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Page 1142 - Top Facts

Having a spouse with dementia increases your chances of getting dementia.




Being a caregiver of someone going through dementia increases your likelihood of developing the same condition by 6 times. It’s worse for men; men whose spouses developed dementia are 12 times more likely to than men whose spouses have not. A 12 year study of 1,221 senior couples found that of the 255 seniors who developed dementia, that spouses were more reliable risk factors than genes, gender or socioeconomic status. This is likely because â..." of the cases of dementia were brought on by Alzheimer’s disease. Caring for someone with dementia can be very stressful, and stress increases the risk of Alzheimer’s.
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The first female was elected to Congress before American women even had the right to vote!




Jeannette Rankin helped pass women’s suffrage in her home state of Montana in 1913, though the majority of women in the rest of the country remained unrepresented. Rankin’s brother Wellington was a major player among Montana Republicans and served as her campaign manager three years later in both the party nomination for Congress and in the general election. On November 17th, 1916, Jeannette was elected to the House of Representatives. This is quite interesting seeing as the 19th Amendment, which gave ALL American women the right to vote, was not ratified until 1920 - a year after Rankin had completed her first congressional term!

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The number of indigenous people within Brazil fell from 6 million in the 1500s to 100,000 in the 1950s.




The roughly 2000 nations of mostly semi-nomadic native tribes of pre-Columbian era Brazil steadily disappeared after the arrival of European settlers. Millions died from disease, war, and slavery over the centuries. Many others were assimilated into the Brazilian population. Today, the Brazilian indigenous population is on a slow rebound after an all-time low population of around 100,000 in the 1950s. There are now around 735,000 indigenous people living in 24 of the 27 states in Brazil. Among them there are 235 different ethnicities speaking over 170 unique languages.

You can learn more about the indigenous people of Brazil at the Society for Threatened People's website.

Lighting is hotter than the surface of the sun!


Lightning can be up to 18,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is almost twice the surface temperature of the sun! If lightning is so hot, why is it that we get our energy from the sun?

Although lightning is blistering, its radiant energy pales in comparison with the sun’s. While it’s true that lightning can set a tree on fire, the distance to its target must be very small for it to feel the full heat of lightning. The sun’s core however is close to 15 million degrees Fahrenheit!

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Someone calculated pi to 2.7 trillion digits!


The mathematical constant pi, more often referred to as the Greek letter π, is the ratio of any circle to its diameter, and has an infinite amount of numbers. Usually written as simply 3.14, it has now been calculated to its 2.7th trillion digit!

The 2.7 trillion digits is 123 billion more digits than the previous record. The prior record had been calculated on a super computer, but Fabrice Bellard, who calculated the digits, says he used a very simple method and common computer. Bellard says that although it was fun to break the record, finding pi was simply a way to test his method to see if it could be used for other mathematical purposes.

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