|  *Some 30% of local residents in Shanghai say cycling is their main means of transport and 60% of locals pedal to work every day. With the possible exception of China, the Netherlands boasts more bicycles per capita than any other country - at least 16-million bikes for the 16-million Dutch. Roughly 30% of all urban trips in the Netherlands are on bicycles, compared with 2% in the UK
*Their are at least 250,000 species of insects constituting the order Coleoptera or beetles, making it the largest order in the animal kingdom. Among the approximately 5,000 widely distributed beetles of the family Coccinellidae is the Ladybird; the name originated in the Middle Ages, when this little beetle was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and called "beetle of Our Lady
*In early Scotland, a gentleman wore a kilt. There were two types of kilts, one for casual wear, and one for formal affairs. The formal one took 9 yards of tarten. The tailor would inquire to which kilt was needed, and the reply…if it were a formal one was “I’ll take the whole 9 yards”
*In the nursery rhyme Jack and Jill , Jack represented the French King, Louis XVI who "Lost his Crown" in the Revolution, while Jill who (or rather her head) came tumbling after, was Marie Antoinette
*Fish or fishes?? Though often used interchangeably, these words actually mean different things. Fish is used either as singular noun or to describe a group of specimens from a single species. Fishes describes a group containing more than one species
*Ten countries border Brazil in South America; Equador and Chile are the only two countries in South America that do not share a border with Brazil.
*One out of every 25 coffins from the 16th century were found to have scratch marks on the inside. This is a Myth. Some did get buried alive, but not that many! It is a 10 year old internet joke.
*AIDS was first 'reported and recognised' June 5, 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recorded a cluster of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia in five homosexual men in Los Angeles. It had no name, the term "GRID" was used first followed by “the 4H disease”, by September 1982 the CDC started using the name AIDS, and properly defined the illness.
(update because of confusion: Later research by the CDC (Center for Disease Control) finds .. In 1966, a widely traveled Norwegian sailor died with AIDS-like symptoms. When his blood was tested later, it turned out HIV positive. A 1959 blood sample kept from a man living in Kinshasha in Zaire turned out to be HIV positive when tested, according to the CDC. According to Laurie Garrett (1994), the CDC lost this blood sample and the positive test results were never confirmed by anyone else. The HIV that researchers claimed the blood of a sailor from Manchester, U.K., who died of AIDS-like symptoms in 1959, when tested it had was tainted with the modern virus, and a Saint Louis teenager who died in the 60's of AIDS-like symptoms the HIV virus was never found in his blood, the CDC say if either of them had died from Aids, they had a variety that is not known today, that has died off or evolved into a more modern form).
*The 1912 Olympics were the last games that gave out gold medals made entirely of gold. Absolute pure gold, is so soft, it can be moulded on your hands.. okay if you get fed up with it and want something else round your neck!!! On a more serious note I think that well used fact should be phrased differently.
*In the Andes, time is often measured by how long it takes to smoke a cigarette
*More than 20 million seahorses are harvested each year for folk medicinal purposes. The world seahorse population has dropped 70 per cent in the past 10 years.
*It takes 20,000 light bulbs to make the Eiffel Tower sparkle at night and there are 2,500,000 rivets holding it together; the total weight of the tower is 10,100 tons. They use 60 tons of paint each repainting campaign, every 7 years in it's entirety. 1,665 steps in the East pillar take you to the top, the hieght to the top of the flage pole is 312m, if including the antennas it is 324 m.
*According to research women are enticed to buy more if they hear the clicking of heels on the floor ~ I wonder??!
*In Aztec mythology, a pantheon of 400 rabbit gods known as Centzon Totochtin, led by Ometotchtli or Two Rabbit, represented fertility, parties, and drunkenness.
*Scarlett O'Hara, the heroine of Margret Mitchell's 'Gone With The Wind' was originally named Pansy.
*In ancient China, criminals who attacked travellers had their noses cut off.
*In the early days of film making, the people who worked on the sets were called movies. The films were called motion pictures.
*Hyperpolysyllabicomania is a fondness for big words.
*The first genuine French kiss in a Hollywood movie was between Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood in the film "Splendor In The Grass". (allegedly)
*The Great Barrier Reef is composed of roughly 3,000 individual reefs, 900 islands stretching for 2,600 kilometres and has more than 1,500 species of fish living on it.
