Archives: Useless Facts

Name the fruit with the highest fiber content?

George Washington Carver, an agricultural scientist and inventor, is the famous scientist who conducted research with peanuts. His research promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods of farming that helped farmers prevent soil depletion.

Who is the famous scientist that conducted research with peanuts to help farmers?

In the game of horseshoes, the stakes are forty feet apart.

How many feet separate the stakes in a game of horseshoes?

Australia’s Ninety Mile Beach stretches from Ahipara to Scott Point in Northland, but it isn’t 90 miles (145 kilometres) long. It is actually only fifty five miles (just under 90 kilometres) long! So how did the name come about you ask!

Early missionaries to Australia traveled the beach by horseback. Not realizing horses move more slowly on sand, they thought their horses could go about 30 miles every day as they usually would on a regular road in those days. Since it took them about three days to get from one end of the beach to the other, they incorrectly assumed it was ninety miles long – and eventually gave it that name.

How Long Is New Zealand’s Ninety Mile Beach?

The first motion picture that was rated PG-13, was Red Dawn, which was released in 1984.

For those movie buffs who are also interested in military trivia, the only real military mission I could find with that name, was named and actually took place almost 20 years after the original movie was released.  The military operation by the United States that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein in 2003 was codenamed Operation Red Dawn.

Back in October, we asked you to name the only X-Rated movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture.  The answer: Midnight Cowboy!  Now can you name the first movie ever to be rated PG-13?

 

The brightest visible star in the night sky is Sirius (also known as the Dog Star).

For those of you astronomy buffs, Sirius has an apparent visual magnitude of 1.46 and a surface temperature of 9, 9940 Kelvin – about 4,000 Kelvin hotter than our Sun.

For you science buffs, Kelvin (K) is not referred to or written as “degrees.”  Kelvin (K) is the base unit of thermodynamic temperature measurement in the International System of Units and the fundamental unit of the absolute temperature scale named for the British physicist William Thomson (known as Lord Kelvin).

This absolute temperature scale starts at absolute zero (which, translated into temperature we know would be −273.15° on the Celsius scale and −459.67° on the Fahrenheit scale).

Absolute zero is the theoretical temperature at which the molecules of a substance have the lowest energy and since the starting point of the kelvin scale is absolute zero, there are no negative values. In other words, in Kelvin, nothing can be below zero!