Decibels are measured on a logarithmic scale -- every 3 dB is a doubling of the intensity of sound saves. Restaurant conversation is about 60 dB, a motorcycle (at 25 ft) is 90 dB, airplanes at takeoff are 110 dB.

Our human senses for sound (as well as light) are tuned for a wide range of values, hence the logarithmic scales we use for measurement

Remarkably, there exist simple scaling laws relating animal metabolism to body mass. Larger animals live longer; but they also metabolize slower, as manifested in slower heart rates. These effects cancel out, so that animals from shrews to blue whales have lifespans with just about equal number of heartbeats — about one and a half billion, if you simply must be precise. In that very real sense, all animal species experience “the same amount of time.”

Originally bubble wrap was conceived as a wallpaper. Since that did not work out, it was used as a wrapping material. Every year enough bubble wrap is made to stretch it all the way to moon and back.

Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak later said he had no idea about the correlation between the number and the mark of the beast. He says, "I came up with [it] because I like repeating digits." It was $500, plus a 33% markup.

FactMe! has lots of facts about apples

Back in 1955, Founder Charlie Loudermilk and a partner borrowed $500 to purchase 300 chairs that they rented out for 10 cents a day. They chose the name "Aaron" for their business because it appears at the beginning of the phone book!

Jobs sold his Volkwagen Bus and Wozniak sold his HP scientific calculator -- each was worth $500.

• A space station
• A space shuttle
• A permanent base on the moon
• A manned mission to Mars

According to a new study, the inner core of Earth spins nine-thousandths of a second faster than outer layers of the Earth, which may be responsible for the Earth's magnetic field.

If all our brain cells were laid end-to-end, it would be 200 million miles long (from here to the Sun and back!)

This is an average from 2002-2004 -- a number that has been steadily increasing. The report, based on CDC data, also finds that MS, AL, WV, LA, and TN have the highest percentage of obese adults.

"Obesity" is defined by having a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or more. Find out your BMI now!

Alice (56) and Helen (85) Walton share the title of richest woman in America. As daughter and wife of Sam Walton, respectively, they have an estimated net worth of $18 billion each.

Another tidbit about Wal-Mart -- Their sales in one day was larger than the GDP of 36 countries!

By buying locally-produced honey, your body gets small doses of the same pollen that can trigger your allergies. In the same fashion that a vaccine works, by giving your body the honey, allergies may be dramatically reduced! So the closer you live to the beekeeper, the better off you are!

The official spelling is Daylight Saving Time, not Daylight SavingS Time.

On August 8, 2005, President Geroge W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This Act changed the time change dates in the U.S. Beginning in 2007, DST will begin on the second Sunday of March, and end the first Sunday of November.

Daylight Saving Time, for the U.S. and its territories, is NOT observed in Hawaii or in most of the Eastern Time Zone portion of the State of Indiana, and the state of Arizona (not the Navajo Indian Reservation, which does observe). Navajo Nation participates in the Daylight Saving Time policy, due to its large size and location in three states.

In 2004, Fortune named her the 19th richest person under 40.

The gardens, number of slabs of marble, engravings of flowers, even the number of leaves carved and laden with emeralds on each side are perfectly symmetrical. The Queen's tomb is laid exactly in the centre.

The ONLY non-symmetrical part of the Taj Mahal is the King's tomb, as it was not planned to be placed there, but in a replica of the Taj to be built in black marble across the river. Since the Prince arrested his father, the plan to build the second Taj was cancelled, and the King was buried next to the Queen's tomb, thereby breaking the symmetry of the Taj. Still considered the most amazing of the seven wonders, the Taj has half the verses of the Quran inscripted on it; the other half were to be in the second monument.

Check out some pictures!

America Online (AOL) says that at any time between 1/3 and 2/3 of its server capacity is taken up by spam.

G-rated films account for only 3% of the total films made in a typical year. 69% of films are R-rated.

As an aside, box office sales typically account for only 20% of a film's earnings. Other sources are merchandising, DVD sales, video rentals.

Every second, the Sun converts about 700 million tons of hydrogen to 695 million tons of helium and 386 billion billion megawatts of energy (see also e=mc² fact). It's been doing this for about 4.5 billion years and will keep going for another 5 billion years before growing to a red giant and gobbling up the Earth.

At one point, 9% of Americans were on the Atkins diet.

Each tree produces about 40 cubic feet of wood every year.

There are over 100,000 children working in dangerous conditions in Ivory Coast alone, the source of 40% of the world's cocoa, according to a US State Department report in 2003. Hazards include harmful pesticides and risk of injury from machetes. In response, there has been talk of a "no child slavery" label requirement for all chocolate manufacturers.

In the US, that number is only 4%.

"2003 UB313" could be bigger than Pluto and is probably twice the distance from the Sun. See the fact about the relationship between days of the week and the planets.

On average, 147 million people see a Taco Bell commercial each week -- more than half the population of America... Yo quiero taco bell!

The ancient Greek term "gymnos" means nude, and the original olympic games were in the nude in Athens. Hence the term "gymnasium"...

