Americans use enough toilet paper in one day to wrap around the world nine times. If it were on one giant roll, we would be unrolling it at the rate of 7,600 miles per hour - roughly mach. 10, ten times the speed of sound.

Try to say the alphabet without moving your lips or your tongue. Every letter will sound exactly the same.

The world's largest flower is also one of the worst smelling flowers. Rafflesia Arnoldii is often over 3 feet wide and its petals are almost an inch thick. You wouldn't want it in your garden, however, because it smells like a rotting animal. The flower is attempting to attract flies for pollination.

Approximately one out of every ten people who ever lived are alive today.

Nine out of every 10 scientists who ever lived are alive today.

There is a bird in Antarctica that repels threatening animals in unique ways. The bird throws up in the enemy's face. If that doesn't work, it blows snot at them with enough force to bowl a human over.

The FDA considers chocolate acceptable for public consumption as long as there are less than 60 microscopic insect fragments per 100 grams (four ounces, or approximately one candy bar).

A Japanese priest set a kimono on fire in Tokyo because it carried bad luck. The flames spread until over 10,000 buildings were destroyed and 100,000 people died. (Year: 1657)

Some dinosaurs had two brains! Since nerve signals move from one part of the body to another relatively slowly - it takes 1/50 of second to notice a pain in your foot - and since these beasts were so large, a second brain was at the base of the tail to maintain control of the creature's backs. Interestingly, the rear brain was bigger than the one in their heads.

The Largest dinosaur, Brachiosaurus, weighed as much as 800 people, was taller than a four-story hotel, and was as long as two of the longest school buses.

One out of every 300 Americans is a millionaire.

One out of every four women fail in business. Four out of every five men fail in business.

The world's most outrageous musical instrument was made in France during 1450. A long row of spikes was connected to a keyboard. Under each spike was a pig, arranged according to the pitch of its oink.

Some anglerfish, who live in the ocean at depths of over one mile, have unusual lives. To see where they are going in that depth, or perhaps to attract food, the females have a chemically operated lamp that hangs on a stalk in front of their mouths. The male doesn't need to see because early in his life, he bites into the belly of a female and stays there forever. After a while the female grows skin over the connection, and the male degenerates, losing his teeth, his fins, and any manner of life beyond being a small appendage hanging off the female.

We all know that whales are big, but few of us realize just how big. The biggest species is the Blue Whale. This animal is bigger than any dinosaur that ever lived. The biggest dino (brachiosaurus) was only 50 tons and 80 feet long. One blue whale is as big as 25 of the largest elephants. (150 tons, 100 feet long) Think of 75 Volkswagen vans. They are that big! And they grow fast. Youngsters gain weight at the rate of ten pounds per hour. A blue whale's tongue is about the same weight as three Chevy station wagons. Their heart is about the same size as a Toyota. This monster organ beats about nine times per minute. At the other end of the spectrum is the hummingbird with up to 1200 beats per minute, or 133 beats for every time the whale's heart beats.

Whales have the worst bad breath imaginable. According to Herman Melville, who researched whales thoroughly for his novel, Moby Dick, "The breath of the whale is frequently attended with such an insupportable smell as to bring on a disorder of the brain."

A baby blue whale gains 200 pounds per day while drinking 50 gallons of milk. Her mom eats 4 tons of plankton out of the water every day.

Liechtenstein used to have the world's smallest army. There was one soldier. He served his country until his death at age 95. Then the country no longer had an army.

Not all of Henry Ford's mechanical engineering was as successful as the Model T Ford.

When Henry Ford was about ten years old, he noticed steam rising out of his mother's teapot on the stove. He figured that if the steam were trapped in the teapot, the whole thing would have to rise into the air. To test his theory, Henry took a clay teapot and corked the spout from inside and tied down the lid. He then put the teapot in the fireplace and settled down to watch closely. Soon something happened, but it wasn't what Henry expected. The teapot exploded, breaking a window and a mirror in the living room and scalding Henry and scarring his cheek with bits of shrapnel.

There was a research project that involved having a scientist yell at chickens - then measure their health compared to other chickens that were treated nicely. As it turns out, the chickens treated kindly were more resistant to infection.

A medical curiosity was David Kennison, who was born in 1736 and participated in the Boston Tea Party. At the age of seventy-six, serving in the War of 1812, he lost a hand to a gunshot wound. Later, a tree fell on him, and fractured his skull. Some years later, while training soldiers in the use of a cannon, something went wrong and an explosion shattered his legs. He recovered. Yet later, a horse damaged his face. He died peacefully in 1851 at the age of 115.

