Classmate Facts # 126 - Know This?

1. Blue for a boy! The colour blue was associated with the heavenly spirits and so boys were clothed in that colour, boys then being considered the most valuable resource to parents!

2. The Earth is slowing down – in a few million years there won’t be a leap year.

3. The Great Comet, which appeared in 1843, had a tail that was 350 million km long. It will return in 2356.

4. The oldest inhabited city is Damascus in Syria.

5. The study of oceans – Oceanography – is a mixture of Biology, Physics, Geology and Chemistry.

6. The pleasant feeling of eating chocolate is cause by a chemical called anadamide, a neurotransmitter that is also produced naturally in the brain.

Classmate Facts # 125 - The Fact of the Matter is...

1. Silent Night, Holy Night is sung in more than 180 languages by millions of people.

2. Ancient Skyscrapers! During Roman times buildings were up to 8 stories high.

3. A green diamond is the rarest diamond.

4. It is calculated that since the creation of man, about 60 billion people have died.

5. The machine that takes a space shuttle to the launching pad is called a crawler. It moves at 3 kmph!

6. The first trademarked product in the world was beer – British beer Bass Pale Ale received its trademark in 1876.

Classmate Facts # 124 - Chocolate Coffins?

1. In 1973, Swedish confectionary salesman, Roland Ohisson was buried in a coffin made entirely of chocolate.

2. The British Royal family changed their surname from Saxe-Coburg to Windsor, the name of their castle, in 1917.

3. Leonardo Da Vinci could write with one hand and draw with the other simultaneously.

4. The Colourless Cullinan, the biggest diamond ever found, weighed 620 grams (one and a quarter pound) uncut.

5. There are about one billion cattle in the world of which 250 million are in India.

6. Adult frogs are carnivorous and will eat just about anything smaller than themselves!

Classmate Facts # 123 - Amazed?

A Very Happy New Year's Day to our Readers!!! Enjoy the remaining 10 days of Classmate Facts!

1. The South American giant anteater eats more than 30,000 ants a day.

2. Did you know that the young ones of fish are called ‘fry’?

3. The tradition of diamond engagement ring started in 1477 when Archduke Maximillian of Austria gave a diamond ring to Mary of Burgundy.

4. The highest rank you can achieve without being a king or prince is Duke!

5. About 50 Bibles are sold every minute!

6. The most numerous bird species is the red-billed quelea of South Africa. There are an estimated 100 trillion of them!

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!