Useless facts. Share yours. No googling allowed.

[SeasickSteveIsMyBoyfriend]

Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

Its illegal for a woman to eat chocolate on a bus.

111,111 x 111,111 = 12345654321

Italians are convinced it is illegal to buy carrots in England on Sunday.

(this was a question on Who wants to be a millionaire and had me Wtf-ing at the host for the nth time)

Bucharest, I don't suppose you'd have any idea why?

You spend roughly 15,000 hours of your life from the age of 4-16 in school

*I think you can actually die from lack of sleep, Fatal Familial insomnia. (I wont check Google but I roughly remember something like this from Psych 101)

Alien, the sleep fact I remember was that a few people have suddenly "lost" the ability to sleep. In all cases, they die within a few years, but there's no explanation as to why.

Other than that, the record stands at 14 days I think. After sleeping for about 23 hrs, the person who did it suffered no long term ill effects.

The laugh at the end of Michael Jackson's Thriller sounds a bit like Woody Woodpecker when played on an old record player at 78

After one week of 6 hours sleep, the average person loses 15 IQ points compared to what they would have after a good nights sleep.

TAB I think the guy who holds the record for sleep deprivation (cant remember how long it was though) has a highly memorable name: Randy Gardner!

Relative to its size, the barnacle has the biggest penis of any animal.

AIDS was originally called GRID which stood for gay related immunodeficiency (thank god they changed that one).

Gap, the clothes retailer, does NOT stand for 'gay and proud' (although this rumour has been going round...oh, forever, and is currently again de rigeur with teens trying to explain why they must have Abercrombie&Fitch and Wills and such £££ stuff ).

The founders of Gap wanted it to stand for the Generation Gap ie 'we make cool clothes for you young folk, which your elders may not approve of and will therefore be even more attractive to you'.

I am now off to google familial fatal insomnia

The reason human babies are born completely helpless/dependant as opposed to other mammal babies who can walk, etc after a few hours is because of our brain size. If pregnancy lasted long enough for the infant to be able to walk then it's head/brain would be too large to fit through the pelvis.

Trebor was founded in 1907 by Robert Robertson, Trebor is Robert spelled backwards (according to the packet of mints I just ate!)

A goldfish kept completely in the dark will eventually turn white.

When someone receives a kidney transplant their defunct kidney is left in place, the new one is plumbed in around it.

Male ducks often have sessions of group sex with one female, it's not exactly consensual and the female usually drowns. In the absence of any females they group will turn on the youngest/smallest/weakest male to play the role of "female duck".

Until 1965 necrophilia wasn't a crime in any US state.

Sorry, that's not right.

It was first categorised in 1980/1, when they named the condition acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). It came from African primates some time in the late 19th or early 20th century, but wasn't found until then. Lord knows how a human got it from a monkey.

Two years later, the virus was discovered by two separate researchers who called it HTLV-III, as it resembled the human T-lymphotropic viruses (HTLVs), another called it lymphadenopathy-associated virus (LAV). HIV was chosen as a compromise between the two discovories.

In reply to the female elephant, I believe that they are called cows.

It is 10,000 X more hygienic to lick the inside of a (clean) toilet than it is to bite your nails. Noum noum noum.

Technically, King Henry VIII had only TWO wives.

AromicBum - I seem to remember watching something about AIDS. The virus first transmitted from monkeys to humans when they killed and skinned them (for food?)

Male pigs woo their lady loves with a pig song before mating.

Humans have the same number of bones in their necks as giraffes.

The oldest recorded wet nurse was 82.

The humans killed and skinned the monkeys obviously. Or we would be living on the planet of the apes.

I once heard it was an accident in a science lab during an experiment on a monkey. It seems more likely that the one you heard is right. The article I read on the subject didn't seem to know how it happened.

Not sure if it's true but... There is more bacteria inside most people's fridge than their toilet, because the toilet is cleaned far more frequently.

The discovery of penicillin was a complete accident... a spore floated in through an open window and landed on an agar plate. Without that floating spore we would all be popping our clogs of sepsis.

I've ofton wondered why the toilet is considered so unclean. You can drink you're own urine, right? So why? Considering you also bleach it regularly.

And on that note, if that area of the body is so unhygenic, why is oral sex OK? If it was that toxic then we'd all die after giving to our DP's.

I have a theory that it's got nothing to do with that area. It's just that you should was you're hands every now and then to stop the buildup of germs, and when you go to the loo is probably a good habitual reminder.

Seymore, very close. But nothing floated. It was an experiment to watch the groath of some bacteria and mould. A certain type of mold, whilst being fairly harmless to humans, ate all the bacteria.

That thing about human and giraffe necks - all mammals (with only a couple of exceptions like sloths and manatees) have 7 neck vertebra. From pigmy shrews to blue whales.

And following from "Thriller at 45"; if you have the technology, listen to the LP version of Bruce Springsteen's "I'm on Fire" at 45 - it sounds exactly like Dolly Parton singing it. They've never been pictured together you know...

Electricity flows through a copper wire at approximately two-thirds the speed of light.

The sperm of a fruit fly is over 5cm long(!)

The gas you use in your home for cooking and heating is, by itself, odourless. The stuff that gives it the distinctive "gas smell" is deliberately added to it at the refinery to make it easier to detect a gas leak. I think they use a gas called mercaptan for the smell but I'd have to google that to check.

brazil nuts are radioactive

Really? Shucks. I loved that story!

If you were to travel to the nearest star (Proxima Centauri - approx. 4.2 light years away) by conventional space shuttle, it would take you 88,000 years and require more rocket fuel than there is mass in the universe.