Queen Elizabeth I of England, using a diamond, scratched the following message on her prison window: "Much suspected of me, Nothing proved can be."

Pain from any injury or illness is always registered by the brain. Yet, curiously, the brain tissue itself is immune to pain; it contains none of the specialized receptor cells that sense pain in other parts of the body. The pain associated with brain tumors does not arise from brain cells but from the pressure created by a growing tumor or ...Read more

Traditionally young men dress up as the Krampus in Austria, southern Bavaria and South Tyrol during the first week of December, particularly on the evening of December 5th, and roam the streets frightening children with rusty chains and bells

The Sun produces more energy every minute than all the energy used on Earth in a whole year.

The official time ball for the U.S. is on top of the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. As early as 1845, the U.S. Navy dropped a time ball every day at noon from atop a building on a hill overlooking Washington, D.C. People from many miles away could set their watches at noon. Ships anchored in the Potomac River could check their ...Read more

The hides of mature female blue sharks are more than twice as thick as those of males, probably as a protection against courtship bites.

Both -- The temperature on the Moon reaches 243 degrees Fahrenheit at midday on the lunar equator. During the night, the temperature falls to -261 degrees Fahrenheit.

French consumers drink an average 88 servings of Coca-Cola® products per year.

The chameleon, a small lizard generally measuring 6 or 7 inches, has a tongue several inches longer than its body. With a thrust of this remarkable appendage, it can catch insects some 10 inches away.

The first product to have a UPC bar code on its packaging was Wrigley's gum.

Television's "I Love Lucy" began as a radio show - My Favorite Husband, in which Lucy played the scheming, middle-class wife of a bank vice president. CBS wanted to move the show to television - but almost scrapped the idea because of Lucy's insistence that Desi Arnaz play her husband. Lucy got

Possibly, although it's certainly one of the most parodied. American Gothic is one of the most reproduced, and parodied, images ever. Many artists have replaced the two people with other known couples and replaced the house with well known houses. References and parodies of the image have been numerous for generations, appearing regularly in ...Read more

In Somalia, Africa, it's been decreed illegal to carry old chewing gum stuck on the tip of your nose.

TV’s popular cartoon duo Rocky and Bullwinkle represented a number of General Mills cereals from 1959 to 1970: Cheerios, Cocoa Puffs, Jets, and Trix.

On October 17, 1949, Northwest Airlines became the first airlines in the United States to serve alchoholic beverages in flight.

A cat's arching back is part of a complex body language system, usually associated with feeling threatened. The arch is able to get so high because the cat's spine contains nearly 60 vertebrae which fit loosely together. Humans have only 34 vertebrae.

Olympic badminton rules say that the shuttlecock has to have exactly 16 feathers. The best shuttles are made from the feathers from the left wing of a goose.

The smallest of American owls, the elf owl, often nests in the Gila woodpecker’s cactus hole after the woodpecker leaves. The owl measures barely 6 inches tall. It specializes in catching scorpions, seizing each by the tail and nipping off its stinger. It then swallows the scorpion’s body,

A device invented as a primitive steam engine by the Greek engineer Hero, about the time of the birth of Christ, is used today as a rotating lawn sprinkler.

About two-thirds of the world's fresh water flows out of the Amazon River in South America. The amount is so immense that fresh water can be found on the sea surface 40 miles from the river's mouth.