Fun Facts!!!

here are some fun facts I found...

1. MOPED is the short term for 'Motorized Pedaling'.

2. POP MUSIC is 'Popular Music' shortened.

3. BUS is the short term for 'Omnibus' that means everybody.

4. FORTNIGHT comes from 'Fourteen Nights' (Two Weeks).

5. DRAWING ROOM was actually a 'withdrawing room' where people withdrew after dinner. Later the prefix 'with' was dropped.

6. NEWS refers to information from four directions North, East, West and South.

7. AG-MARK, which some products bear, stems from 'Agricultural Marketing'.

8. JOURNAL is a diary that tells about 'Journey for a day' during each day's business.

9. QUEUE comes from 'Queen's Quest'. Long back a long row of people as waiting to see the Queen. Someone made the comment Queen's Quest.

10. TIPS come from 'To Insure Prompt Service'. In olden days to get prompt service from servants in an inn, travelers used to drop coins in a box on which was written 'To Insure Prompt Service'. This gave rise to the custom of Tips.

11. JEEP is a vehicle with unique gear system. It was invented during World War II(1939-1945). It was named 'General Purpose Vehicle (GP)'. GP was changed into JEEP later.

12. Coca-Cola was originally green.

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

14. The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with except NA & SA .

15. The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

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

17. Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

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

19. It is impossible to lick your elbow.

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

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

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

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

24. Horse statue in a park:
- If a statue of a person in the park on a horse has both front legs in the air, the person died in battle.
- If the horse has one front leg in the air, the person died as a result of wounds received in a battle.
- If the horse has all four legs on the ground, the person died of natural causes.

25. What do bullet proof vests, fire escapes, windshield wipers and laser printers all have in common?
Ans. All invented by women.

26. A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

27. A snail can sleep for three years.

28. All polar bears are left handed.

29. Butterflies taste with their feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

36. The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

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

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

39. Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.

40. 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.

41. The cigarette lighter was invented before the matchbox.

42. Most lipstick contains fish scales.

Sleep

well... Hi all...

I am writing into my blog after a really really long time.
I kinda thought that the reason that I stopped writing in my blog is that I dont have anythign interesting to write about... so i figured that why not make the blog an informative one as well. from now on, I am going to put up informative links which I feel are really interesting and also would make our lives better atleast a little bit.

So... I was reading an article in a really informative site... its about a problem which we all face as students... its about irregular SLEEP and whether our body is able to cope up with it...
I felt the article was really good and true and does tell us about how we feel tired sometimes even though we get a good nights sleep...

I thought about posting the link.. but I thought it would be easier for you readers if I just copied the contents in this post..

The article goes on like this

"It’s a time-honored practice among medical residents, cramming undergrads, and anyone else burning the candle at both ends: get very little sleep for days, maybe even pull an all-nighter, and then crash for an extra-long night of shut-eye to catch up.

Ten hours of sleep at once may indeed recharge us, and allow us to perform well for several hours after waking, according to research recently published in Science Translational Medicine. But “the brain literally keeps track of how long we’ve been asleep and awake—for weeks,” says Harvard Medical School (HMS) neurology instructor Daniel A. Cohen, M.D., lead author of the study. And that means that the bigger our aggregate sleep deficit, the faster our performance deteriorates, even after a good night’s rest.

Cohen and his coauthors monitored nine young men and women who spent three weeks on a challenging schedule: awake for 33 hours, asleep for 10—the equivalent of 5.6 hours of sleep a day. (This approximates the schedule of a medical resident, but many of us live under similar conditions; the National Sleep Foundation reports that 16 percent of Americans sleep six or fewer hours a night.) When the study participants were awake, they took a computer-based test of reaction time and sustained attention every four hours.

The researchers were surprised to discover just how much an extended rest boosted test performance. “Even though people were staying awake for almost 33 hours, when they had the opportunity to sleep for 10 hours, their performance shortly after waking was back to normal,” Cohen says. “The really interesting finding here is that there’s a short-term aspect of sleep loss that can be made up relatively quickly, within a long night.”

But the days and weeks of lost sleep eventually took their toll. The investigators knew from previous research that people awake for 24 hours straight display reaction times comparable to those of people who are legally drunk. Cohen’s new study reveals that those who pull an all-nighter on top of two or three weeks of chronic sleep loss reach that level of severe impairment faster—after just 18 hours awake.

Sleep researchers sometimes use the analogy of an hourglass to illustrate how we lose our ability to function as the day wears on. A good night’s sleep gives us a full ration of sand at the top of the glass; the grains begin to fall when we wake up, and “with each grain that drops, there’s an increasing level of impairment,” Cohen explains. The new study’s findings led its senior author, associate professor of medicine Elizabeth Klerman, to refine the analogy: “She says chronic sleep loss essentially enlarges the hole between the halves of the hourglass, so the sand falls a lot faster. That means you can be fully restored [by a long night’s sleep], but you peter out very quickly.”

Cohen’s study also revealed valuable information about how circadian rhythms influence our responses to sleep deprivation. The researchers determined that hitting the body’s circadian high (from about 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. for most people, when levels of the hormone melatonin are lowest in the bloodstream) can effectively mask the effects of sleep loss on performance—suggesting why chronically sleep-deprived individuals may not feel very sleepy for much of the day and think they’re sufficiently rested. To make matters worse, Cohen says, “Prior research shows that people start to overrate how they perform when they’re chronically sleep deprived.” But the inevitable circadian low (roughly 3 a.m. to 7 a.m., when melatonin levels are highest) magnifies the effects of sleep loss, slowing reaction times by a factor of 10—one reason overnight drivers, for example, are especially prone to errors.

Scientists don’t yet know how long it takes to overcome a long-term sleep debt. “It certainly takes longer than three days,” Cohen says. “It could even take up to a couple of weeks of a normal sleep schedule before people are fully caught up”—an important fact for people with safety-sensitive jobs to know, so they can make adequate sleep a priority. He admits some trouble with this himself, especially during his medical training. “But since I’ve been in the sleep field,” he says, “I’ve tried to shoot for closer to eight hours per night.” "

Hope it is informative for you all also!!!