Here are some amazing facts which will stun you and shock you and get you thinking.
- Mum-Zi, favourite wife of chief Akkiri on the island of Calabar, Africa, became a grandmother at the age of seventeen. She bore a daughter at the age of 8 years and 4 months and in turn her daughter also did.
- King Frederick VI of Denmark was scared of stiff people who wore spectacles.
- During the eighteenth century there were “toothnappers” who roamed the streets attacking people and extracting their teeth from their unfortunate victims.
- This was because it was uncommon for dentists to advertise for particular teeth in order to make a set of dentures!
- A Middle Age cure for toothache was to take a piece of bark and scrub it onto the part of the gum where the tooth aches till it bleeds. Then hammer it into a tree with a nail to leave the pain behind.
- Old remedies for tuberculosis include eating a mixture of snails dissolved in salt and inhaling the fumes of cow dung.
- An eighteenth-century charlatan sold a lotion that was guaranteed to cure stammering if spread on the tongue.
- A nineteenth century cure for smallpox involved opening the window in the patient's bedroom, encouraging gnats to enter and then shooing the insects to carry the disease away with them.
- Bogor in Java has had as many as 322 days in a year where there were thunderstorms. It usually has 215 stormy days a year.
- In 1970 a huge hailstone, almost as big as a football, fell in Kansas, USA.
- The winter of 1925 in Canada was so cold that the Niagara Falls froze completely.
- Africa is the world hottest continent. Eastern Africa is hot all year round and the highest temperature recorded there was 60`C.
- The sun loses one million tons of weight per second (estimate).
- The month of February, 1866, was in one way the most remarkable in the world history. It had no full moon. January had 2 full moons, as did March. This baffled astronomers. To them this phenomenon will not occur for another two and a half million years.
- Steam and gases rising from the surface of a lake on Java condense into large bubbles 1.8m (6ft) in diameter. After floating high into the air it explodes with a large POP.
- At Battlacaloa, Sri Lanka, there is a salt water lake which on calm nights, especially when there is a full moon, emits clear musical notes. The “singing” appears to cone from the bottom of the lake and, although no entirely satisfactory explanations has been given, it is believed the culprit is a kind of shellfish which inhabits the lake.
- One sand dune in the Sahara measures 427 m (470ft) and is taller than the Empire State Building in the USA.
- Snow sometimes falls on the mountains in the Sahara.
