Page 197 - Animal Facts

In 2007, a Nebraska State Senator sued God.

Senator Ernie Chambers filed the intentionally frivolous lawsuit to make a point that anybody can sue anybody else. This was in response to a lawsuit against a district court judge that Chambers thought was inappropriate.

In Chambers' suit against God he claims that God has made terroristic threats against both him and his constituents and has caused "widespread death, destruction and terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants." In addition, he was suing him for causing "fearsome floods ... horrendous hurricanes, terrifying tornadoes."

You can read the whole story here.

Giraffes sleep for only half an hour each day.

This is due to the fact that giraffes are constantly on the lookout for predators. Not only do giraffes only sleep for 30 minutes, but they also typically break this up into a series of 6 five-minute naps! Talk about paranoid...
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Curious George is not a monkey.

At least, he doesn't have the characteristics of any known species of monkeys. The fact that he doesn't have a tail would indicate that he is an ape, not a monkey. There are tailless monkeys (the Barbary Macaque and the Celebes Crested Macaque) but they look NOTHING like Curious George.

In fact, parents in a school in Atlanta were so bothered by the inaccuracies of George's anatomy that they tried to have Curious George books removed from a school. (More about this and other Curious George controversies here). Ultimately, the parents did not pursue removing the books. However, this begs the question: why is he called a monkey if he has no tail?

At the time Curious George was written, most people referred to both monkeys and chimpanzees as monkeys. Today, we are more careful to make the distinction between the two animals.

Electric eels are not actually eels.

They actually are much more closely related to carp and catfish! These fascinating creatures can generate an electrical charge of over 600 volts - five times that of a wall socket! Their bodies contain electric organs with about 6,000 electrocytes. These are cells that store power like tiny batteries.

Some electric eels can get up to 8 feet long and weigh as much as 44 pounds! Despite their size and high voltage shocks, electric eels rarely kill people. The most dangerous thing to worry about is drowning after being stunned by one.

You can learn more about electric eels on the National Geographic website.

Although a typical neutron star is only 20 km in diameter, its mass is 1.4 times greater than that of the Sun.

These bodies are so dense that on Earth a teaspoonful of neutron star would weigh a billion tons! As you would expect, this also comes with a gravitational field far stronger than that of our home planet. A neutron star's surface gravity is about 200,000,000,000 stronger than that of Earth!

A neutron star is what happens when a star that is 4 to 8 times the size of the sun runs out of nuclear fuel and undergoes a supernova explosion. The central region of the star collapses in on its own gravity so and the protons and electrons are forced to turn into neutrons.

More about Neutron Stars can be found on the NASA website.