Uncle John’s Did You Know? Read online

  • A hyena is one of the few animals that will attack a lion.

  • What’s gnu? The name “gnu” is from a West African language that pronounced the “g.” (We don’t.) The word probably came from the gruntlike sound that gnus make.

  • Female lions do most of the hunting. Its the males’ job to defend the herd (called a “pride”) against intruders.

  GLUG GLUG

  Water, water everywhere.

  • About 72% of the Earth’s surface is underwater.

  • The Seven Seas: Antarctic, Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Indian, North Pacific, South Pacific.

  • Every minute that your kitchen faucet is on, it pours out about three gallons of water.

  • You use about two gallons of water to brush your teeth if you leave the water running.

  • The longest freshwater shoreline in the world is located in the state of Michigan.

  • The United States is 27 times larger than Norway, but Norway has a longer coastline. Why? Because of Norway’s fjords—deep inlets with steep cliffs, the longest of which reaches 127 miles inland.

  • There are more than a million swimming pools in Florida…even though no one in Florida lives more than an hour’s drive from the ocean.

  • Average depths: The Java Sea is 151 feet deep; the Arctic Ocean is 3,407 feet.

  • The Pacific Ocean is about 12 times larger than the Arctic Ocean.

  HAPPY

  HOLIDAZE

  • “Rollo, the Red-Nosed Reindeer”? Almost. That was one name author Robert May considered before he decided on Rudolph. (Reginald was another.)

  • Early Easter baskets were made to look like birds’ nests, with eggs and other treats tucked inside.

  • What workers receive the most Valentine’s Day cards? Teachers, of course.

  • Under the rule of Emperor Claudius, the Romans had 159 holidays per year—that’s one almost every other day. (Whoopee!)

  • Who buys greeting cards? Women, mostly—they purchase a whopping 93% of all cards sold.

  • 54% of New Year’s resolutions are broken within two weeks.

  • When’s Easter? Good question. It’s celebrated on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring. With this complicated formula, there are 35 dates in March and April on which it can fall.

  • In Finland, Santa rides on a goat named Ukko.

  • How fast does Santa’s sleigh have to go to deliver a gift to every kid in the world on Christmas? Over two million miles per hour.

  THAT’S

  DISGUSTING!

  • Scabs are nature’s Band-Aids: They start to form less than 10 seconds after you get cut, and they keep germs out while the cells underneath make new skin.

  • Your mouth is one of the most crowded parts of your whole body: More than 100,000,000 micro-creatures are in residence there at any one time.

  • London’s parks are watered by more than a million gallons of dog urine every single year.

  • 50% of women and 90% of men do not wash their hands after they’ve used the bathroom…unless someone is watching them.

  • Think your kitchen sponge is clean? Wrong! It contains more bacteria than your toilet.

  • Amateur biologist Ruth Nauss was a true lover of slime mold: She kept specimens (she called them “pets”) in jars and took them along with her on vacation. One slimy pet lived for more than nine years.

  • When a wasp attacks a skipper caterpillar, the little wormlike critter fires defensive poop balls from its butt. These missiles travel at six feet per second! Evidently the smell of skipper caterpillar poop is like perfume to the wasp, because it will turn around and immediately zoom off in the direction of the dookie.

  LOONY

  LAWSUITS

  Think the classroom’s weird? Try the courtroom,

  • Actual court case: The United States v. 350 Cartons of Canned Sardines.

  • Shades of Stephen King: A 375-pound woman stepped on a 53-year-old grave, and it collapsed under her weight. She’s suing the cemetery.

  • Harry Potter publisher Scholastic sued a newspaper for more than $100 million for running a review of Harry’s latest book three days before it was released, and revealing the surprise ending.

  • Someone is suing Palm, Inc. for “deceptive marketing practices” because one of their PDAs was advertised as displaying more than 65,000 colors—but it’s really only capable of producing 58,621.

