1. Look at your zipper. See the initials YKK? It stands for Yoshida Kogyo Kabushibibaisha, the world's largest zipper manufacturer.

2. 40 percent of McDonald's profits come from the sales of Happy Meals.

3. 315 entries in Webster's 1996 Dictionary were misspelled.

4. On the average, 12 newborns will be given to the wrong parents daily.

5. Chocolate kills dogs! True, chocolate affects a dog's heart and nervous system. A few ounces is enough to kill a small sized dog.

6. Ketchup was sold in the 1830's as a medicine.

7. Leonardo da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other at the same time.

8. Because metal was scarce, the Oscars given out during World War II were made of wood.

9. There are no clocks in Las Vegas gambling casinos.

10. Leonardo da Vinci invented scissors. Also, it took him 10 years to paint Mona Lisa's lips.

11. Bruce Lee was so fast that they actually had to slow a film down so you could see his moves. That's the opposite of the norm.

12. The original name for the butterfly was "flutterby"!

13. By raising your legs slowly and lying on your back, you can't sink in quicksand.

14. Mosquito repellents don't repel. They hide you. The spray blocks the mosquito's sensors so they don't know you're there.

15. Dentists recommend that a toothbrush be kept at least six feet away from a toilet to avoid airborne particles resulting from the flush.

16. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's gum.

17. Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than the entire Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

18. Marilyn Monroe had six toes on one foot.

19. Adolf Hitler's mother seriously considered having an abortion but was talked out of it by her doctor.

20. The three most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.

21. To escape the grip of a crocodile's jaws, prick your fingers into its eyeballs. It will let you go instantly.

22. The average person falls asleep in seven minutes.

23. The "pound" (#) key on your keyboard is called an octothorp.

24. The only domestic animal not mentioned in the Bible is the cat.

25. Rubber bands last longer when refrigerated.

26. The average person's left hand does 56% of the typing.

27. Dreamt" is the only word in the English language that ends in "mt".

28. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

29. In Chinese, the KFC slogan "finger lickin' good" comes out as "eat your fingers off".

30. A cockroach can live for 10 days without a head.

31. We shed 40 pounds of skin a lifetime.

32. Yo-Yos were once used as weapons in the Philippines.

33. Mexico City sinks abut 10 inches a year.

34. Brains are more active sleeping than watching TV.

35. Blue is the favorite color of 80 percent of Americans.

36. When a person shakes their head from side to side, he is saying "yes" in Sri Lanka.

37. There are more chickens than people in the world.

38. The thumbnail grows the slowest, and the middle nail grows the fastest.

39. There are more telephones than people in Washington, D.C.

40. The average four year-old child asks over four hundred questions a day.

41. The average person presses the snooze button on their alarm clock three Times each morning.

42. The three wealthiest families in the world have more assets than the Combined wealth of the forty-eight poorest nations.

43. The first owner of the Marlboro cigarette Company died of lung cancer.

44. Intelligent people have more zinc and copper in their hair.

45. The world's youngest parents were 8 and 9 and lived in China in 1910.

46. Our eyes remain the same size from birth onward, but our noses and ears Never stop growing.

47. You burn more calories sleeping than you do watching TV.

48. A person will die from total lack of sleep sooner than from starvation. Death will occur about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a Few weeks.

49. Chewing gum while peeling onions will keep you from crying.

50. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

51. When the moon is directly overhead, you weigh slightly less.

52. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, never telephoned His wife or mother because they were both deaf.

53. A psychology student in New York rented out her spare room to a Carpenter in order to nag him constantly and study his reactions. After Weeks of needling, he snapped and beat her repeatedly with an axe Leaving her mentally retarded

54. "I am." is the shortest complete sentence in the English language

55. Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking Countries because Colgate translates into the command "go hang Yourself."

56. Like fingerprints, everyone's tongue print is different.

57. "Bookkeeper" is the only word in English language with three consecutive Double letters.

58. Right handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left handed People do.

59. The sentence "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every Letter in the English language.

60. If the population of China walked past you in single line, the line Would never end because of the rate of reproduction

61. China has more English speakers than the United States.

62. Every human spent about half an hour as a single cell.

63. Each square inch of human skin consists of twenty feet of blood vessels.

64. An average person uses the bathroom 6 times per day.

65. Babies are born with 300 bones, but by adulthood we have only 206 in our Bodies.

66. Beards are the fastest growing hairs on the human body. If the average Man never trimmed his beard, it would grow to nearly 30 feet long in his Lifetime.

67. According to Genesis 1:20-22, the chicken came before the egg.

68. The longest place name still in use is: Taumatawhakatangihangaoauauotameteaturi- Pukakpikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu - a New Zealand hill.

