Quite Interesting Facts 9

I’d like to thank ListVerse.com for providing the following interesting facts

- REM dreams are characterised by bizarre plots, but non-REM dreams are repetitive and thought-like, with little imagery – obsessively returning to a suspicion you left your mobile phone somewhere, for example.

-Some scientists believe we dream to fix experiences in long-term memory, that is, we dream about things worth remembering. Others think we dream about things worth forgetting – to eliminate overlapping memories that would otherwise clog up our brains.

-Scientists have not been able to explain a 1998 study showing a bright light shone on the backs of human knees can reset the brain’s sleep-wake clock.

-If you put Saturn in water it would float

-The moon is drifting away from Earth. Every year the moon moves about 3.8cm further away from the Earth. This is caused by tidal effects. Consequently, the earth is slowing in rotation by about 0.002 seconds per day per century. Scientists do not know how the moon was created, but the generally accepted theory suggests that a large Mars sized object hit the earth causing the Moon to splinter off.

-The light hitting the earth right now is 30 thousand years old. The energy in the sunlight we see today started out in the core of the Sun 30,000 years ago – it spent most of this time passing through the dense atoms that make the sun and just 8 minutes to reach us once it had left the Sun.

-The Big Dipper is not a constellation, it is an asterism

-If two pieces of metal touch in space, they become permanently stuck together. This may sound unbelievable, but it is true. Two pieces of metal without any coating on them will form in to one piece in the vacuum of space. This doesn’t happen on earth because the atmosphere puts a layer of oxidized material between the surfaces.

-We Only Dream of What We Know. Our dreams are frequently full of strangers who play out certain parts – did you know that your mind is not inventing those faces – they are real faces of real people that you have seen during your life but may not know or remember.

-The first color film was not the Wizard of Oz or Gone with the Wind. It was a 1918 silent film entitled

Cupid Angling. The next full length color film was The Toll of the Sea in 1922.

-“Ough” can be pronounced in eight different ways. The following sentence contains them all: “A rough-coated, dough-faced ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough, coughing and hiccoughing thoughtfully (from list verse)

-The French Kiss isn’t from France, it’s a slur against the nation. In the 1920s, the English derided the French as the kind of people who’d go around sticking their tongues where they didn’t belong.(from Mental Floss)

-Since 2002, Henry Kissinger has avoided visiting both France and Spain—and for good reason. If he does, he might just be hauled into court. Apparently, Kissinger is still wanted for questioning in relation to French deaths resulting from the American-led war in Vietnam, and Spanish deaths that occurred during America’s military opposition in Chile. (From Mental Floss)

-Doves were called “turtles” long before today’s turtles were known by that name. (from Mental Floss)

-A micronation is an invented country, not recognized by any other. One of the most interesting is the Principality of Sealand, on an ocean platform off the coast of England. They’ve got their own currency, stamps and passports, and have argued their right for sovereignty (and lost) several times in court.(From Mental Floss)

-The Brothers Grimm didn’t write much of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. They simply recorded the stories they were told by locals, and gathered them together in a collection.(From Mental Floss)