth size and how much time was spent actually eating (cooked food requires less chewing than raw). Homo erectus, who emerged in Africa around 1.9m years ago, spent 6.1% of its time eating and Neanderthals, spent 7% of their time, but more primitive species, such as Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, who emerged before Homo erectus and the Neanderthals, spent 7.2% and 9.5% of their day eating. If the estimates are right, it suggests they may have been less accomplished cooks than Homo erectus and the Neanderthals. Maybe the English are more closely related to them.)

According to the World Toilet Organization (yes, there is one), the average person goes to the toilet 2500 times year. (If you add it up it means that your average human spends about 3 years over their lifetime.)

You could fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube. (The human body is made up of atoms, and these atoms are practically empty. Imagine an atom the size of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, a grain of sand inside it would make up the nucleus of the atom and the rest of the space would be a void. So, if you squeezed all the space out of the atoms that make up all the humans on earth you would be able to fit the entire human race in the volume of a sugar cube. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, described it like this, "If the nucleus is like the altar of St Paul's cathedral, an electron is like a moth in the cathedral, one moment by the altar, the next by the dome.") Source: BBC's The Story of Science - 2 / 6

Being either left handed or right handed was once a trait believed to be unique to humans, but it turns out that parrots prefer to use one side of their body more than the other too.  (I wonder if we can teach them to write?!) xx Source - BBC

Comets and human beings contain roughly the same amounts of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. (I guess Moby was right when he sang, "We are all made of stars.")

The Pinot Noir grape, used to make some excellent red wines, has about 30,000 genes in its DNA. (That's more than the human genome, which contains 20,000 to 25,000 genes. I do hope they never prove a link between intelligence and the number of genes, otherwise I have broken my own cardinal rule - never eat anything that might be more intelligent than you are.)

According to the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, bad managers are the biggest cause of stress at work. (This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has a bad manager, the stress of not punching their lights out is very high. What may surprise company owners and members of the board, who are ultimately responsible for bad management, is that these bad managers can cost the UK economy around £28bn because of work related mental illness. The report recommends giving people positive feedback, flexible working hours, and extra time off as a reward. In other words, treat your employees like human beings, not automatons.)

The human body produces hydrogen peroxide. (It is produced primarily in three places - the lung, gut and the thyroid gland. So, how come we're not all blonde?)

The average human head has roughly 100,000 hair follicles. (I really don't recommend that you attempt to test this particular fact.)

Professor Steve Jones from the Department of Genetics, Evolution and Environment at University College London, believes that the mechanisms of evolution are winding down in the human race. (So, according to him this is as good as it gets.)

powered by ODEO The ancient Maya civilisation used to offer human sacrifices to their rain god Chaak. Seemingly the victims were painted a vivid blue before being heaved into a watery sinkhole. (I wonder if that's where the idiom "To feel blue", which means to feel depressed or unhappy, comes from? I'd feel pretty blue if I was being painted blue and facing a watery grave.)

Your stomache has to produce a new layer of mucus every two weeks otherwise it will digest itself. (This overlying layer of mucus buffers your stomache from the acid. Damaging this protective layer can allow the stomach's acid and enzymes to come in contact with the underlying tissue. If this happens often enough, an ulcer develops.)

Insects outnumber humans 200 million to one! (Insects make up more than half of all living things on Earth, There are about 900,000 known insect species, three times as many as all other animal species together, and thousands of new ones are discovered each year. Scratch scratch.)