69. If you leave Tokyo by plane at 7:00am, you will arrive in Honolulu at Approximately 4:30pm the previous day.

70. Scientists in Australia's Parkes Observatory thought they had positive Proof of alien life, when they began picking up radio-waves from space. However, after investigation, the radio emissions were traced to a Microwave in the building.

71. Wearing headphones for an hour increases the bacteria in your ear 700 times.

72. More than 40,000 parasites and 250 types of bacteria are exchanged during a French kiss.

73. Men can read smaller print than women, but women can hear better.

74. Coca-Cola was originally green.

75. The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

76. The name of all the continents ends with the same letter that they start with.

77. There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

78. TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters only on one row of the keyboard.

79. Women blink nearly twice as much as men!!

80. You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.

81. It is impossible to lick your elbow.

82. People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze, your heart stops for a millisecond.

83. It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.

84. The "sixth sick sheik's sixth sheep's sick" is said to be the toughest tongue twister in the English language.

85. If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib. If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.

86. Each king in a deck of playing cards represents great king from history. Spades - King David, Clubs - Alexander the Great, Hearts - Charlemagne, Diamonds - Julius Caesar.

87. 111,111,111 x 111,111,111 = 12,345,678,987,654,321

88. If a statue of a person in the park on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle.

89. If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in battle.

90. If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

91. Question - This is the only food that doesn't spoil. What is this? Ans. - Honey

92. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

93. A snail can sleep for three years.

94. All polar bears are left handed.

95. American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.

96. Butterflies taste with their feet.

97. Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

98. In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

99. On average, people fear spiders more than they do death.

100. Shakespeare invented the word 'assassination' and 'bump'.

101. Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.

102. The ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.

103. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

104. The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.

105. Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over million descendants.

106. The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.

107. Most lipstick contains fish scales.

Your hygiene may not be something you give much thought to, but it's something others will think about when they're forced to take notice. Nonetheless, good hygiene is simply a matter of developing good habits and practices.

When it comes to attracting women, 42-year-old New York bachelor Jim Norton has his charm. His sense of humor. But most of all, he has his Upper West Side apartment, purchased five years ago in a Trump building. Oh, did he mention it’s got breathtaking views through floor-to-ceiling windows?

“Women see windows — and skirts come off,” he says of his large one-bedroom pad, which also features a state-of-the-art kitchen with stainless-steel appliances.

“This one businesswoman, she came over, and she said she was ‘not like the other girls,’ ” he recalls of the guest, who announced that she did not sleep with men on the first date.


“Well, fast-forward an hour after seeing the apartment, and not only was she like the other girls, she was worse. They like the view.”

That certainly comes in handy when other elements of his seduction technique fall short.

“I remember another woman . . . I knew she was impressed with the place and decided to sleep with me,” says the comedian.


“I gave a horrible [sexual] performance. She walked around the apartment a couple of times before she left — almost reminding herself that this is why she just put herself through that.”

TOO SEXY FOR YOUR PLACE?

Norton, who has written two best-selling memoirs detailing his sexual exploits, points out what many men — and the brokers who sell to them — are realizing in the current economic climate. The right apartment can get you laid.

“With so many people out of work,” he says, “if a woman sees a nice place, that makes her much more willing to take the chance and sleep with you.”

Dolly Lenz, vice chairman of Prudential Douglas Elliman, has been noticing an increased emphasis among bachelors on what she calls “the sexy factor.” Rich guys — some of whom are fleeing life in the burbs after a divorce for the freewheeling life in downtown Manhattan — are increasingly buying lavish apartments to woo women.

“The swagger is back in the market,” she says.

And let’s face it: In New York, our standards — for dating and real estate — are different from what they might be elsewhere in the country. With space at a premium, most New York women aren’t expecting anything palatial — they’ll settle for the aforementioned view. Perhaps some parquet floors and a doorman.

“In New York, when you say porn, more people are likely to think you mean real estate,” says John, a multimillionaire financier who asked that his real name not be used. “Every two-bit banker at Goldman Sachs can buy you an expensive dinner or have a $175,000 Ferrari, but how many can have the $10 million trophy pad?”

John frequently lets his friends borrow his 5,000-square-foot Upper East Side apartment so they can bring home the ladies while he’s away on business. After letting a London hedge-funder borrow his flat for a few days, the financier reported that his friend was able to score every night with three women (though not at the same time). “He told me: ‘They were excited when they got to the door — and when they saw the view, it was a done deal.’ ”

But while ladies do love a room with a view, there’s something else they love — anything in the apartment that lends the man an air of domesticity. While the trophy apartments of yore might have been all about flashy effects — think shag carpets and wall-to-wall mirrors — these days, there’s a more subtle aesthetic at work. “We’ve gone from trophies that scream ‘bachelor pad’ to ones that scream, ‘There’s room for both of us here,’ ” says John.

