Tourists who are eager to visit recently erupted volcanoes while on vacation should take heed. Volcanic ash has been known to remain hot for a period of nearly one hundred years.

When sailors speak of sheets (as in "four sheets to the wind"), they are not talking about sails. A sheet in nautical terminology is a rope or chain.

The first city to reach a population of 1 million people was Rome, Italy in 133 B.C. London, England reached the mark in 1810 and New York City, USA made it in 1875. Today, there are over 300 cities in the world that boast a population in excess of 1 million.

Married Catholics continue to be sexually active as they age: 50 percent of them have sex at least once a week when they are 55 years old or older, compared with 40 percent for other faiths.

When Orville and Wilbur Wright were children, their father brought them a rubber-band-powered flying toy called a "bat." The brothers credited this toy with getting them interested in flight.

The AK-47 is simple, inexpensive to manufacture and easy to clean and maintain. Its ruggedness and reliability are legendary. The large gas piston, generous clearances between moving parts, and tapered cartridge case design allow the gun to endure large amounts of foreign matter and fouling without failing to cycle. This reliability comes at the...Read more

Potatoes were banned in Burgundy in 1910 because it was said, "frequent use caused leprosy."

Biologists have discovered that cockroaches can change course as many as 25 times in one second, making them the most nimble animals known.

In the constellation Cygnus, there is a double star, one of whose components has such a high surface gravity that light cannot escape from it. It is Cygnus X-1, which many astronomers believe to be the first "black hole" to be detected.

It has been determined that one brow wrinkle is the result of 200,000 frowns.

More than half of school-age children in the U.S. have no cavities in their permanent teeth, compared with only 26 percent who were cavity-free in the early ‘70s, the American Dental Association has reported.

Right behind Christmas and Thanksgiving, Super Bowl Sunday ranks as the third-largest occasion for Americans to consume food, according to the National Football League.

A Scottish term for someone who is sullen or bad-tempered is "dorty."

There is an organization in Berkeley, California, whose members gather monthly to discuss and honor the garlic plant. Called "The Lovers of the Stinky Rose," this unusual organization holds an annual garlic festival and publishes a newsletter known as "Garlic Time."

Michael Caine fell in love with a woman he saw in a Maxwell House commercial – and married Shakira Baksh.

The breed of the Thoroughbred horse is only about 300 years old, although horse racing has been popular in England since Roman times, and can be traced back to Central Asia among prehistoric nomads.

There is an average of 50,000 spiders per acre in green areas. Essential to the balance of nature, spiders annually consume a hundred times their number in insects.

The mudskipper is a fish that can actually walk on land.

Olympic badminton rules say that the shuttlecock has to have exactly 16 feathers. The best shuttles are made from the feathers from the left wing of a goose.

In the southern part of Japan, it rarely snows to any great amount except for the mountains, but the northern part usually has plenty of snow in the winter. Autumn is by far the best time to visit Japan, as far as the weather goes.