Classmate Facts # 122 - Listen and Silent

1. The word ‘listen’ contains the same letters as the word ‘silent’!

2. All the planets in our solar system rotate anti clockwise, except Venus. It is the only planet which rotates clockwise.

3. Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia is the fear of long words.

4. A jiffy is an actual unit of time for 1/100^th of a second.

5. The whip makes a cracking sound because its tip moves faster than the speed of sound.

6. 55 per cent of people yawn within 5 minutes of seeing someone else yawn.

7. India has never invaded any country in her last 10,000 years of history.

8. Do you know the names of the three wise monkeys? Mizaru (see no evil), Mikazuru (Hear no evil) and Mazaru (Say no evil)!

Classmate Facts # 121 - India Ah!

1. Sanskrit is considered the mother of all higher languages. This is because it is the most precise, and therefore the most suitable language for computer software.

2. The place value system and the decimal system were developed in 100 B.C. in India.

3. The first six Mughal Emperors of India ruled in an unbroken succession from father to son for almost 200 years, from 1526 to 1707.

4. The number system was invented by India. Aryabhatta was the scientist who invented the digit zero.

5. The world’s first granite temple is the Brihadeswara Temple at Thanjavur in Tamil Nadu. The shikara is made from a single 80-tonne piece of granite.

6. The game of snakes and ladders was created by 13^th century poet saint Gyandev. The ladders in the game represented virtues and the snakes were vices. Later the game underwent several modifications but the meaning remained the same i.e. good deeds take us to heaven and evil to a cycle of rebirths.

7. Until 1896, India was the only source for diamonds to the world.

8. Bhaskaracharya rightly calculated the time taken by Earth to orbit the sun hundreds of years before the European Astronomers. His calculations were – time taken by earth to orbit the sun: 365.258756484 days.

Classmate Facts # 120 - Global Warming

1. The number of Emperor penguins in the Antarctic Peninsula have dropped from 300 breeding pairs to just nine!

2. About 2,000 of Indonesia’s islands could disappear by 2030 due to rising sea levels. Many islands in the Sundarbans in India have already disappeared. According to one study, in the last 30 years, nearly 31 square miles of the Sundarbans have vanished entirely!

3. Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing. The region might have its first completely ice free summer by 2040 or even earlier.

4. Globally, electricity generation is the biggest source of CO2 emissions, amounting to 37 per cent.

5. An average home is responsible for more harmful CO2 emissions than an average car produces every year.

6. The amount of ice in the Arctic at the end of summer 2005 was the smallest seen in 27 years!

Classmate Facts # 119 - Global Warming

1. While their mothers hunt for food walrus pups rest on sea ice. Now as ice melts, walrus pups are being stranded!

2. Grass has started to grow in Antarctica in areas that were covered by ice sheets and glaciers previously. Warmer temperatures are allowing grass to survive through winter for the first time!

3. In the Swiss alps, a rock twice as big as the Empire State Building collapsed on the canyon floor, nearly 700 feet below. The reason? Melting glaciers!

4. In 2002, a chunk of ice in Antarctica, larger than the state of Rhode Island, weakened by warm winds, collapsed into the sea!

5. Up to 72% of bird species in Australia and more than a third in Europe could go extinct due to global warming!

Classmate Facts # 118 - Global Warming

1. The entire species of Aldabra banded snail died out after warmer weather cut off rainfall in its habitat!

2. The pine beetle, which feeds on pine trees spread through an area as big as Ireland, and killed off entire Canadian forest within a year! The beetles have been present in these forests for thousands of years, but their population was checked by the winter cold!

3. If all of the ice in Antarctic melts, sea levels around the world would rise about 61 metres!

4. 22% of world’s carbon emissions is produced by 5% of the world population.

5. 1% of India’s land area for solar power could meet all its electricity needs.

6. Humans are pouring Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

Classmate Facts # 117 - Global Warming

1. More than half of the 110 known Harlequin frog species have vanished due to climate change and global warming!

2. Globally, the 1990s were the warmest decade and the year 1998 was the warmest year recorded since 1861.

3. 14.6 million hectares of natural forest are lost each year – an area larger than England. This is a rate of 30 hectares every minute!

4. Because of rising temperatures, polar bears are waking up early from their winter slumber. When they are not able to hibernate, they become grouchy and increasingly aggressive.

Classmate Facts # 116 - Chemistry Facts

Happy Christmas to all our Readers!