A mathematics major with a higher than average IQ estimated at 130, and seemingly normal in every other way, was referred to a brain specialist because his head seemed a bit larger than normal. The brain specialist was amazed to find that the student had an extreme case of hydrocephalitis, also known as "water on the brain." His brain cavity was mostly filled with fluid, not neurons. The cortex, the main thinking part of his brain, was merely a coating one twenty-fifth of an inch thick on the inside of his skull!

If you could harness the energy used by your brain, it would power a 10-watt lightbulb. Walking uses more power than a 150-watt lightbulb.

The youngest parents on record are a Chinese couple who gave birth to a normal boy when the father was nine years old and the mother was eight.

In prehistoric times, people lived to an average age of eighteen.

Your hair grows 83 feet per day. Explanation: This is the total growth of all your 120,000 hairs. Each grows one-hundredth of an inch per day.

Your mouth produces about 16 ounces of saliva per day. Can you imagine drinking it all at once?

Some people have as many as 500 taste buds per square centimeter, others as few as five per square centimeter. Do pancakes with maple syrup taste the same to you as they do to me?

A research project found that children were more likely to be born male if their father was under less stress than their mother at the time of their conception, and be female if their mother was under less stress.

In 1939 an author named Ernest Vincent wrote a 50,000 word novel called Gadsby. The only thing unusual about the novel is that there is not a single letter e in the whole thing.

Some scientists trained a bunch of flatworms to react in a special way to light. They noted how long it took the worms to learn, then they cut the worms up and fed the pieces to another batch of untrained worms. After their meal, the new worms were taught the same lesson. The second batch learned much faster. Wondering if this were a fluke (no, they were plenaria), some other scientists tried similar experimentation with mice. A batch of mice were trained to run a maze. Then their brains were removed, an extract was made from these brains and fed to another, untrained batch of mice. Once again, the new mice learned the maze much more quickly, up to twice as fast.

German researchers trained honey bees to expect food at a certain time every day. Then they cut off the bees' heads and transplanted a part of their brains into the brains of other bees. The bees with the brain transplants then expected the food at the same time of day.

Your brain is mostly water, 80 percent. Your blood actually is less fluid (or more solid) than your brain.

People can carry a weight approximately equal to themselves. Ants can carry a weight 100 times heavier than themselves. Ants are the creatures with the biggest brains compared with their body size. If an ant were as big as we are, they could carry 10 automobiles on their backs and probably solve calculus problems simultaneously.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Jr., a high-school dropout, posed as a monk, a professor of psychology, a cancer researcher, a penal officer, a teacher, and a surgeon, all without the proper education or certification. As a surgeon he successfully performed amputations and even thoracic surgery.

In one large city a telephone operator traced the source of an emergency phone call because the caller would not speak. The phone only emitted unusual noises. When the ambulance crew arrived at the scene, they found a basset hound who had dialed 911 in the process of chewing up the phone.

At one time Thoreau was a school teacher. When he was accused by his principal of leniency, he immediately grabbed six random kids and spanked them.

According to the Guiness Book of World Records, there are as many as 2,241 synonyms for the state of being "drunk." How many can you list?

A fellow in Montana gave his daughter a 622-letter long name. His purpose: To tangle up and crash governmental computers!

World's worst meal: eating a bicycle. A man did this by grinding it into powder.

In 1963 a man ate a single meal weighing 54 pounds.

Most people don't realize that a hot dog may contain cow brains, lips, eyes, stomachs or tails. Americans eat an average of forty of these things per year, at a cost of six hundred million dollars. If you lined them all up, that line would be about a half million miles long.

We Americans drink three million gallons of orange juice per day. We drink over fifteen million gallons of beer daily. This means that on average, Americans drink five times more beer than orange juice.

Ketchup was originally made from fish broth and mushrooms. Tomatoes were added later. Today, ketchup must contain sugar, otherwise it must be called imitation ketchup.

When plans were required for a new house of government, Ben Franklin was given a crack at the architect's job, but his design was rejected. It was just too offbeat. He had planned to hook all the seats in the meeting room to the fireplace chimney. The bottoms of the seats would have many small holes. The draft from the chimney would create a slight suction at these holes in the seats, carrying away what he called "personal odors."

On December 5, 1664, a ship sank off the coast of Wales. The only survivor was a man named Hugh Williams. On December 5, 1785, another ship sank. One man survived, another Hugh Williams. On December 5, 1860, yet another ship went down with only one survivor - you guessed it - his name was Hugh Williams.

There is a one-celled animal called Chaos Chaos which is different from any other creature. Being amorphous, but with three nuclei, it will often try to go in more than one direction at a time, stretching itself to great lengths before pulling back into "shape" and going in only one direction. When it reproduces, it becomes three smaller creatures, not two.