Indeed, while Norton has a stunning state-of-the-art kitchen, he never sets foot in it to actually cook. He even keeps clothes in the oven.


For Ralph Sutton, 41, the appeal isn’t so much his Midtown West apartment, but rather his elevator — which opens straight into his loft. “If I wasn’t a single man, maybe my wife and I wouldn’t pick this apartment,” says Sutton, of radio show “The Tour Bus” and allaccessapp.com. “But being single, you want a place you’re proud to bring a girl home to. I think a guy who lives on the top floor of a sixth-floor walk-up better have some immaculate game.”

Jaf Glazer, a SoHo real estate broker with a roster of celebrity clients, certainly uses sex as part of his sell. His real estate signs proclaim “SoHo is sexy,” and when he describes the neighborhood to prospective (male) clients, he emphasizes that the district is teeming with models and beautiful women. He knows they’re on the hunt — and not just for real estate. “The spaces in SoHo we represent often fulfill the void people have in their life,” he says.

Mara Papasoff, managing director at Brown Harris Stevens, says that in the past, bankers looked for classic Park Avenue apartments, but now her clients shop for penthouse lofts. Lenz, who says that most of her clients could afford to buy in the Plaza, has also noticed this trend. “Today it’s a little ostentatious to be buying a Ferrari,” says Lenz. “But a trophy apartment says you’ve arrived.”

Doctors in Russia have been baffled after treating a baby girl who started showing signs of puberty at just three months old.

Milana, now seven-months-old, has regular periods, her breasts have started forming and she has developed pubic hair.

A source at the Russian Children's Clinical Hospital: 'It is the first case in our experience of a baby going into puberty.

'So far, the world's earliest registered case was for a five years old girl.'

The child is from the south of Russia, where local doctors said the baby was entirely normal at birth.

They initially suspected a tumour was responsible for the mysterious medical condition which first came to light three months after birth.

They recommended chemotherapy, which was refused by the girl's parents, Anna and Yevgeniy Gaspirovich, both 30.

The tumour diagnosis was not confirmed and Olga Bogdanova, Deputy Chief Doctor of Novokubanskaya Central Clinical Hospital, said: 'We could not understand the reason of such an extraordinarily early puberty. We are still at a loss. Perhaps it was an inherited abnormality.'

After the baby was moved to Moscow for treatment, she was found to have five times more adult female hormones than an average grown-up woman.

Doctors now intend to treat her with therapy lasting a dozen years with annual injections aimed at suppressing her hormonal activity.

However, Milana's father, a driver, is worried they will not meet the estimated B£32,000 cost.

First to notice the symptoms was Milana's grandmother Valentina, who said: 'I told my daughter that there is nothing normal in a baby having pubic hair.'

After the baby was moved to Moscow for treatment, she was found to have five times more adult female hormones than an average grown-up woman.

Doctors now intend to treat her with therapy lasting a dozen years with annual injections aimed at suppressing her hormonal activity.

However, Milana's father, a driver, is worried they will not meet the estimated B£32,000 cost.

First to notice the symptoms was Milana's grandmother Valentina, who said: 'I told my daughter that there is nothing normal in a baby having pubic hair.'

Famed sexologist Alfred Kinsey called them "group X." Big Bang Theory calls them people who, like Sheldon, "have no deal." But the one percent of the population who aren't interested in sex call themselves asexuals, aces, or, more simply, people who would pick cake over sex.

Asexuality began to emerge in the public sphere as a sexual orientation in the mid-1990s, after a massive study in the UK revealed that 1.05% of people described themselves as having "never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all." Since then, asexuals began to form communities online and in person, trying to create a comfortable place for themselves in a world where sexual indifference is often treated as a defect or disease. Though asexual communities may have precursors in millennia-old celibate religious orders, there is a big difference between choosing celibacy for religious reasons and choosing asexuality because you like cake more than sex.

Asexuality is also a futuristic sexual orientation, represented more often in science fiction than other genres, which may be why some asexuals call the Doctor from Doctor Who their hero.

Unlike homosexuality, which has been stigmatized for centuries in many cultures, asexuality isn't usually greeted with rage or disgust. Most often, say asexuals, the problem is that people don't realize that asexuality is — as the characters in Big Bang Theory put it — "a deal." Even when people do stumble across asexuality, there are a lot of misunderstandings about what it means.

Paul Cox, an asexual who is happily married to another asexual, wrote in The Guardian about what it was like to go through puberty as an asexual:

When I was 13, my father gave me a book on sex education. I felt as if I was reading about a foreign culture; I just couldn't see why anyone would go to so much trouble just to have sex. I tried looking at pornography on the internet. I wasn't disgusted or appalled - it was just boring, like looking at wallpaper.