  • A 15-year-old boy who joined a Babe Ruth Baseball League didn’t get to play as much as he thought he should. He sued the league for a refund of his entry fee. (He lost.)

  • A lot of junk: A man who was having heart attacks and got diabetes because he’s obese is suing McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and KFC because they didn’t tell him that he shouldn’t eat so much fast food.

  HERE, DOGGIE

  • Top dog: When two dogs approach each other, the dog that’s wagging its tail very slowly will be the dominant of the twosome.

  • Detector dogs trained to look for drugs at airports can sniff out 400 to 500 packages in about 30 minutes.

  • Every pile of dog poop that goes unscooped attracts about 144 flies.

  • For every 130 dogs who try out for police work, only one is qualified.

  • It may look like one, but according to breed standards, it isn’t officially a Chihuahua if it weighs more than six pounds.

  • Bloodhounds aren’t specialists in smelling blood—their name comes from “blooded hound,” referring to their pure breeding.

  • A group of greyhounds is called a leash of greyhounds.

  • The Basenji is known as a dog that doesn’t bark. That’s a myth—it does bark on rare occasions. But it sounds more like a scream.

  • Those little dogs called “lapdogs” were once popular among the wealthy because they could be put into bed first to attract the bedbugs and fleas. (Eww!)

  • Newfoundlands are good swimmers because they have webbed feet.

  AROUND THE

  WORLD

  • Next to Warsaw (the largest city in Poland), there are more people of Polish origin in Chicago than in any other city on Earth.

  • About 85 million people live in deserts. That’s about 13% of the world’s population.

  • The South Pacific nation of Fiji is made up of 332 islands, most of which are uninhabited.

  • The official dance of Mexico: the Mexican Hat Dance.

  • The Yanco tribe of the Amazon cannot count beyond three. Why? They don’t have any words for larger numbers.

  • There are 75 towns in the world named Waterloo.

  • Most rivers flow south, and a few flow north, but the Tonle River in Cambodia does both. Six months of the year it flows north, and the other six months it flows south.

  • Lost and Found Department: In one year, 7,026 umbrellas and 19,583 articles of clothing were found on London’s buses, trains, and taxis.

  THE ANCIENT

  OLYMPICS

  • The first event at the first Olympics, held in 776 B.C., was a foot race. The winner was Koroibos, who worked as a cook.

  • The Games were held every four years for 12 centuries—until A.D. 393.

  • The ancient Olympic Games never had a marathon race. The first marathon was held in Athens in 1896.

  • Famous Greeks like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Hippocrates attended—or even competed in—the ancient Olympics.

  • In A.D. 67, the Roman emperor Nero won a series of events—not because he was a great athlete, but because he was the emperor of the most powerful state in the world and everybody had to lose to him.

  • No holds barred: The pankration event was a kick-boxing and wrestling match between two men. It could go on all day, and everything was allowed except eye gouging, nose gouging, biting, or using a weapon.

  • According to ancient Olympic regulations, bribing a judge or an opponent would be punished by whipping.

  • Married women weren’
t allowed to attend the ancient Games. If they were caught, they’d be thrown off a cliff.

  EVERYBODY’S

  BODY

  • The human body is mostly water—about 70%. How watery are you? If you weight 80 pounds, 56 pounds of it is water. That’s about 112 eight-ounce glasses of water in you.

  • Every day about 10 billion tiny scales of skin rub off your body.

  • The Japanese believe blood types determine personality traits. Type A: calm, trustworthy. Type B: creative, excitable. Type AB: thoughtful, emotional. Type O: confident, good leader. (Uncle John is Type O.)

  • Itch, ouch, itch, ouch: Babies who wear disposable diapers are five times more likely to get diaper rash than babies who wear cloth diapers.

  • Sweaty feet? No wonder! Feet have about 250,000 pores oozing a quarter of a cup of liquid each day.

