Fun Friday Fact - hope you respond weekly to give us all a smile

[Marcie Jensen]

27 minutes ago, Colleen Henderson said:

You could have fooled me.  I thought it was my ex-wife.

Me, too. Although, I admit that gives the T-Rex a bad reputation...

[Heather Shay]

Ouch ladies.....

[Heather Shay]

1. Light is made up of energy.
2. 02Light travels in a straight line. Objects in its path cause light to bend or refract.
3. 03The speed of light is exactly 299 792 km per second.
4. 04This is the speed when light is travelling in a vacuum and not obstructed by the atmosphere.
5. 05Travelling at the speed of light, you could go around Earth 7.5 times in a second.

[Heather Shay]

You are the tallest first thing in the morning.

[Colleen Henderson]

1 hour ago, Heather Shay said:

You are the tallest first thing in the morning.

Yet that's when you weigh the least.

 

Discuss.

[Ivy]

6 minutes ago, Colleen Henderson said:

Yet that's when you weigh the least.

Usually loose a bit of weight shortly after I get up.

[miz miranda]

Some stuff about sleep

 

On the first night of sleeping in a new place, one hemisphere of our brain remains more active than the other during sleep. Scientists believe this "vigilant mode" allows us to respond more quickly to unfamiliar, potentially danger-signaling sounds

 

A malingerer is someone who pretends to have a sleep disorder in order to get medication or other attention

 

REM atonia, or sleep paralysis, occurs in the typical sleeper every night to prevent people from acting out their dreams. Only a few muscles have the ability to move during REM sleep, such as the eye muscles, the auditory muscles, and the diaphragm for respiration.

 

The average amount of time people sleep has dropped from nine hours in the pre-lightbulb era to seven-and-a-half hours today

[Heather Nicole]

2 hours ago, Jandi said:

Usually loose a bit of weight shortly after I get up.

 

lol, I was thinking the same thing, but I couldn't come up with a polite way to word it. 😆

 

18 minutes ago, miz miranda said:

On the first night of sleeping in a new place, one hemisphere of our brain remains more active than the other during sleep. Scientists believe this "vigilant mode" allows us to respond more quickly to unfamiliar, potentially danger-signaling sounds

 

So that's why, for the life of me, I absolutely cannot manage to get a halfway decent night's sleep when I travel (and even that's after hours of trying to doze off in the first place). It's a really annoying, anxiety-fueled deterrent to traveling for me.

[Heather Shay]

There is a technical name for the "fear of long words." It's called "hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia."

[Ivy]

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia causes hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

[JJ Orange]

Supposedly, the term "Bucket list" was created around 1999 to 2007 for the movie with the same name. Which is weird because I always assumed it was a much older term and that that it had nothing to do with the movie as far as its origin. 

[Mmindy]

[miz miranda]

words:

 

Startling is the only 9-letter word where you can remove one letter at a time and still create a word: Startling -> Starting -> Staring -> String -> Sting -> Sing -> Sin -> In -> I.

Deeded is the only word that is made using only two different letters, each used three times.

 

Stressed is desserts spelled backwards.

 

Feedback is the shortest word that contains the letters ABCDEF.

 

Listen contains the same letters as silent.

 

Misspelled/misspelt is – ironically – one of the most commonly misspelled words.

 

Pronunciation is one of the most often mispronounced words.

 

lastly in homage to hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia

Poecilonym is a synonym for the word synonym.

 

 

[Heather Shay]

[Ivy]

This is not a very fun fact…

[Heather Shay]

"Cats headbutt you as a way of telling you that they trust you."

[miz miranda]

Trying to answer the burning question did Dinosaurs head butt

 

"Finding out brings us closer to their social lives: were pachycephalosaurs more likely just showing off their domes like peacocks with their tails, or were they also cracking their heads together like musk oxen?"

Using CT scanning and a new statistical method for diagnosing behavior in fossil animals, the researchers compared the bony-headed dinosaur with modern ungulates (hoofed animals) that engage in different kinds of combat.

"Our analyses are the closest we can get to observing their behavior. In a way, we can get "inside their heads" by colliding them together virtually. We combined anatomical and engineering analyses of all these animals for a pretty thorough approach," says Snively. "We looked at the actual tissue types in the skulls and heads of the animals."

