Interesting Facts

Almost one in 50 children in the UK is allergic to peanuts, double the rate of ten years ago. (The innocent looking legume can cause reactions as mild as itching and redness; but in other cases, it can produce vomiting, diarrhoea and anaphylactic shock, where the throat and airways swell and become severely inflamed, preventing breathing.  You don't even need to eat a nut; peanut oil can be found in anything from processed food and sweets to cosmetics and lipstick. The condition kills more people than any other food allergy.)

According to career website, CareerCast.com, the people with the worst jobs in the US are newspaper reporters. (The five worst jobs were:- Oil-rig worker Actor Enlisted military personnel Lumberjack Newspaper reporter The top five jobs were:- Actuary Biomedical engineer Software engineer Audiologist Financial planner Poor old Clark Kent.)

From 1 January 2014, jugs of olive oil and dipping bowls will be banned from restaurants in Europe. (After that date olive oil "presented at a restaurant table" must be in pre-packaged, factory bottles with a tamper-proof dispensing nozzle and labelling in line with EU industrial standards. The European Commission, a committee of nameless bureaucrats, has used special Common Agriculture Policy regulations to pass this weird bill. Their reason for the ban is "hygiene" and to protect the "image of olive oil" to attempt to benefit struggling industrial producers in Spain, Italy, Greece and Portugal. What a load of tosh!) Thanks to    + Luke Pettit for sharing this.

Venezuala provides Cuba with an astounding 115,000 barrels of oil each day—gratis. (Yes, nada, nix, nothing to pay. The idea is that Cuban doctors provide medical care for Venezuela's poor in return.  I hope they get really excellent health car.   As you know, I give lots of time away for free, but it's my time.  Nice that Mr Chavez gives away things other people worked for.) Update - Since President Hugo Chavez's death, Venezuelan opposition leader Henrique Capriles says he would stop trading oil to Cuba for such services as it does not benefit Venezuala.

Manchester Airport ran out of fuel today, delaying more than a dozen flights. (The airport gets through three million litres of aviation fuel a day. The fuel is pumped through a 30-mile pipeline, which is the airport's only source of aviation fuel, every day transporting the equivalent of 79 road tankers' worth of fuel, but suddenly the flow of fuel dried up as production problems at the the Essar refinery near Ellesmere Port in Cheshire meant that fuel stopped being pumped to the airport early this morning. Usually the airport has between 12 and 24 hours of spare capacity, but the Jubilee weekend had been very busy with about 300,000 people flying over the four days, and by 17:15 BST the fuel had run out.  I've only ever run out of fuel once, and it was hubby's fault.)

According to a study study, published in the British Medical Journal , fried food is not bad for the heart if it's cooked in olive, or sunflower oil. (For over 11 years, scientists surveyed the cooking methods of 40,757 healthy adults, ages 29 to 69, in Spain and concluded that heart disease events and deaths were not statistically tied to fried food consumption. I'm just wondering what fish and chips fried in olive oil would taste like.)

Brazilian scientists have discovered a new river in the Amazon basin, but it's not a place to go swimming with piranhas, it's actually underground, around 4km beneath the Amazon river. (They've called it The Rio Hamza, after the head of the team of researchers who discovered it, and it appears to be as long as the Amazon river but up to hundreds of times wider. It was located using data collected inside a series of 241 abandoned deep wells that were drilled in the Amazon region by the petrochemical company Petrobras in the 1970s and 1980s. I wonder if anyone shouted, "Hey! We've hit water!")

According to Dr Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the respected International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris, oil on which modern civilisation depends is running out far faster than previously predicted. (He predicts that global production is likely to peak in about 10 years – at least a decade earlier than most governments had estimated. As he said, "we have to leave oil before oil leaves us".)

The minimum order for crude oil is a thousand barrels. (Luckily this stipulation doesn't apply at the petrol pumps.)

Buying oil only requires a 10% deposit of the market price. (Yes. You only need to pay 10% and then watch the value of what you bought rise - or fall.)

Researchers studying shoppers' baskets found people who bought wine also tended to buy poultry, cooking oil and low-fat cheese. Beer buyers, on the other hand, tended to buy chips, pork, butter, margarine, and sausages. (What about people like me, I buy both wine and beer! But not sausages and certainly not low-fat cheese - what's the point?)

Norway is the world's third largest oil exporter. (And I always thought they only exported Norwegian wood.)