  • A blink lasts about .15 seconds. Every person blinks for roughly 23 minutes per day. In just one day, all the blinks of all the people in the world would add up to 267,000 years of darkness.

  • Mom is right: Carrots are good for your eyes. Your body converts the carotene in carrots into vitamin A, which is essential for proper vision.

  GEOGRAPHICAL

  RECORDS

  • Brazil has the most plant species in the world: more than 56,000.

  • Not the grandest? The deepest canyon in the United States isn’t the Grand Canyon. Hell’s Canyon, along the Oregon-Idaho border, is more than 8,000 feet deep. The Grand Canyon is less than 6,000.

  • World’s largest city: Davao City, in the Philippines, with an area of over 1,500 square miles.

  • China is bordered by more countries than any other: Its 16 neighbors are Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Macau, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam.

  • The Netherlands boasts the highest concentration of museums in the world.

  • Ushuaia, Argentina, is the southernmost city in the world.

  • Hawaii’s Mount Waialeale is the world’s wettest location: it gets about 460 inches of rain per year.

  • The steepest street in the world is Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, with an incline of 38%.

  INSTRUMENTAL

  A little background music, please, maestro…

  • Instruments named after their inventors: the saxophone (Adolphe Sax), the Moog synthesizer (Dr. Robert Moog), and the theremin (Leon Theremin). The sousaphone was named after bandleader John Philip Sousa, but he didn’t invent it.

  • After some California preschool students took musical keyboard lessons for eight months, their IQs rose by 46%.

  • In 2006 a violin made in 1707 by famed violin maker Antonio Stradivari sold for $3.5 million.

  • Some scientists believe that Stradivarius violins sound so good because of microscopic holes in their wood. The holes may have come from soaking the wood in seawater or coating it with borax.

  • Former president Bill Clinton played the saxophone in jazz bands when he was a teenager.

  • The combined tension of the strings in a grand piano is as much as 30 tons.

  • Traditional circus music was played on a calliope (ca-LIE-oh-pee), a kind of organ that runs on steam. It was named for Calliope, the Greek muse of poetry.

  • Ukulele is Hawaiian for “jumping flea,” because a player’s fingers move really fast when playing it.

  WORLD

  RELIGIONS

  • The first religion to spread beyond the society where it originated: Buddhism.

  • Medieval experts on religion believed there were 399,902,004 angels in the universe.

  • There’s a statue of Buddha in Tokyo that’s 394 feet tall—more than twice the height of the Statue of Liberty.

  • Seven out of 10 people believe in life after death.

  • The ancient Egyptians worshiped more than 2,000 different gods and goddesses.

  • According to Norse mythology, Valhalla, the heaven reserved for brave Viking warriors slain in battle, has doors so wide that 800 warriors could walk through them shoulder-to-shoulder.

  • But I couldn’t help it! The Puritans considered being born on a Sunday a huge sin.

  • Some people think the Shroud of Turin bears Jesus Christ’s image at his crucifixion. Others think it’s a hoax, possibly perpetrated by Leonardo da Vinci.

  • Hinduism is one of the world’s oldest religions, dating to 1500 B.C. Hindus call their religion sanatana dharma, meaning “eternal truth.”

  ANIMAL

  DEFENSES

  • To save their colony, some ants can actually explode in the face of the enemy.

  • Some lizards have tails that break off when grabbed by an attacker. The lizard slips away, leaving the attacker holding the tail. (Not to worry, though: The tails do grow back.)

  • Ready, aim, fire: The spitting cobra spits its venom right into the eyes of its enemy.

  • Skunks aren’t the only animals that rely on bad odors to repel their enemies. Bedbugs, cockroaches, earwigs, foxes, minks, snakes, weasels, and wolverines do, too.

  • The jawfish spits pebbles at attackers.

  • Playing possum: Most people think that when opossums are threatened they pretend to be dead. Turns out they don’t—they actually faint from sheer terror.

  • Zebras defend themselves with their hooves and teeth. What about their stripes? It’s possible that the stripes of a fast-moving herd make it hard for a predator to focus on any one animal.

