Facts You Probably don’t Need
- Humans are unlikely to sink entirely into quicksand due to the higher density of the fluid. Quicksand has a density of about 2 grams per milliliter, while human density is only about 1 gram per milliliter. A human would descend about up to their waist, but no further.
- Adolphe Sax (inventor of the saxophone) survived a three-story fall, a gunpowder explosion, drinking a bowl of sulfuric water, a near-poisoning due to furniture varnish, and falling into a speeding river, all before the age of nine. His neighbors called him “little Sax, the ghost.”
- The game Twister was nearly killed in its crib when the Sears catalog rejected it for being too sexy. But just as the makers were about to give up, the game was saved by Johnny Carson, who played Twister with blonde bombshell Eva Gabor on The Tonight Show, and sales soared into the millions.
- In 2007, Siberia experienced orange snow. This orange snow was ruled to most likely be caused by a heavy sandstorm in neighboring Kazakhstan. Tests on the snow revealed numerous sand and clay dust particles and a high iron-content.
- The electricity needed to power an iPhone for a year costs only about $0.47.
Facts by Sean McVeigh, factologist.