Head butting is a form of male-to-male competition for access to females, says Dr. Jessica Theodor, co-author and associate professor in the biological sciences department at the University of Calgary. "It's pretty clear that although the bones are arranged differently in the Stegoceras, it could easily withstand the kinds of forces that have been measured for the living animals that engage in head butting."

Most head-butting animals have domes like a good motorcycle helmet. "They have a stiff rind on the outside with a sort of a spongy energy absorbing material just beneath it and then a stiff, really dense coat over the brain," says Snively. The Stegoceras had an extra layer of dense bone in the middle. Stegoceras was a small pachycephalosaur about the size of a German shepherd, and lived about 72 million years ago.

Llamas would crack their skulls head butting and giraffes aren't very good at it. "They swing their necks at each other and try to hit each other in the neck or the side," says Snively. If giraffes do manage to butt heads, they can knock each other out because "Their anatomy isn't built to absorb the collision as well as something like muskox or big horn sheep."

[Mmindy]

[Marcie Jensen]

Here's an odd piece of high heel trivia. The first recorded instance of wearing high heels was King John of England. He wore them regularly because he was so much shorter than his older brother, RIchard the Lionhearted.

[Mmindy]

6 minutes ago, Marcie Jensen said:

Here's an odd piece of high heel trivia. The first recorded instance of wearing high heels was King John of England. He wore them regularly because he was so much shorter than his older brother, RIchard the Lionhearted.

🐛🏳️‍⚧️🦋👠👢👠👡👢👠💖

[Heather Shay]

Malala Yousafzai, the girl who was shot in the head by the Taliban for insisting on going to school, recently completed her final exams in the University of Oxford.

[Jani]

Good for her.  Now the other women and girls left behind under Taliban rule need help! 

[Marcie Jensen]

1 minute ago, Jani said:

Good for her.  Now the other women and girls left behind under Taliban rule need help! 

Agreed. Having been there many times over the years, courtesy of the U.S. Army, and having been out among the populace (at one point I spoke Dari--one of the primary languages) I can say with some confidence that Afghanistan, and the Taliban, are firmly lodged in about the 13th century culturally.

[miz miranda]

An interesting discussion on this topic can be found at https://upgrader.gapminder.org/t/sdg-world-un-goals/3/explanation

The site is a legacy of the work of Hans Rosling and provides information on how most of the world believes conditions are substantially worse than they actually are. It is worthwhile to checking out as well as his TED talks. I found it eye opening.

Around 60% of young girls in low-income countries go to school.

Source: UNESCO

 

Survey Results

Of the people we have tested, 86% got this question wrong.

• Total

  86%

• Japan

  94%

• Belgium

  94%

• Russia

  91%

• Türkiye

  91%

• Canada

  91%

About this misconception

Many people wrongly think a minority of girls in low-income countries go to school, probably because they know there are still huge gender inequalities in the world and they don’t want to trivialize them. Out of 195 countries, today only 27 are called low-income and only 11 of them still have big gender inequalities in primary education: Afghanistan, Guinea, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Guinea-Bissau, Yemen, Chad, Niger, Eritrea, Mozambique and Somalia.

Forty years ago, across all low-income countries, many more boys finished primary school compared to girls but, since then, more parents across the world now prioritize their daughters’ education. Today, in most countries, both girls and boys miss school to almost the same extent, and when they do, it’s mainly because their families are extremely poor.

In most low-income countries in general, girls drop out of school more than boys when they reach puberty, partly because of bad school toilets. When countries become middle-income countries, schools are better prepared for female students. When measuring results, pretty much everywhere, girls outperform boys all the way up to higher education.

The Coronavirus pandemic resulted in more than 90% of countries globally closing schools at some point during 2020. The effect on how many girls (and boys) who might not have returned to school when they reopened is still unknown, but UNESCO projected that up to 11 million girls may not go back (particularly those aged 12-17).

[Heather Shay]

Fall Leaf Colors are Caused by Sugar

Everyone loves those colorful leaf colors in the fall from vibrant reds to eye-popping bright oranges, but did you know that the color the leaves turn is based on how much sugar is in the leaves, according to One Country.  That’s why maple leaves are such a brilliant red color.

(Ekaterina Pokrovsky / Shutterstock.com)