Facts You Probably don’t Need
- Black Widows are easily the most dangerous spider in North America. Its venom is 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake and may even lead to seizures and/or death.
- The French Alps hosted the first ever Winter Olympic games a century ago in 1924.
- Winter lasts 21 years on Uranus … And Lou thinks January is tough!
- The ability to read music uses different parts of the brain than reading words, and there are cases where a stroke has caused people to lose one ability, but not the other.
- The last official civil war widow died in 2020. She was 17 when she married the 93-year-old veteran of the Civil War.
- There are approximately 10 quintillion (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects on our planet or roughly 200 million insects for each human.
- Fax machines were invented in 1843, well before the telephone.
- Cincinnatus, who lived from 519 to 430 BC, was twice given near-absolute authority over the Roman Republic and gave it up both times.
- Hummingbirds lay the smallest eggs among birds. They are the size of a pea. An ostrich lays the largest egg. They are the size of a cantaloupe.
Facts by Sean McVeigh, factologist.
