Four humors of the body are blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile originating in the heart, brain, liver, and spleen, respectively. Empedocles of Agrigentum, in 5th century BC, probably originated the theory in which he equated the body fluids to the four elements of nature: earth, fire, air and water. To be in good health the humors should be in harmony within the body.

09 21 2001

When a person pulls quickly on his or her finger, a vacuum is created in the joint space between the bones, displacing the fluid liquid normally found in the space. The popping sound of cracking knuckles occurs when the fluids rush back into the empty gap.

09 20 2001

The hyoid bone is the only bone, in the human body, that does not touch another bone. It's above the larynx and anchors the tongue muscles.

09 19 2001

Cats' navigational ability could be attributed to the cats' sensitivity to Earth's magnetic fields. When magnets are attached to cats, their normal navigational skills are disrupted.

09 18 2001

The only mammal that can truly fly is a bat.

09 17 2001

The male penguins balance the baby egg on their feet and sometimes huddle together when there's a blizzard or cold weather. If a penguin egg is inadvertently orphaned, a male with no egg will quickly adopt it. When the chicks first hatch, the males regurgitate a milky substance into the chick's mouth. After the female returns from finding food, they take over feeding of the baby. The females don't return to their mate, though.

09 16 2001

The hummingbird is the only bird that can fly upside down. It can do so due to its angles wing structure, but they can only do it for a short amount of time. It can also fly backwards. It can fly at up to 71 miles per hour.

09 15 2001

The earliest cockroach fossils are about 280 million years old. Some cockroaches measured three to four inches long.

09 14 2001

When Pope Leo V died, a woman, named Joan, disguising as a man named John was elected to succeed him. During the celebration of Rogation Days in a procession from the Janiculum Hill to the Lateran Place, between the Colosseum and the church of Pope Clement, she gave birth in public without a midwife. The cardinals, discovering that she was female, cast her out.

09 13 2001

In the Aeolian dialect, sios corresponds to the Latin word for God and byles means mind, so sibyls signify 'women of divine mind' or 'women who bear God in their minds.'

09 12 2001

The continent Europe is named after Europa, a Queen of Crete and Libya is named after Queen Libya, daughter of Epaphus of Egypt and his wife Cassieopeia.

09 11 2001

Minerva discovered numbers and arranged them in the order they are used today.

09 10 2001

Semiramis, the queen of Assyranians, is said to have invented the chastity belt, to stop the women of the household from stealing her son from her bed.

09 09 2001

Bocaccio's Famous Women is the first collection of biographies in Western literature devoted exclusively to women. Most of the work, 104 chapters, was written at Certaldo between the summer of 1361 and 1362.

09 08 2001

The elephant trunk is six feet long and one foot thick and contains sixty thousand muscles. Elephants can use their trunks to uproot trees, stack timber, or carefully place huge logs in position when recruited to build bridges. An elephant can curl its trunk around a pencil and draw characters on letter-size paper. With the two muscular extensions at the tip, it can remove a thorn, pick up a pin or a dime, uncork a bottle, slice the bolt off a cage door, and hide it on a ledge, or grip a cup so firmly, without breaking it, that only another elephant can pull it away. The tip is sensitive enough for a blindfolded elephant to ascertain the shape and texture of objects. In the wild, elephants use their trunks to pull up clumps of grass and tap them against their knees to knock off the dirt, to shake coconuts off of palm trees, and to powder their bodies with dust. They use their trunks to probe the ground as they walk, avoiding pit traps, and to dig wells and siphon water from them. Elephants can walk underwater on the bed of deep rivers or swim like submarines for miles, using their trunks as snorkels. They communicate through their trunks by trumpeting, humming, roaring, piping, purring, rumbling, and making a crumpling-metal sound by rapping the trunk against the ground. The trunk is lined with chemoreceptors that allow the elephant to smell a python hidden in the grass or food a mile away.

Elephants are the only living animals that posses this extraordinary organ. Their closest living terrestrial relative is the hyrax, a mammal that you would probably not be able to tell from a large guinea pig.

09 07 2001

A male voice is a wave with vibrations not only at 100 cycles per sound but also at 200cps, 300cps, 400cps, 500cps, 600cps, 700cps, and so on, all the way up to 4000cps and beyond. A female voice has vibrations at 200cps, 400cps, 600cps, and so on.

09 06 2001

The creative powers of English morphology are pathetic compared to what we find in other languages. The English noun comes in exactly two forms, (duck and ducks), the verb in four, (quack, quacks, quacked, quacking). In modern Italian and Spanish every verb has about fifty forms; in classical Greek, three hundred and fifty; in Turkish, two million.

09 05 2001

The word glamour comes from the word grammar.