Even though a female butterfly can secrete only about one-quarter millionth of an ounce of her perfume into the air, a male butterfly can smell it and track her down from seven miles away.

If you cut the head off a cockroach, it can continue to live for many weeks.

Starfish have a gross and unusual manner of eating. They regurgitate their stomach through their mouth onto their food, and absorb it directly. Then they suck their stomach back in.

Do cats pretend they are people? Consider Anya. She is a half-Siamese kitty who is full-grown, and just less than a year old. When her owner steps out of the shower and turns off the water, she steps into the wet bathtub, shakes her feet a little bit, and then just sits there facing the showerhead for about five minutes. What is she thinking? When Anya's owners ask her to "do a summersault," she usually complies. She will tip her head down to the rug, and then roll over. She seems to like to please her owner. One day her owner was fooling around with 360 degree pirouettes, like dancers do. Anya saw that, and then turned around exactly 360 degrees two separate times within a few minutes.

If your kitty-cat scratches up valuable furniture, tape balloons to it. The cat will never scratch there again.

In Harper Woods, Michigan, it is against the law to paint a sparrow and claim it's a parakeet.

There is an actual court case on record named: "The United States v. 350 Cartons of Canned Sardines." It has something to do with interstate commerce.

You may not legally own a pair of pliers if you live in Texas.

In Memphis, Tennessee, a woman cannot legally drive unless there is a man running on foot ahead of her car with a red flag to warn motorists that a woman is driving. This law is seldom enforced.

In Chaseville, New York, they have a law that states, "you may not drive a goat past a church in a ridiculous fashion."

In Oklahoma, it's illegal for a baseball player to hit the ball out of the park.

Very important for those in Los Angeles: If you herd more than 2,000 sheep along Hollywood Blvd, you're breaking the law. And, while you're at it, don't drive your car along Hollywood Blvd. more than twice in four hours. That, too, is illegal.

Cataract surgery (removal of lens from eye) was first done in 1748. But the first anesthesia wasn't until 1842. In 1809, a woman had a twenty-two-pound ovarian tumor removed without anesthesia. As late as 34 years after the public introduction of anesthesia, some doctors refused to use it. Some said that the shock of pain is a necessary ingredient to recovery. Others were afraid, because some preachers said that anesthesia was the work of the devil.

In 1976, doctors in Los Angeles went on strike because of the rising cost of malpractice insurance. All elective and non-emergency surgery and medical attention were canceled. During that time, 18 percent fewer people died than usual.

Of all the people who work in hospitals, only 1.78 percent are doctors. 17.27 percent are clerical workers. So there are nine times more people involved with the paperwork, than those involved in the actual work!

The longest operation on record took 96 hours. During February 4 - 8, 1951, surgeons in Michigan removed an ovarian cyst from a woman. When they were done, she weighed 308 pounds less.

Researchers at Ohio University accidentally proved that love and attention is good preventive medicine. They were doing experiments with rabbits to test effects of cholesterol blocked arteries. All the groups of rabbits got sick as expected except one group. Everything was the same for this group except one thing: Each rabbit in this group was being held and stroked by the student in charge of feeding them. Later experiments specifically involving loving some rabbits and ignoring others proved that the effect is real.

The US Federal Reserve offers a free service. If you have cash that has been burned, torn, or otherwise destroyed, they will help you verify and replace that money. They once received a shotgun in which a man had hidden some money, but forgot and fired the gun. In another case, a farmer sent his cow's stomach to them, all stuffed with money.

A few years ago, the people who worked in the Interior Decorating Department of Sears had to write a customer's name in 67 different places for a job which could sell for as little as $300 installed.

The scientist, Louis Pasteur, used to sneak a microscope into friends houses under his coat and then examine the food they serving to make sure it was safe from germs.

Hollywood was founded in 1888 by Horace Wilcox. It was to be a model city of people who did not drink alcohol. There were only 500 residents until the movie industry came to town.

Twenty-four percent of the land in Los Angeles is paved. We all know LA. is an abbreviation for a big city in California, but most people don't know the full name. It is, "El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula."

US President James Garfield could do a neat trick: He could write Greek with one hand while at the same time writing Latin with his other hand.

In 1957, United States senator Strom Thurmond made a speech that lasted 24 hours, 19 minutes.

"History is a race between education and catastrophe." - H.G. Wells

"A man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches isn't so sure." - unknown

"I have little patience with scientists who take a board of wood, look for its thinnest part, and drill a great number of holes where drilling is easy." - Albert Einstein

"If the doctors threw all their medicine into the sea, it would be a horrible day for the fish." - unknown author

Researchers in Louisiana placed rubber snakes and turtles on highways and observed the behavior of 22,000 motorists. They discovered that 87% of the drivers purposely avoided hitting the creatures, but 6% of drivers went out of their way to "kill" the rubber animals with their tires.