1. Every atom of an element contains the same number of protons. For example, Carbon has 6 protons. Bu sometimes the number of neutrons in elements varies and this results in isotopes. Sometimes, Carbon atoms have 8 neutrons and we get Carbon 14, an Isotope of Carbon 12.

2. Fission occurs when one element breaks into several others, releasing energy in the process. When a neutron strikes Uranium it disintegrates into Krypton, Barium, a few neutrons and lots of energy. This energy is also used by nuclear reactors. In fusion, two elements fuse together to form another element and also release energy. Tritium and Deuterium fuse to form Helium and release enormous amounts of energy in the bargain! That's fission and fusion for you!

Classmate Facts # 115 - Global Warming

1. One person travelling by plane for one hour produces as much as carbon dioxide as an average Indian produces in one year!

2. The airplane meadows are disappearing due to higher temperatures. Bighorn sheep, mountain goats, and grizzly bears are becoming homeless!

3. The plastic bottles that you use today will break down completely in your great-great-great grandson’s time! (It takes about 450 years just for one plastic bottle to break down in the ground.)

4. Between 34 to 80 fish species have become extinct since the late 19^th century. 6 since 1970. The reason: Global Warming!

5. If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!

6. In 1999, just eight nations were responsible for nearly 50% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Classmate Facts # 114 - Global Warming

1. If you lined up all the polystyrene foam cups made in just one day, they would circle the earth. Can you calculate the amount of waste generated in a year?

2. In Glacier National Park, the number of glaciers has dropped from 150 to 26. None will be left within the next 30 years!

3. Warmer winters mean skiers have more trouble finding places to train!

4. The present Carbon Dioxide concentration is the highest in the past 420,000 years and possibly in the past 20 million years.

5. The Mediterranean Sea is quickly turning into a stagnant sea affecting many of the sea’s plant and animal species!

6. Recycling a single plastic bottle can conserve enough energy to light a 60W bulb for up to 6 hours.

Classmate Facts # 113 - Global Warming

1. By eating less meat you can reduce the amount of methane that is sent into the atmosphere! Methane is the second most significant greenhouse gas. Cows exhale methane with every breath because of their grassy diet and multiple stomachs.

2. At the rate our climate is changing, the world will soon be warmer than it has ever been in the last 10,000 years.

3. The amount of oxygen produced by an acre of trees per year equals the amount consumed by 18 people annually.

4. Do you know that if our earth gets any warmer, forty years from now we will only be able to grow half the almonds and walnuts that we are growing now! Wouldn’t we miss our crunchy, nutty ice-creams?

5. You can stop the release of 1,200 pounds of carbon dioxide gas, if you cut down your garbage by 10%.

Classmate Facts # 112 - Global Warming

1. Global Warming means living underwater (don’t forget to carry your oxygen masks)! If Greenland’s entire ice were to melt, global sea levels would rise by 7.2 metres.

2. Between 34 and 80 fish species have become extinct since the late 19^th century, 6 since 1970. The reason: global warming!

3. Some indoor plants can remove 87% of the indoor toxic air in just 24 hours!

4. Warmer temperatures mean malaria carrying mosquitoes are now able to live in climates beyond the tropics, in areas they were not found earlier.

5. India is the 4^th Largest producer of Windpower in the world.

Classmate Facts # 111 - Global Warming

1. Four out of Five of the world’s beaches are eroding away! The culprit? Global Warming!

2. The world’s richest countries, with 20 per cent of the global population, use about 80 percent of the world’s resources.

3. In Tibet, the ice records indicate that the last 50 years have been the warmest in 1,000 years.

4. Around half of all carbon dioxide produced by humans, since the industrial revolution, has dissolved into the world’s oceans.

5. Ice/snow cover cools the earth by reflecting sunlight.

6. The famous Indian River, the Ganges is beginning to run dry. Because the glacier from which the river gets its water, is shrinking at the rate of 34 metres per year, twice as fast as two years ago. The glacier could disappear by 2030!

7. A quarter of all the world’s coral reefs have been destroyed in the past 20 years, by the soaring sea temperatures. In the Indian Ocean and parts of the Pacific, more than three quarters coral reefs are thought to have died!

Classmate Facts # 110 - Global Warming

1. Igloos are no longer keeping the Eskimo warm! Rising temperatures in the Arctic are causing igloo walls to melt and re-freeze, thereby losing their heating properties!

