Page 5 - Fun Facts

Astronauts in space lose their sense of smell and crave Tabasco sause!

When an astronaut spends enough time in a zero-gravity environment, they get what NASA calls the 'Charlie Brown' phase. Their head begins to swell, because liquids that are usually dragged down by gravity stay in their head.

As a result of this, astronauts begin to lose the sense of smell. They feel like they have a cold, stuffy nose, etc. And they can't really taste things very well. The head of NASA's food science program thinks that losing the ability to taste leads to astronauts craving hot things like Tabasco because that way they can at least feel something different in their taste buds.

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There is a bush that's over 11,000 years old!

King Clone is known as not only having the coolest name ever, but as being one of the oldest known living organisms on the planet. The creosote bush ring in the Mojave Desert is estimated to be 11,700 years old. The plant is located 0.6 miles North of California route 27 on Bessemer Mine Road near the towns of Lucerne Valley and Landers.

King Clone was identified as being 11,700 years old by Frank Vasek - a professor at the University of Riverside California. After Vasek hypothesized that the ring was one living organism, he found that the plants around the ring all had identical characteristics that differed from other plant clusters.

Vasek used two methods to guess the plants age. His first method, was to count the rings in the planet and measured the annual growth. The next, he used radiocarbon dating on chucks of wood found at the center of the ring. To his amazement, the dates he came up with for both methods were the exact same.

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There is a giant salt city 1200ft below Detroit!

Not many Detroit citizens are aware that when they walk of the streets of their humble city, they are walking on top of a 1,500 acres salt mine. The mine stretches from Detroit's metropolitan area, all the way to Melvindale and Allen Park in the South West.

The Detroit Salt and Manufacturing Company shut the mine down in 1983, when the fall of salt prices had caused the company to start losing business. But, the mine was a thriving location in the 1920's all the way up to the 1950's. Allegedly, thousands of citizens would flock to the mines for guided tours, including children on field trips!

The mine, even at it's busiest of times, was according to the worker's clean, and rodent free. One of the reasons the mine was surprisingly rodent free is because rats would have absolutely nothing to eat besides what was left behind by the miners lunch pails. As a result, nothing lived in the mines, nor were there any signs of anything living in past ages.

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The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer!

eBay is a beautiful website because you can find virtually anything you could ever want on the website to buy off of other users. EBay paved the way for other websites such as amazon.com to form and build their own empires.

You would think that the first item ever sold on eBay must have been a magnificent item, something that someone really wanted. Well, allow me to remind you that eBay is a part of the internet - and there are a lot of weirdos that hangout on the internet.

The first item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer, and it was sold for $14.83. The founder of eBay asked the buyer if he knew that the laser pointer was broken when he bought it. The owner simply responded “I’m a collector of broken laser pointers.”

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A saguaro cactus takes 75 years to grow its first arm!

The saguaro cactus, is easily the most famous type of cactus in the world. Everyone has heard about, or seen this desert symbol at some point or another. A little known fact about the cactus is that it takes 75 years until it grows it's first arm, however there are a few other things that people don't know about this cactus.

For example, over the span of it's lifetime, 175-200 years, the Saguaro Cactus can produce as many as 40 million seeds - however only a handful will actually live to adulthood. You can also tell if the needles on the cactus are old or not. The more red the roots of the needle, the younger it is in relation to the cactus!

There was once a cactus that set a few records - it was 300 years old, was over 12m tall, had 45 arms, and weighed around 13 tons!

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