*Tottenham Hotspur didn't have a single player sent off in a Football League match between October 27th 1928 and December 4th 1965.
*The words moonbeam, generous & to champion were all invented by Shakespeare. Some myth .. some fact. There are 200 plus words that you will see scattered around claiming "invented by Shakespeare". These words were not all invented by Shakespeare but the earliest citations for them in the OED from Shakespeare.
*If you suffer from geophagia then you have a compulsive urge to eat soil.
*The African baobab tree (adansonia digitata) blossom opens only to moonlight and it is pollinated by bats .. the fruit bats.
*Clint Eastwood's roll of Dirty Harry was turned down by Paul Newman, John Wayne, Robert Mitchum and Frank Sinatra.
*According to sales, 17,000 individual 'smarties' are eaten every minute in the UK. (2006)
*The life of an eyelash is about 6 weeks.
*Iceland, Europe's second largest island following Great Britain, boasts of having the world's oldest 'active' parliamentary body, Althing, which first met in 930AD.
*The Turkish football club, Galatasaray, has an A for every other letter.
*The tongue of a mature Blue Whale has approximately the same mass as that of an entire adult elephant.
*The study, which tested telephones, desks, water coolers, doorknobs, and toilet seats, compiled 7,000 samples from major centers across the country. What they found, was that while phones ranked highest in bacteria levels, the office desk was a close second.
*In England during World War I, many German names and titles were changed and given more English-sounding names, including the royal family's from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. Kaiser Wilhelm II countered this by jokingly saying that he was off to see a performance of 'The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.'
*Both turdoid and turdine mean "belonging to the family turdus," Turdus musicus is the song thrush & Turdus viscivorus is the mistletoe thrush.
*Nearly a quarter of all mammals can fly; with a huge 985 known species, bats make up 23.1% of all known mammals by species.
*January is National Soup Month in the United States, January is the seasonal equivalent to July in the Southern Hemisphere; & on Jan 14th, 90% of New Year resolutions will be broken!
*You use an average of 43 muscles for a frown and you use an average of 17 muscles for a smile, and they say every two thousand frowns creates one wrinkle.
*Baby robins eat 14 feet of earthworms in the first 14 nestling days of their life and that is not even their main food on the menu (14 feet a day is wrong) But parent robins make around 100 food visits to the nest every day!
*The first man to die during planning & construction of the Hoover Dam was the father of the last man to die during its construction. December 20, 1922 with J.G. Tierney a Bureau of Reclamation employee who was part of a geological survey and drowned when he fell from a barge. Exactly 13 years later, in 1935, his son Patrick W. Tierney, fell to his death from an intake tower.
* You will have to walk 80 kilometers for your legs to equal the amount of exercise your eyes get daily.
*The Chinese used fingerprints as a method of identification back in 700.
*Sound travels 15 times faster through steel than it does through the air.
*A greenfly born on a Tuesday can be a grandparent by Friday.
*There are more mobile phones in UK than there are people.
*Termites are affected by music; the termites will eat your house twice as fast if you play them loud music.
*Paraskavedekatriaphobia is the extreme fear of Friday the 13th.
*One gallon of used motor oil can ruin approximately one million gallons of fresh water!
*Christopher Trace, the first presenter of Blue Peter, was the body double for Charlton Heston in the film Ben-Hur.
*Thomas Edison got patents for a method of making concrete furniture and a cigar which was supposed to burn forever.
*A cubic mile of ordinary fog contains less than a gallon of water.
*If you think of the Milky Way as being the size of the continent of Asia, our solar system would be the size of a penny.
*The chicken is the closest living relative to the Tyrannosaurus Rex Myth or fact??
*The average driver will be locked out of their car nine times during their life time (yes, men are in the stats).
*A Boeing 767 airliner contains 3,100,000 parts.
* Belief in the existence of vacuums used to be punishable under Church law.
* Your skin weighs twice as much as your brain.
*An owl can see a mouse moving from over 150ft away by a light no brighter than candlelight.
*The average person has walked 100,000 miles by the time they reach the age of 85.
*Your hearing is less sharp after eating too much.
*In the course of a lifetime, the average person spends 2 years on the phone (I bet cell phones/mobiles were not taken into consideration when that fact was worked out!!).
* Henry VIII was once served a loin of beef whi
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