2. Greenland is melting at a rate of 52 cubic miles per year. If Greenland’s entire 2.5 million cubic kilometers of ice were to melt, it would lead to a global sea level rise of 7.2 metres, or more than 23 feet!

3. One hundred ton of ancient plant life is required to create just 3.8 litres of petrol.

4. Because of warming oceans sharks are coming closer to the shores.

Classmate Facts # 109 - Global Warming

1. For every one degree Celsius rise in temperature, Alaska’s boreal forests have been expanding northward by about 100 kms.

2. When shopping, use a reusable bag instead of a disposable one. Plastic bags pollute the air, groundwater and soil.

3. The major seal breeding grounds in the Bering Sea have seen fur-seal pup numbers fall by 50% between the 1950s and 1980s.

4. The extent of sea-ice in the Nordic seas have shrunk by 30% over the last 130 years.

5. Extreme weather conditions like heat waves and strong tropical storms will become more frequent, if temperatures continue to rise.

Classmate Facts # 108 - Global Warming

1. Humans send Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than plants and oceans can absorb it.

2. One 500 MW coal fired plant produces approximately 3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.

3. Shortage of food, have made polar bears attack their own kind.

4. The concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere has increased by 31% and 149% respectively above pre-industrial levels since 1750 – higher than at any time in the last 650,000 years!

Classmate Facts # 107 - Global Warming

1. Simply turning off your television, DVD player, stereo and computer when you’re not using them will stop the release of thousands of pounds of carbon dioxide a year.

2. Do you know, if the temperature of our Earth rises, almost 7 million people in India will have to move their homes, because the sea levels will rise and cover some parts of Chennai and Mumbai.

3. Making cans from recycled aluminum uses 90% less energy than making cans from scratch. We can watch TV for 3 hours from the energy saved from recycling one can!

4. The glacial lake in Southern Chile was sighted in March, but two months later it had completely disappeared! The culprit: global warming.

5. Take shorter hot water showers. Heating water uses energy.

6. It’s true – the oceans are turning to acid! Oceans absorbs CO2 which, when mixed with water, turns to weak Carbonic Acid!

Classmate Facts # 106 - Global Warming

1. Warmer temperatures are killing eucalyptus trees, the main food source for Koalas. It is feared that because of this Koalas could become extinct in the next few decades!

2. Lousiana, a state in USA, about the size of Orissa, is losing an acre of its land, to the rising sea levels, every 24 minutes!

3. Between 1961 and 1997, the world's glaciers lost 890 cubic miles of ice.

4. Global Warming means bad news for baseball lovers! Ash tree from which all baseball bats are made, is in the danger of disappearing because of warmer temperatures.

5. As rising ocean temperatures are killing off their food supply, more number of gray whales are being washed up on beaches after starving to death.

Classmate Facts # 105 - Olympics Trivia

1. At the World Eskimo Indian Olympics, one notable game is "ear pulling". In this event, two people sit down facing each other with twine looped around each other's ear - right ear to right ear, left to left. The two then begin their own unique version of tug-of-war!

2. Q. What's common between Flamingo, Crane and Fishtail? A. They are all positions in the Olympic event Synchronized Swimming.

3. Emperor Nero was declared the winner of the chariot race in A.D. 67 even though there were no other entrants in the race and he didn't even finish!

Classmate Facts # 104 - Olympics Trivia

1. Tug-pf-War was an Olympic event from 1900 to 1920.

2. The Sydney 2000 Olympics was the only second Olympic Games to be held in the Southern Hemisphere.

3. In the ancient Olympics, the philosopher Plato was a double winner of the Pankriation (a form of ancient martial arts).

Classmate Facts # 103 - Olympics Trivia

1. For many years, the ancient Olympics Games consisted of only one race, a sprint of 192 metres called the "stadian." A second race of 400 metres was added 50 years later.

2. You will be surprised at some of the odd and even weird events that have been part of the Olympic Games at some time. Some of the discontinued events are tug-of-war, Live pigeon shooting, rope climbing and one-hand weightlifting!

3. For his victory in the long jump, in the 1900 Summer Olympics , Alvin Kraezlein was ounched in the face by his rival Myer Prinstein! (Prinstein was allegedly annoyed because he was prevented from competing in the final scheduled for Sunday.

