The Do You Know Series

In our latest ‘Do You Know?’ series we have lots of interesting facts for you. If you would like to read more then click here.

Elvis didn’t have naturally black hair. He was born blond and his hair became more of a sandy blond colour. He started dying it black while at high school and kept it the same colour for the rest of his life.
New York City has its own indigenous species of ant called the ManhattAnt.
There are an estimated 50,000 working Elvis impersonators in the world today.
China has treatment camps for internet addicts.
Human life expectancy has increased more in the last 50 years than in the previous 200,000 years.

The average visitor to Las Vegas gambles US$447.
Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, invented underwater spectacles so he could read in the bath.
Heartbroken after being unaware of his wife’s death for days, Samuel Morse decided to explore rapid long distance communication and ended up inventing the single-wire telegraph and the Morse Code.
Walt Disney borrowed most of the US$1.5 million needed to make Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. It took three years to complete and became the highest-grossing sound film of its time.
There are about 500,000 detectable earthquakes in the world each year. Nearly 100,000 are felt, but only 100 cause damage.

There will be a 50% increase in lightning strikes by 2100 if global warming continues, according to a scientific report.
Indonesia is the world’s largest island country, with more than 13,000.
Unfaithful men have lower IQs according to a scientific study.
The world’s oldest wooden wheel is in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It is over 5,000 years old.
The Bill Gates Foundation spends more on global health each year than the World Health Organisation.

At any given time, 0.7% of the world is drunk meaning 50 million people are inebriated right now.
More people died in Auschwitz than the British and American losses of WW2 combined.
Boys are nearly five times more likely than girls to have autism.
Parents of new babies miss out on six months worth of sleep in the first two years of their child’s life.
A ship abandoned off the coast of Alaska in 1931 was spotted, still adrift, in the Arctic in 1969.

Bananas don’t grow on trees. They are produced by herbaceous plants.
There are more than 1,000 species of banana. We eat only one of them.
The word “school” comes from the ancient Greek for “free time”.
Dinosaurs lived on Earth for 150 million years. We’ve been around for just 0.1% of that time.
People who work 11 hours or more a day are 67% more likely to have a heart attack than people with an eight-hour work day, according to a study.
In 2008, the ashes of Fredric Baur were buried in one of the iconic Pringles cans he invented.