For her 80th birthday in 1947, Queen Mary requested a radio play be written for her by Agatha Christie. The play – broadcast on May 30, 1947 – was called Three Blind Mice but when Christie adapted it to a stage play in 1951 it was renamed The Mousetrap. It debuted on November 25, 1952. [...]

In 1801, when the first complete world census was carried out, the world’s population was 1 billion. China had 295 million people, India 131 million, Russia 33 million, France 27 million, Ottoman Empire 21 million, Germany 14 million, Spain 11 million, Britain 10 million, Ireland and the USA 5 million.

In 1972, after a month of deliberation, Congress launched the nation’s most ambitious experiment in universal health care: a change to the Social Security Act that granted comprehensive coverage under Medicare to virtually anyone diagnosed with kidney failure, regardless of age or income. It was a supremely hopeful moment. Although the technology to keep kidney [...]

Your heart beats 101,000 times a day. During your lifetime it will beat about 3 billion times and pump about 800 million pints (378 million litres) of blood. A normal heart beats 70 to 80 times a minute. Over 70 to 80 years, it gives a few billion beats. It is the powerful machine inside [...]

The human eye can detect millions of colors and is sensitive to light and sounds. Yes, sound. University research studies show that mild and incidental noises cause the pupils of the eyes to dilate. According to David Louis’s book of Fascinating Facts, it is believed that this is why surgeons, watchmakers, and others who perform [...]

When you do an eye test, the distance between you and the eye chart is 20 feet. The distance was chosen because the rays of light, as you experience it from your two eyes, are about parallel to an object at that distance. The third line from the bottom on the eye chart is the [...]

In medieval times, left-handed people could not become knights because it was thought that they were descendants of the devil, it is said. Spiral staircases in castles ran clockwise to allow knights – all right-handed – to battle intruders effectively. The word for left in French means gauche and in Latin it means sinister. The [...]

We bid a hearty welcome to the millions of new earthlings who arrive in August, the month with the highest birth rate. You are the proud results of a joyous Christmas season… even if your parents did not put up Christmas trees. 19.5% of new August babies are born in India and 11.6% in China, [...]

While British and American tobacco companies are in the headlines often, China actually is the world’s largest cigarette producer. Almost 50% of Chinese men puff their way through the 2 million trillion cigarettes made there mostly by The China National Tobacco Corporation, the world’s largest cigarette producer. They supply one-third of the world’s cigarettes. And [...]

The characters in the movies Psycho and Silence of the Lambs are based on a real person, Ed Gein. He died on July 26, 1984 of respiratory failure in the Mendota Mental Health Institute, Wisconsin. His victims were not so lucky. Ed was a grave robber who had developed a taste for slicing up people. [...]