Masturbation was another topic of conversation in those days, and I did masturbate. It wasn't a sexual urge for me, I didn't fantasise, it was just something my body decided to do. People say about asexuals: "But if they masturbate doesn't that make them sexual?" It's hard to explain, but if you're asexual you don't necessarily feel an explicit connection between masturbation and sexual orientation. It's just part of having a human body - a physical, biological process.

Later, Cox describes discovering the asexual community through the message boards at Asexuality.org, and at last coming out as an asexual. Once he realized he wasn't alone, he began exploring what it meant to have relationships without sex. When he met his future wife through an asexual group online, he discovered that he wanted a romantic, long-term relationship.

And Cox realized, as many asexuals do, that a lack of sexual desire doesn't foreclose the possibility of marriage. It just means that the marriage won't be conventional. On their wedding night, Cox and his wife stayed up late with their friends playing Scrabble in the honeymoon suite.

Science fiction writers from Kurt Vonnegut and Karen Healey to Greg Egan and Elizabeth Bear have written about characters who identify as asexual, and the idea of becoming asexual for the good of a space colony is played for weirdness in Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix. Asexuals also romp through the post-human worlds of Iain M. Banks and Charles Stross.

I'd suggest there are two main reasons why SF authors have written asexuals into their future societies. First of all, many authors imagine that humans of the future will be completely liberated from the need to reproduce biologically, using seriously retrograde penis/vagina methods. Once the species can reproduce using biotechnology, we are freed up to explore the idea that maybe not everybody wants or needs to have sex, and so asexuals will become an ordinary part of any post-human society. The second reason I think that asexuality figures into science fiction is that asexual relationships themselves free humans from the traditional constraints imposed on romantic couplings. If you don't base your most intimate relationships on sex, then you're able to reimagine human intimacy in all kinds of new ways.

And indeed, this is precisely what asexuals are doing right now.

Over at Kitch Magazine, Helen Havlak profiles Alexis, an asexual college student who is very active in online communities like AVEN (the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network). Alexis talks about how Doctor Who's time traveler is one of the heroes of the asexual community, because he has incredibly close friendships with people but seems mostly uninterested in sex. Havlak emphasizes that one of the benefits of asexuality is being able to embrace friendships as central emotional connections:

Overall, Alexis said, many asexual relationships don't differ all that much from a "normal" sexual relationship. Open relationships do tend to be a greater presence on AVEN than in the general public, though, and many asexuals have more fluid life plans than getting married and having kids at a certain age. "Some people re-adopt that plan later," Alexis said, "but on their own terms."

One perk of identifying as asexual, Alexis told me, is that many people find that "discovering their asexuality liberated them from feeling like they had to be held up to certain standards, and it helped them become much closer to a lot of their friends, in that they started treating their relationships more like friendships, and their friendships more like relationships." She clarified, "In a certain way, they try to remove the ‘just' in front of ‘just friends,' because no, a friendship does not have to be in any way a lesser kind of relationship than a romantic one. Society makes you think that your goal in life is to find a specific romantic relationship. And ultimately, we should build emotionally close relationships with everyone around us."

Just as homosexuals are helping to redefine what marriage means, asexuals are helping to redefine friendship. And they are becoming a stronger, more visible group in the process.

A World Health Organization team of experts concluded the ever-present communication devices can cause brain cancer -- and advised the planet's 5 billion cell users to cut their exposure to the radiation they emit.

WHO's International Agency for Research on Cancer panel said yesterday they examined every published study on the subject and concluded cellphones are "possibly carcinogenic."

The finding reverses WHO's previous verdict that there are no risks from cellphone use. It also triggered a rebuke from the ever-expanding industry and skepticism from other cancer experts.


The WHO study put phones in the same category as a long list of potential cancer-causers, including the pesticide DDT, lead, chloroform, talcum powder and even pickled vegetables.

That category is the third-highest on WHO's list, below those items that definitely cause cancer or "probably" do.

The US-based wireless association CTIA said the WHO scientists "did not conduct new research, but rather reviewed published studies."

Some studies, including those done by the FCC and Food and Drug Administration, have found no cancer link. But the European Environmental Agency has called for taking cellphone dangers much more seriously, saying they may be as risky as smoking.

One study found that among heavy users -- who averaged 30 minutes on their cells over a 10-year period -- there was a 40 percent increased risk of a brain tumor called a glioma, WHO said.

Other experts questioned the WHO finding, pointing out that there hasn't been a worldwide spike in brain cancer during the last 30 years -- while cellphones have become almost indispensable.

Kurt Straif, who heads WHO's monographs program, issued a word of caution.

"It is not at the moment clearly established that the use of mobile phones does in fact cause cancer," he said. It's up to "the individual consumer to make a decision about whether the current level of evidence is strong enough to take such precautionary measures."