Man's three-pound brain is the most complex and orderly arrangement of matter known in the universe.

George Constant Louis Washington (May 1871 – March 29, 1946) was an American inventor and businessman of Anglo-Belgian origin. He is best remembered for his invention of an early instant coffee process and for the company he founded to mass-produce it, the G. Washington Coffee Company.

Not really -- However, Giant crab spiders have such a ferocious appearance they earned a spot as extras in the horror film Arachnophobia. The creatures, however, eat cockroaches, crickets, and caterpillars, more than compensating for their scary appearance. Giant crab spiders are about 2 inches long, are hairy, and have noticeable black fangs ...Read more

Peanut oil is used for underwater cooking in submarines. Undersea fleets like it because it does not smoke unless heated above 450 degrees F.

James Ramsey invented a steam-driven motorboat in 1784. He ran it on the Potomac River, and the event was witnessed by George Washington.

It was while he was examining urine, seeking the philosopher's stone (the magic elixir needed to change base metals into gold), that German chemist Hennig Brand discovered phosphorus.

The height of the 984-foot-tall Eiffel Tower varies, depending on the temperature, by as much as 6 inches.

The mule possesses the sobriety, patience, endurance and sure-footedness of the ass, and the vigour, strength and courage of the horse. Operators of working animals generally find mules preferable to horses: mules show less impatience under the pressure of heavy weights, while their skin, harder and less sensitive than that of horses, renders ...Read more

he AK-47 (shortened from Russian Avtomat Kalashnikova 1947) is a gas-operated assault rifle designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov, and produced by Russian manufacturer Izhevsk Mechanical Works and used in many Eastern bloc nations during the Cold War. It was adopted and standardized in 1947

Created in 1888, De Beers Consolidated Mines, Ltd. is the most successful cartel arrangement in the annals of modern commerce. While other commodities, such as gold, silver, copper, rubber, and grains, fluctuated wildly in response to economic conditions, diamonds have continued, with few exceptions, to advance upward in price every year since ...Read more

Credit for inventing the electric telephone remains in dispute. There were several inventors who did pioneer experimental work on voice transmission over a wire and improved on each other's ideas. Innocenzo Manzetti, Antonio Meucci, Johann Philipp Reis, Elisha Gray, Alexander Graham Bell, and Thomas Edison, among others, have all been credited ...Read more

Florida is not the southernmost state in the United States. Hawaii is farther south.

Abe Silverstein, who headed NASA's Space Flight Development Program, proposed the name Apollo for the space exploration programs in the 1960s. He chose that legendary Greek name because the virile Apollo was a god who rode through the skies in a magnificent golden chariot. The precedent of naming manned spacecraft for mythological gods had been ...Read more

On August 11, 1960, an 85-pound instrumented capsule, ejected from the Discoverer XIII satellite, was recovered off the coast of Hawaii after making only 16 orbits. It was the first man-made object recovered from space.

The first log cabins in North America were built in 1683 by Swedish immigrants in Delaware.

The venom of the king cobra is so deadly that one gram of it can kill 150 people. Just to handle the substance can put one in a coma.

Most teen-age boys think about sex once every 5 minutes.

The French are known connoisseurs of truffles, of which they are very proud. These wild black mushrooms usually grow under oak trees. They are grown in the rural areas of France and are a rare delicacy.

The Toll House Cookie, was accidentally developed by Ruth Graves Wakefield, owner of the Toll House Inn near Whitman, Massachusetts, in 1937. Wakefield was making chocolate cookies but ran out of regular baker's chocolate and substituted broken pieces of semi-sweet chocolate, assuming it would melt and mix into the batter. It did not, and the ...Read more

Horse racing is one of the most ancient sports, originating in Central Asia among prehistoric nomadic tribesmen around 4500 B.C. When humans began keeping written records, horse racing was already an organized sport throughout the world.