The first person ever awarded a gold record was Glenn Miller for "Chattanooga Choo-Choo."

The brilliant colors in a hummingbird's feather are created by tiny platelets that resemble a pancake filled with air bubbles. They are called "interference colors," and are much like the shimmering colors seen in a soap bubble or in a drop of oil.

Millipedes never have a thousand legs. They can have from a few dozen to several hundred, but not a thousand.

It took 214 crates to transport the Statue of Liberty from France to New York in 1885.

Each year, 9 million tons of salt, more than 10 percent of all the salt produced in the world, is applied to American highways for road de-icing. The cost of buying and applying the salt adds up to $200 million.

The Colgate company started out making starch, soap, and candles.

The Sun provides our planet with 126,000,000,000,000 horsepower of energy every day. This means that 54,000 horsepower is delivered to every man, woman, and child on Earth in each 24-hour period.

According to Margaret Jones, author of a Patsy Cline biography, there are a dozen places in Virginia that could claim to be the hometown of the nomadic Cline. Her family moved 19 times before she was 15.

Victoria Woodhall, the radical feminist who ran for the Presidency in 1872, feared that she would die if she went to bed in her old age. She spent the last four years of her life sitting in a chair. (She died at the age of 89 in 1927.)

If laid out in a straight line, the average adult's circulatory system would be nearly 60,000 miles long - enough to circle the Earth 2 and a half times.

The Untouchables, which debuted in 1959 and starred Robert Stack, was the most violent television show of its time. It became the target of more protests from viewers than any other regular TV series. To this day, it is the only TV program ever boycotted by mobsters over unfair treatment.

Civil War General Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson has two separate burial sites. His left arm, which was amputated after the battle of Chancellorsville, was buried on a nearby farm. A week later, Jackson died and was buried in Lexington, Virginia.

Marco Polo discovered that Kublai Khan maintained 5,000 resident court astrologers. Their duties included that hazardous task of weather prediction, with unforeseeable consequences for those who guessed wrong.

There are seven distinctive types of combs on chickens: rose, strawberry, single, cushion, buttercup, pea, and V-shaped.

The Egyptian vulture, a white bird about the size of a raven, throws stones with its beak to open ostrich eggs to eat. This bird is one of the very few animals that, like man, manipulates objects as tools.

The last words of famed ballerina Anna Pavlova were "Get my swan costume ready."

The first log cabins in North America were built in 1683 by Swedish immigrants in Delaware.

In a review for Rolling Stone writer Matthew Perpetua described the vocals as having "a peculiar tonality that inadvertently highlights the absurdity of boilerplate pop lyrics," adding that the tone in the refrain "sounds unlike anything else in pop music." He noted the sound as being not entirely agreeable to listen to, but states that Black ...Read more

The cubit is the oldest known measurement, appearing in the Bible when God gives Noah instructions for the ark. Described as a Royal Cubit, it was measured from the elbow to the thumb knuckle. It was a means of insuring that the nobility got a larger share at the market place.

Whistler professed to be perplexed and annoyed by the insistence of others upon viewing his work as a "portrait." In his 1890 book, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, he writes: "Take the picture of my mother, exhibited at the Royal Academy as an 'Arrangement in Grey and Black.' Now that is what it is. To me it is interesting as a picture of my ...Read more