Page 73 - Technology Facts

Bees can detect explosives.

Entomologists (bug scientists) have known that bees can detect different kinds of dangerous chemicals, but research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory has shown that they can be trained to detect explosive materials!

The way you can train bees to detect explosives is to mix the explosive chemicals with sugar water. In a laboratory, when bees approach sugar water they have the same reaction that they have to flowers: they extend their proboscises to suck out the nectar. Doing this repeatedly with explosives and sugar water will cause the bees to associate the scent of the explosive chemicals with nectar. Bees trained in this way are actually more reliable than a lot of man-made equipment at detecting the explosive TATP, the same explosive used by American al-Qaeda terrorist Richard Reid and likely the explosive used in the 2005 London train bombings.
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In the 2008 presidential election, neither of the major-party candidates were born in the mainland of the United States!

As you have likely heard, politicians and the media made a great stink earlier this year about the country of President Obama’s birth. The debate was finally laid to rest with the release of his long-form birth certificate, which showed that he was born in Hawaii, as he had always claimed. Barack Obama is the first president in U.S. history to have been born outside the 48 contiguous states, but most do not realize that his opponent in 2008 was born much further away! Senator John McCain was actually born down in Central America...but he is technically a United States citizen. McCain’s father, John McCain, Jr., was an officer in the Navy that was stationed down in Panama when his wife Roberta was pregnant with their son. At the time the Panama Canal was under American control, so a section of the country called the “Panama Canal Zone” was technically U.S. territory. John III was born on August 29th at Coco Solo Naval Air Station, which was located inside this zone.
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Left-handed people might have an advantage in playing video games.

At least, Gamestop seems to think so. They cite research from the journal Neuropsychology that claims lefties outperform righties in tasks that involve handling a lot of information and stimuli. This would include driving while talking, flying a plane, and, more importantly, playing video games!

The research has shown that data that is usually only processed by the left hemisphere of the brain of right-handed people is processed by both hemispheres in lefties. Anatomically, the connection between the two hemispheres is larger and better for left-handed people, which makes them process data more quickly.

You can see more of this explained here.

Atari’s Pong was the #1 selling holiday gift of 1975.

Pretty amazing. Atari actually had a lot of surprising firsts. In the 1980s, Atari 2600 owners could hook up their video game systems to their phone lines to download games! This online service was actually the inspiration for AOL! Also, the first portable game system with a color screen wasn’t a Gameboy, it was the Atari Lynx (also in the 80s). Here's a list of more strange video game facts.

The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was originally supposed to be a first-person shooter.

Video game designer Yoshiaki Koizumi explained his conversation with Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto about the N64 classic:

“I talked with Miyamoto-san about how we should make The Legend of Zelda for the Nintendo 64 system, and he asked, ‘How about making it so that Link will not show up?’,” Yoshiaki Koizumi remembers. “He wanted to make it a first-person game.”

Koizumi was working on the Link model at the time and was rather attached to the beloved character. Ultimately, the Nintendo team decided to abandon the first-person format because it wasn’t visually interesting enough.
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