Housepets!

Rats cannot vomit

The German StG 44 fired full-powered rifle rounds, and was fully automatic, making it the first "battle rifle."

Rabbits are obligate nasal breathers. Due to the arrangment of their pharynx and soft palate they cannot breathe through their mouth.

A cat has thirty-two muscles in each ear, dogs have around eighteen and humans only have three.

Walt Disney was afraid of mice.

Of all the songs in all the movies he made, "Feed The Birds" from Mary Poppins was Walt Disney's favourite.

Nobody knows how cats purr.

Cats will purr not just when they're happy but also if they're excited or upset or hurting. Purring has a lot of different meanings.

yehoshua wrote:Rats cannot vomit

Thus, the greenest rat poison is not poison at all, but dehydrated potatoes.

Siberia has the greatest temperature difference of any region on Earth.

Westray airport to Papa Westray airport (Orkney Islands) is the shortest commercial flight in the world, operated by Loganair. It is ~3 km long, and takes 2 to 3 minutes.

i am going to post this sentence....

What do thunderstorms and bananas have in common? A 0.511 MeV gamma emission peak from positron annihilation.

I knew bananas were slightly radioactive but I didn't know it was gamma radiation!

Antimatter actually, the gamma radiation is secondary when the positrons emitted by the K -> Ar + e⁺ + ν chain hit an electron and do the e⁺ + e⁻ -> γ + γ (511 keV) thing.

The game Depth Dwellers.

Aristotle thought that men had more teeth than women

Wow, are you a physics major, Argent?

When sticks of dynamite get too old they start secreting highly unstable liquid nitrogen.

Brazil nuts aren't nuts, they are a seed.
Brazil nuts are radioactive.

A female "dude" is known as a "dudine".

I thought it was dudette?

Tiggy wrote:I thought it was dudette?

Sorry, I might need to modify it a bit. The original female equivalent of dude is dudine. ref XD

Groups of animals:
A mob of kangaroos
A murder of crows
A clowder of cats
A glaring of cats (the more appropriate name, I think )

All nuts are seeds.

Peanuts aren't nuts.

The Egyptian Pyramids were not built by slave labor, but by a system of workfare. In the dry season, farmers would work on public works projects and be paid in grain.

It took 20,000 people 10 years to build Khufu's great pyramid.

Sumerian is the first written language. It is an isolate language and we have reconstructed most of it.

No one ever believed the Earth was flat. Since Ancient Greece, the Earth was surmised to be round. And, by measuring the lengths of the shadows of sticks placed in the ground, they came very close to calculating its actual size.

Sumerian is the oldest known language, we don't know if it is the oldest overall.

It probably isn't.

Hlaoroo wrote:Groups of animals:
A mob of kangaroos
A murder of crows
A clowder of cats
A glaring of cats (the more appropriate name, I think )

A skulk of foxes!

"Ye Olde" is actually pronounced "The Old".
In early English, the "th" sound was represented using a 27th letter which was shapped a little like a "Y". People would sometimes write the letter "Y" instead of the symbol for "th" to save time. When presses came along people got really lazy and used the typeface for "Y" to represent both characters, although they still read it as a "th" when appropriate.
As for the "Olde" part, that dates to when there was no official way to spell the English language. People just wrote things however they thought they looked right. Eventually with the advent of standardised spellings the "e" was dropped because it didn't change the pronunciation of the word anyway.

Hlaoroo wrote:"Ye Olde" is actually pronounced "The Old".
In early English, the "th" sound was represented using a 27th letter which was shapped a little like a "Y". People would sometimes write the letter "Y" instead of the symbol for "th" to save time. When presses came along people got really lazy and used the typeface for "Y" to represent both characters, although they still read it as a "th" when appropriate.
As for the "Olde" part, that dates to when there was no official way to spell the English language. People just wrote things however they thought they looked right. Eventually with the advent of standardised spellings the "e" was dropped because it didn't change the pronunciation of the word anyway.

Doesn't explain why School has an H in it.

Both coffee and tea have about the same amount of caffeine.
Tea is purported to act as a stimulant when drunk hot, or as a relaxant when drunk cold.
The debate is still on-going for this particular theory, but as of now, it is accepted that coffee is good for the brain (preventing dementia), but bad for the heart (like most stimulants do).
It is a axiom that the British drinks a lot of tea, but they are not the largest tea consumers in the world. I'm not really sure which country is, but some high consumer countries include Russia, China, Ireland, Libya, Kuwait and Turkey.

Each day we take about 26,000 breaths, which is somewhere around 14,000 liters of air. And we should breathe from our stomach, not our chest. But when we’re distracted, when we’re stressed, when we’re moving too fast, we tend to breathe from our chest. We take somewhere between 4 and 6 breaths a minute. But most of us, on average, take between 16 and 20 breaths a minute. And experts say that from our breathing we should get 99% of our energy. And they say that most of us only access 10% to 20% of that energy.

"School" comes from the Greek word "scholḗ" ("σχολείο") which originally meant "leisure employed in learning" (but now just means school). The "ch" would be the closest English approximation of the Greek character "chi" (written in Greek as "X") - ergo the "h" is silent.

Interestingly, in Middle English the word was spelled "scole".

Most words in English which have silent letters are derived from other languages.

The modern English noun phoenix derives from Middle English fenix (before 1150), itself from Old English fēnix (around 750). Old English fēnix was borrowed from Medieval Latin phenix and, later, from Latin phoenīx, deriving from Greek φοίνιξ phóinīx.

During the Classic period, the name of the bird, φοίνιξ, was variously associated with the color purple, 'Phoenician', and the date palm. According to an etymology offered by the 6th and 7th century archbishop Isidore of Seville, the name of the phoenix derived from its purple-red hue, an explanation that has been influential. This association continued into the medieval period, albeit in a different fashion; the bird was considered "the royal bird" and therefore also referred to as "the purple one".

With the deciphering of the Linear B script in the 20th century, however, the ancestor of Greek φοίνιξ was confirmed in Mycenaean Greek po-ni-ke, itself open to a variety of interpretations.

yehoshua wrote:Sumerian is the oldest known language, we don't know if it is the oldest overall.

They wrote it down first so they win.

Ascultation is the art of listening and interpreting body sounds heard through a stethoscope.

The concept of a microwave oven was first by a researcher whose chocolate bar melted when he was working on a radar. After that, they placed popcorn and then an egg, which exploded.

The first vacuum cleaners blew rather than sucked.

How are those vacuum cleaners then? I imagine it doesn't take a vacuum (the physical phenomenon) to blow...

It was ALMOST a vacuum cleaner.

The bellchord seen in the real Nonnberg Abbey in the film "The Sound Of Music" during the marriage scene is actually a prop and is non-functional. It was put there by the filmmakers during filming. The nun liked it so much, however, that they decided to keep it after the filming was concluded.

"Stewardesses" and "reverberated" are the longest words that can be typed using only the left hand.