Sealand was built during World War II as British outpost to defend the mainland. After being abandoned by the British, a family took possession of it in 1969 and filed all the paperwork to make this outpost a sovereign country. Sealand now has its own flag, currency, passports, and ruling Prince and Princess!

Congrats to Zack and Chris for guessing the answer:

• dwindle
• dwarf
• dwell(ing)
• dweeb

On a sidenote, Florida, Montana, and a few New England states seem to have more of this group of people.

Home Depot had $73.1 billion in 2004 revenue and employs over 325,000 people. Over 22 million people visit a Home Depot in any given week.

If such particles did exist, however, Special Relativity implies that they could never be slowed down to velocities below the speed of light. The existence of such particles, called tachyons, has not been totally ruled out, but several experiments have tried, without luck to detect them. If they did exist, and they interacted with ordinary matter, it would give us the means to communicate with the past...

24% of the bottled water purchased in America is 're-purified' tap water (water clean enough to drink in the first place) from Coke (Dasani) and Pepsi (Aquafina)!

• 22222 is Arlington, Virginia
• 44444 is Newton Falls, OH
• 55555 is Young America, MN
• 12345 is Schenectady, New York.

It was probably the first time that any non-Anglo name was among the 10 most common in the nation.

More than 1 million homes are expected to enter foreclosure this year -- so that's at least 125,000 renters evicted...

In the 1500s, houses had thatched roofs-thick straw-piled high, with no wood underneath. It was the only place for animals to get warm, so all the cats and other small animals (mice, bugs) lived in the roof.

When it rained it became slippery and sometimes the animals would slip and fall off the roof. Hence the saying "It's raining cats and dogs."

Indian-Americans are even more dominant in budget properties, owning about 60% of these hotels/motels.

At the top of the risk list from mosquitoes is malaria. Even after decades of battling against the mosquito carrier, an amazing 40% of the world's population, mostly those living in the world's poorest countries, is still at risk of malaria. The disease causes more than 300 million acute illnesses each year and over a million deaths annually, mainly children under five.

There are only four MBAs in the top 50.

Low-fare carrier AirTran charges companies as much as $50,000 a month to advertise on napkins.

The flea when jumping accelerates 50 times faster than a space shuttle. Without its outer shell it would get smashed by the velocity of the jump.

As a result, his full salutation is Prof. Dr. Michael Griffin BSc,MSc,MEng,MBA,Ph.D!

What's the old NASA adminstrator doing? Running Lousiana State University according to an old FactMe! fact.

1st orbital spacecraft, Sputnik
1st spacecraft to carry an animal (a dog Laika), Sputnik 2
1st spacecraft to reach another celestial body, Luna 2
1st spacecraft to photograph the far side of the moon, Luna 3
1st spacecraft to land safely on another planet, Venera 7
1st manned spacecraft, Vostok 1, which carried the ...
1st human into space (Yuri Gagarin)

Well in 1792, France (home of the metric system or "SI") established a much better system: 100 seconds in a minute. 100 minutes in an hour. 10 hours in a day. (These "seconds" were .864 of our "seconds" but that's not too important). 10 days in a week. 3 weeks in a month.

Just like the metric system ("1000mL=1L" instead of "2 cups in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon"), this time system makes so much sense. However, just 13 years later, Napoleon took over and returned France to the Gregorian system to please the Pope.

Death will occur after about 10 days without sleep, while starvation takes a few weeks.

Indian Railways transports over 6 billion passengers each year and has over 1.6 million employees! Everyday, it runs over 14,000 trains!

NASA's robotic space explorers, the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, have survived for a full Martian year (687 Earth days) on the red planet! When Spirit first landed on Jan. 3, 2004, scientists hoped that the rovers would last 90 sols, a Martian days which is just a few minutes longer than an Earth day.

Children across the world spend 5 billion hours every year playing with Lego bricks, available in 90 different colors, according to the company’s Web site.

More than 1.5 million personal bankruptcies were filed this year (Illness and medical bills accounted for half of these). A sidenote -- more families with children will file for bankruptcy than divorce.

That's about 100 pieces of mail to every person in America!

If the USPS was a private company, it would be the tenth largest in America, with 234,033 mail carriers delivering mail each day.

In both elections, partisan Florida Republicans gave the state's electoral votes to the Republic candidate, and the Democrats challenged the result. Both challenges were decided by a single vote cast by a Republican Supreme Court justice in favor of the Republicans.

Too bad an old fact says you can only fold a sheet of paper 7 times.

The Lunar Module from the Apollo missions required less computer power to land on the moon than today's average cellphone!

Over the past four years, stocks that the Street has been telling you to sell have risen 19% per year on average. Meanwhile, the "buys" and "holds" have risen just 7%.

More than 2 million Americans underwent laser vision correction procedures last year.

The average fee for merchants accepting AMEX is $2.50 per $100 charged, while it is only $2.00 per $100 charged for Visa or MasterCard.

There are 7.73 million small and medium-sized business, of which the majority (76%) have fewer than 10 employees!

Trails leading away from an ant nest always fork at a 60-degree angle, similar to a capital Y. On their way out to pick up food, they take either the left or right branch (30 degrees off their current heading). On their return home, ants need only stay as straight as possible to find their nest.