Classmate Facts # 102 - Olympics Trivia

1. Which country's Olympic basketball team does Chicago Bulls star Toni Kukoc play for? A. Croatia's.

2. Olympic Swimmer Dawn Fraser startled the Japanese at Tokyo when she climbed the flagpole at the emperor's palace to talk the flag as a souvenir! (Later she was penalized for this misdemenour).

3. When Swedish shooter Oscar Swahn won his sixth Olympic medal at the 1920 Antwerp Games he was 72 years and 280 days old!

Classmate Facts # 101 - Olympics Trivia

1. In his boxing career of 62 fights Wilfred Benitz won 52 matches! He is the youngest person ever to have won a world boxing championship!

2. Gymnasiums were introduced in 900 B.C. and Greek athletes practised there to the accompaniment of music.

3. The last Olympic gold medals that were made entirely out of gold were awarded in 1912.

4. Most athletes at the 1900 Olympic Games held in Paris had a tough time! The discus and hammer throwers found that there wasn't enough room to throw, so their shots landed in the trees! No track was laid, races took place on an uneven field of grass littered with trees, also for the hurdle races, the hurdles were made out of broken telephone poles! The Olympics were organised that year because Paris was also hosting the World Exhibition at the same time. This caused extra pressure on their infrastructural resources.

Classmate Facts # 100 - Olympics Trivia

A 100 POSTS IN THIS SERIES!!!! WAY TO GO @ THE FACTORIUM!!

1. In 648 B.C. horses were first introduced into sports with the entrance of riders in the Olympic Games.

2. Sports command the biggest television audience, led by the Summer Olympics, World Cup (Soccer) and Formula One Racing.

3. The first modern Olympic Games were held in Athens, Greece in 1896. There were 311 males but no female competitors.

Classmate Facts # 99 - That's Funny!

1. Queen Elizabeth II has a rubber duck that wears a crown. When this quirky fact became public knowledge, the sales of rubber ducks increased by 80%!

2. 85% of people can curl their tongue into a tube. The remaining 15% get annoyed that they can't.

3. Coca-Cola was invented by a pharmacist, and during his lifetime the soft drink had been used nly for medical purposes!

4. The call of a blue whale is louder than a jumbo-jet!

5. Koala bears and human beings have so similar looking fingerprints that they could be easily confused at a crime scene.

Classmate Facts # 98 - Tickle me, please!

1. Humans and chimpanzees share similar ticklish areas of the body, such as the armpits and belly!

2. Rats can live without water longer than camels can!

3. The inventor of coca-cola originally intended the soft drink to be a medicine available without prescription!

4. A cat's nose print is as unique as our fingerprint!

5. The United States and Russian militaries have trained dolphins to rescue lost divers!

Classmate Facts # 97 - Amazing Facts!

1. Crocodiles swallow stones to help them dive deeper.

2. The typewriter was invented by Hungarian Immigrant Qwert Yuiop, who left his "signature" on the keyboard.

3. In England, the Speaker of the House is not allowed to speak.

Classmate Facts # 96 - Amazing Facts!

1. It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

2. Replying more than 100 times to the same piece of spam e-mail will overwhelm the sender's system and interfere with his ability to send any more spam.

3. A female mackeral (a fish) can lay 500,000 eggs at one time!

Classmate Facts # 95 - Believe it or Not

1. Paper was invented early in the second century by a Chinese Eunuch.

2. The first person to receive a singing telegram was singer Rudy Vallee, in honour of his 32nd birthday, July 28th 1933.

3. The longest one-word syllable in the English language is Screeched.

4. In Shakesphere's time, mattresses were secured on bed frames by ropes. When you pulled on the ropes, the mattresses tightened, making the bed firmer to sleep on. Hence the phrase "Goodnight, Sleep Tight."

Classmate Facts # 94 - Think Practical

1. If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

2. Beware! Your bed at home could have more than 6 billion dust mites.

3. Americans today consume 17.3 billion quarts of popcorn per year! The average American eats about 68 quarts!

Classmate Facts # 93 - Remember the Time

1. Did you know that the first living creature to travel to space was Laika, a Russian Dog, in 1957?

2. Alexander the Great discovered the banana in 327 B.C. when he conquered India.

3. Pumpkin was once recommended for removing freckles and curing snake bites!

Classmate Facts # 92 - Silence Please

1. Only human beings sleep on their backs.

2. In Alaska, it is legal to shoot bears. However, waking a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph is prohibited.

3. Table cloths were originally meant to be used as towels with which dinner guests could wipe their hands and faces after eating.