If a salamander is injured, it can repair the damage much better than a human. If part of the salamander's heart, eye or brain is removed, a replacement part re-grows in its place. If they lose a leg, a new one is grown.

Comparing this phenomenon to a frog, closely related to a salamander, but not able to regenerate new parts, a remarkable discovery was made. When a frog or a salamander is first injured, positive electrical voltage can be measured at the injury. With the salamander, the electricity soon switches to a strong negative voltage, but with the frog, the voltage stays positive.

When a negative voltage is applied to an injured frog, will it grow a new limb?

This has given medical researchers a whole new avenue of exploration.

Some scientists have a sense of humor. You can see it when they name new molecules. Some of the chemical names they have come up with include: Buckminster Fullerene, Megaphone, Sonic Hedgehog, Moronic Acid, Curious Chloride, Periodic Acid, Diabolic Acid, Antipain, and Dogcollarane.

Before the first atomic bomb was tested in the New Mexico desert on July 16, 1945, some of the scientists working on the bomb thought there was a three-in-one-million chance that an atomic bomb might melt down the entire earth. They went ahead and tested that first atomic bomb.

A student at Iowa State University wrote to thirty-seven scientists who had published research studies. He requested their data for verification. Five did not answer, and twenty-one of the so-called scientists said that their data was lost or that some accident made it inaccessible.

Scientists tested vision in men with tight collars and ties and found significant improvement in these men's vision when they loosened their ties and unbuttoned their collars.

One of the most successful astronomers, Milton Humason, was best known for measuring the speed at which stars are moving away from each other. He was never formally trained as an astronomer. He was a donkey driver who used to stop by the Mount Wilson observatory in California on his journeys. He was curious, and since the astronomers there realized he had a lively mind, they were happy to answer his questions. Eventually, they gave him a job.

Some small stars spin at over 38,000 rpm (revolutions per minute) on their axes. This is more than ten times faster than a lawnmower at full throttle.

When tennis was first invented in 1874, it was called sphairistike. Most tennis injuries actually happen after the game when the winner tries to jump over the net.

The guy who won the Indianapolis 500 in 1915 had to get out and push his broken car for more than the last mile of the race.

Baseball players have the longest lives of all occupations.

In the 1920's a radio station in Schenectady, NY built a powerful transmitter. In those days before FCC regulations, not knowing just how big to make a transmitter in order for the signal to be received some distance away, the station set up to broadcast at 500,000 watts. It requires about one watt to be received four blocks away. This station broadcast at such tremendous power that they could be heard around the world. People in New York didn't even need radios. They could sometimes hear voices in their furnaces and coming off chain-link fences. Light bulbs lit up in people's houses even if they were switched off.

As you break a window, the cracks made in the glass travel at speeds up to three thousand miles per hour.

People who live near big airports have as much as a 19% higher death rate.

A woman in England had to take her drivers' test 41 times before she was awarded a license to drive. It sounds to me like the only time she got to practice was when she was taking her test. That's one way to get driving lessons without paying for them. I'd say the examiner got taken for a ride.

Frank Tower was a ship worker who was on the Titanic when it sank, the Empress of Ireland when it sank, and the Lusitania when it sank. He escaped all three times.

There are 1.3 billion cattle in the world, and they all belch. This might be a serious problem! Each of these cattle burp up about 8 ounces of methane per day, which totals one third of a million tons. According to one scientist's calculations, this is enough methane to ruin the world's weather.

A computer with the job of issuing traffic citations goofed in September 1989 and sent notices to 41,000 residents of Paris, France informing them that they were charged with murder, prostitution and illegal sale of drugs.

A devout Hindu, to demonstrate his mastery over pain, raised his arm above his head and kept it that way for years. He held so still that a bird built a nest in his hand.

In 1949, Jack Wurm, an unemployed man was aimlessly walking on a California beach when he came across a bottle that had floated up to the beach containing this message: "To avoid confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike. Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937." It was not a hoax. Mr. Wurm received over $6 million from the Alexander estate.

A church steeple in Germany was struck by lightning and destroyed on April 18, 1599. The members of the church rebuilt it. It was hit by lightning three more times between then and 1783, and rebuilt again and again. Every time it was hit, the date was April 18.

America was named after Amerigo Vespucci, who map maker Martin Waldseemuller mistakenly thought was Christopher Columbus, the discoverer of North America. Vespucci discovered South America.

In a happiness survey based upon a scale of one to ten, lottery winners rated their happiness at seven; paraplegics said six.