Earworms And Our Golden Oceans

In this month’s Do You Know? feature, we take a look at such strange phenomena as earworms and our golden oceans!

“Earworms”

1. Listening to music while working out measurably improves your performance.
2. You don’t like the original version of a song because it’s better. You like it because it’s the one you heard first.
3. A song that you can’t stop playing in your head is called an “earworm”.
4. Loud music can make a person drink more in less time.
5. Alcohol doesn’t make you forget anything. When you become “blackout drunk“, the brain temporarily loses the ability to create memories.
6. Each Russian consumes 18 litres of alcohol per year, doubling what experts consider dangerous.

Put That Drink Down, Tovarich!

7. More than 500,00 people die of alcohol-related symptoms in Russia every year.
8. Nearly 80% of Russia consists of Siberia.
9. In Russia, there are 10 million more women than men.
10. Women say about 20,000 words a day. That’s 13,000 more than the average man.
11. Women spend nearly one year of their lives deciding what to wear.
12. Women cry on average between 30 and 64 times a year, while men cry between 6 and 17 times.

“Let’s Go And Watch The Nuclear Explosion!”

13. Men spend almost a year of their lives staring at women, a survey found.
14. A switched-on laptop placed in a man’s lap may adversely affect the quality of his sperm.
15. People perceive men with shaved heads as an inch taller and 13% stronger than men with hair.
16. About 300 couples marry in Las Vegas every day.
17. Atomic bomb tests were a major tourist attraction in Las Vegas during the 1950s.
18. The postage stamp of The Statue of Liberty depicts the replica in Las Vegas, not the actual statue in New York.

Egypt’s Statue Of Liberty

19. The Statue of Liberty used to have a reddish-brown colour.
20. Egypt was originally the intended destination for the Statue of Liberty. Its design was that of a beacon of light and progress at the entrance to the Suez Canal. The statue was called Egypt (or Progress) Carrying the Light to Asia.
21. The World’s oldest dress was found in Egypt, and it is 5,000 years old.
22. On the border between Egypt and Sudan, there are 795 square miles (2,060 km²) of unclaimed land.
23. Paid labourers built the pyramids, not slaves. That’s a myth the Greek historian Herodotus created.
24. Divers discovered the lost Egyptian city of Heracleion 1,200 years after the sea claimed it.

Under Pressure

25. The average ocean depth is 2.5 miles (4 km).
26. Seven million tons (6bn kg) of garbage find their way into the ocean every year. Most of it is plastic.
27. If we could capture just 0.1% of the ocean’s kinetic energy caused by tides, we could satisfy the current global energy demand 5 times over.
28. The world’s oceans contain nearly 20 million tons of gold.
29. In Newfoundland, Canada, the Atlantic Ocean freezes hard enough for people to play ice hockey on it.
30. At the ocean’s deepest point, the water pressure equals the weight of 50 jumbo jets lying on top of you (~9,176 tons).

We hope you enjoyed reading “Earworms And Our Golden Oceans“. Click here for more of our Strange Facts articles.

Author: Adam Howarth, Editor