  • Among North American snakes, the eastern hog-nose has the most elaborate defense behavior: When threatened, it flattens its head and neck like a cobra and hisses loudly. Then it may strike, though it rarely bites. If these ploys fail, the snake rolls over, writhes as if in pain, opens its mouth, sticks out its tongue, and plays dead.

  • Fence lizards defend themselves with camouflage: They look like tree bark, especially when they remain perfectly still.

  • The slo-o-o-w-moving sloth uses camouflage as its main defense: It will hide beneath branches or curl into a ball in the fork of a tree to resemble a termite nest or a knot in the wood.

  • Fake-out: The scarlet king snake (which is not venomous) looks similar to the deadly eastern coral snake. So any predator that fears the coral is very unlikely to attack the scarlet.

  • Electric eels, electric catfish, and electric rays all live up to their names: They emit an electrical shock to stun or injure attackers.

  • The skin of a skink (a type of lizard) is covered with scales that overlap smoothly, making them slippery and difficult for predators to catch.

  VOLCANOES

  • Since the beginning of recorded history, about 550 different volcanoes have erupted on the surface of the Earth—but a lot more than that have erupted on the ocean floor.

  • The word “volcano” probably comes from Vulcano, a volcanic island near Sicily, Italy. The island’s name came from Vulcan, the god of fire in Roman mythology.

  • What countries have the most active volcanoes? Indonesia, Japan, and the United States, in that order.

  • Mount Kilauea (kee-la-WAY-ah) on the island of Hawaii is the most active volcano on Earth. Perhaps that’s because it’s the legendary home of the powerful—and short-tempered—goddess Pele (peh-LAY).

  • Fifty American volcanoes have erupted in recorded history.

  • The Yellowstone Caldera (a caldera is the crater of a volcano) in Yellowstone National Park is at least two million years old. It hasn’t erupted violently for the last 640,000 years.

  • While lava is still underground, it’s called magma.

  • Hot lava eventually solidifies to form two kinds of lava, both with Hawaiian names. One is a’a (AH-ah), whose surface is rough and broken; the other is called pahoehoe (pah-HOY-HOY) and has a smooth surface.

  WHADAYA SAY?

  Italians say “pronto” when they answer the phone, meaning “I’m ready.” Here are some more facts about other languages.


  • Schools in different parts of India teach courses in 58 different languages.

  • The word ka has 214 different meanings in Japanese.

  • Only 19% of the people in Wales can speak their nation’s historic (and co-official) language, Welsh.

  • The Sanskrit word for “war” means “desire for more cows.”

  • The letter F can be pronounced five different ways in Icelandic.

  • In Brazil the number six has two different names: seis and meia. Because seis and três (three) sound similar, Brazilians say meia (which means “half,” as in “half-dozen”) when saying phone numbers.

  • There are 6,800 languages in the world, but experts think half will be extinct by the end of this century.

  • Only one person in the world still speaks the Eyak language: Marie Smith, of Anchorage, Alaska—and she’s 88 years old.

  • Nearly 900 million people in the world speak Chinese; 341 million speak English. How many American schoolchildren study Chinese? About 50,000.

  MAKE A WISH

  • Why do we throw coins in fountains to make wishes come true? The ancient Greeks started it—they threw coins in their wells, hoping to keep the wells from running dry.

  • The first wishbones were used by the Etruscans, who lived 2,500 years ago in what’s now Italy. They would lay the wishbone in the sun to let it dry, and people would come by to stroke it and make a wish.

  • A wishbone is a turkey’s clavicle, or collarbone.

  • The things that a bride wears for good luck: something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue. The tradition comes from a poem, the next line of which is “and a silver sixpence in her shoe.”

  • When an eyelash falls out, put it on your finger, make a wish, and blow it away.

  • Next time you find a penny, wear it in your left shoe and your wish will come true.