These tragic events have resulted from consumers rocking or tilting the machines in an attempt to obtain free soda or money. In response, vending machine manufacturers have voluntarily agreed to provide warning labels for the 1.7 million vending machines in the marketplace.

A strand of human DNA, containing every bit of information about you, contains 3 billion base pairs. These base pairs can be A, T, C, or G. Since it takes two bits to represent 4 options, your full DNA sequence would occupy 6 billion bits in a computer -- or 800 megabytes. This is just enough to fit onto a compact disc!

And according to an old fact, with current IP addressing, we could almost give every person on Earth a unique address.

The actual discrepancy between True North and the North you read from a compass is called "magnetic declination" and changes depending on where you are.

It took the ship Titanic approximately 2 hours, 40 minutes to sink. Titanic, the film, runs 3 hours, 14 minutes.

The ship took 3 years to build, approximately the same amount of time it took to make the film.

Honey is effectively regurgitated nectar that has been partially digested by a honeybee. Mmmmm...

Throughout WWII, Hitler was administered daily injections of methamphetamine, an addictive stimulant commonly known today as speed.

Inside a piano, there are roughly 230 wires of varying sizes and tension. When you press a piano key, 1-3 wires are struck by a hammer, causing it to vibrate at a unique frequency. Each of these wires is under 200 pounds of tension or more. These wires are held tight by a large cast iron frame (peek inside a grand piano sometime) which prevents the piano from caving in on itself!

In comparison, the North Pole rests in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, where the surface of floating ice rides only a foot or so above the surrounding sea. The Arctic Ocean also acts as an effective heat reservoir, warming the cold atmosphere in the winter and drawing heat from the atmosphere in the summer.

There are gold-plated records flying away from Earth towards aliens on both the NASA Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft (launched in 1977). These contain information on finding our Solar System and planet, images of culture and diversity on Earth, and greetings in a LOT of different languages. How to actually communicate with aliens.

These craft passed Pluto in 1990 and are now roughly 8 billion miles from the sun (90 times farther than the Earth).

However, only 3% of female-owned businesses generate revenue of over 1 million dollars.

CostCo sold 69 million hot dog and soda combos for $1.50 last year!

58-megaton means that the blast was equivalent to exploding 58,000,000 tons of dynamite.

Some 114 million carats of diamonds are produced every year and, with new mines coming onstream and others being expanded, that should rise to about 120 million in 2005. And 80% of the diamonds dug out of the ground end up being used in industry.

The reason they seem scarce is that up until recently, De Beers controlled 80% of the world's supply. Catch-phrases such as “Diamonds are Forever” and adverts insisting men spend two months’ salary on a ring for their fiancée created the myth that diamonds are a scarce, valuable resource.

While sitting down, lift up your right foot and move it around in circles clockwise.

Then with your right hand, try to draw number 6's in the air at the same time. It's impossible!

Using its 94.5-inch primary mirror, Hubble transmits about 120 gigabytes of data every week! This mirror is such a smooth curve that if it was scaled up to the diameter of the Earth, the largest bump would only be 6 inches tall.

Take a look at some of the beautiful pictures Hubble has brought us!

That is enough for 36 million free tickets, at the basic rate of 25,000 miles - or enough to give almost everyone who flew out of Kennedy International Airport last year a free ticket.

According to Mythbusters, if you fall/jump from 160 feet, your body experiences 285 G's, or 285 times the normal force of gravity, when you hit the water.

To put this in context, the force your body experiences in a normal car crash is 70 G's.

More than 20 million plastic pink flamingos have been sold since 1957. Flamingos are pink because of the beta-carotene in the shrimp they eat.

According to Daniel Boorstin in his book "The Discoverers," an assistant to the Roman consul was assigned to notice when the sun crossed the meridian, and to announce it in the Forum, since lawyers had to appear in the courts before noon.

As the temperature drops, the atoms slow down - In 1995, physicists in Boulder, CO, cooled atoms to 20 billionths of a degree above absolute zero, where all motion ceases, creating a Bose-Einstein condensate - a new state of matter that "had never existed anywhere in the universe ever before".

Turns out a gland near their beaks filters the saltwater -- once the gland gets full, a penguin will knock his beak on a rock to empty the salt out.

In the late 1830's and 1840's, the abbreviation fad began with many of the abbreviated expressions being exaggerated misspellings. One predecessor of OK was OW, "oll wright," and there was also KY, "know yuse," KG, "know go," and NS, "nuff said."

With this deal, Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and CEO of Pixar, will also become the largest shareholder of Disney (at 6.6% of shares outstanding)!

This one pound of highly enriched uranium (~90% Uranium-235 for weapons grade vs. 2% -3% for civilian reactors) has as much energy as a million pounds of gasoline (a cube 50 ft/side).

The average office chair with wheels will travel 8 miles this year.

The average pencil will draw a line 35 miles long.

An inch was the width of a thumb. A foot was the length of a foot. A pace was two marching steps (~5 feet). A mile was a thousand paces (5,280 feet).