Australia is the smallest, flattest, and driest inhabited continent in the world. It is the only country which is also a whole continent - 18.6 million people live here.

The oldest registered food trademark still in use in the United States is the red devil on cans of Underwood's deviled ham. It dates back to 1886.

Nearly one in four people said they have more headaches during the Christmas season than any other time of the year. Of those surveyed, 75 percent said that not having enough time caused them to have headaches; 73 percent said crowds and traffic created their headaches; and 51 percent said

The godfather of film actress Winona Ryder was the late Dr. Timothy Leary, LSD guru of the 1960s. Winona’s father, Michael Horowitz, served at one time as Leary’s archivist and ran a bookstore called Flashback Books. Additionally, her parents were politically active intellectuals, and Beat

West Virginia’s largest and most beautiful caverns, Seneca Caverns, are located in West Virginia in the Appalachian Mountain range. Seneca Caverns were discovered in 1760, and tours began in 1930. The Seneca tribe used the caverns in the 1600s and 1700s for ceremonies and as refuge from winter storms and enemy tribes. Spectacular natural ...Read more

Traveling at the speed of 186,000 miles per second, light take 6 hours to travel from Pluto to Earth.

Cats have amazing hearing ability. A cat's ear has 30 muscles that control the outer ear (by comparison, human ears only have six muscles). These muscles rotate 180 degrees, so the cat can hear in all directions without moving its head.

Sexual freedom and the elimination of sexual jealousy are a major theme of Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), in which the straitlaced nurse Jill acts as a dramatic foil for the less parochial characters Jubal Harshaw and Mike. Two negative references to homosexuality have been interpreted by some readers as being homophobic, but both deal with ...Read more

Michelangelo's David is a masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture and one of Michelangelo's works of sculpture, holding the title of the most recognizable and infamous statue in the history of art. It has become regarded as a symbol both of strength and youthful human beauty. The 17 foot marble statue portrays the Biblical King David at the moment ...Read more

The world's largest yo-yo resides in the National YoYo Museum in Chico, California. Named "Big Yo," the 256-pound yoyo is an exact scale replica of a Tom Kuhn "No Jive 3 in 1 YoYo." Fifty inches tall and 31.5 inches wide, the yo-yo is made of California sugar pine, baltic birch from the former USSR, and hardrock maple. It was first launched in ...Read more

The town of Fort Atkinson, Iowa was the site of the only fort ever built by the U.S. government to protect one Indian tribe from another.

The sea lion can swim 6,000 miles, stopping only to sleep.

In 1500 B.C. in Egypt, a shaved head was considered the ultimate in feminine beauty. Egyptian women removed every hair from their heads with special gold tweezers and polished their scalps to a high sheen with buffing cloths.

Badminton was once known as battledore and shuttlecock. The game as we know it today took its name from Badminton House in Gloucestershire, England - home of the Duke of Beaufort.

A jigsaw puzzle is a tiling puzzle that requires the assembly of numerous small, often oddly shaped, interlocking and tesellating pieces. Each piece has a small part of a picture on it; when complete, a jigsaw puzzle produces a complete picture. Jigsaw puzzles were originally created by painting a picture on a flat, rectangular piece of wood, ...Read more

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 the sixteenth century, a Dutchman named Zacharias Janssen developed the microscope lens to such a high degree of refinement that it magnified with little distortion. He became famous for his accomplishment, and was nicknamed "Father of Microscopy." Ironically, Janssen was not trained as a

An exact count of rest areas on the Interstate System is not available. However, a count in 1972 reported 1,214 rest areas in existence. The number still operational today is not expected to differ dramatically from the 1972 figure.

The first baseball game to be televised was not in the United States. It was in Tokyo, Japan.

There are 250,000 species of flowering plants on Earth today.