The famed German highways without a speed limit actually have a lower death rate than US highways.
About half of the German Autobahn has no speed limit - even though there is a suggested maximum speed limit of about 80 mph (130 kph). In 1973, photo radar units were installed and the accident rate reduced 18-fold. These days, deaths on the Autobahn account for only 10% of national traffic fatalities.
In a discussion of why some technological innovations succeed while others fail, many researchers adhere to Rogers' (1983) "Ideal Adopter Categories," which group individuals according to how and when they adopt changes.
The first category, innovators, comprises only 2.5% of society, and they are the people who create new ideas and new products. The other categories are early adopters (13.5%), early majority (34%), late majority (34%) and laggards (16%). Laggards never fully adopt a change.
On average, it takes a person 2 hours of non stop walking (80 calories/hour at 3mph) to burn off the calories and sugar from a 12 oz. can of Coke (160 calories).
There is a difference between a poisonous snake and a venomous snake.
If you bite a snake and it makes you sick, it's poisonous. If a snake bites you and it makes you sick, it's venomous. Hence, rattlesnakes and cobras aren't poisonous, they're venomous.
In the fall of 1982, Johnson & Johnson faced the biggest public relations crisis in corporate history after seven people in Illinois died from taking Extra-Strength Tylenol.
Johnson & Johnson sprang into action, recalling 31 million bottles of the pain reliever nationwide at a cost of more than $100 million and launching a major PR campaign.
The FBI, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and law enforcement agencies realized that someone had methodically taken the Tylenol bottles off the shelves at the stores where they were sold, filled the capsules with cyanide and returned them back to the shelves at a later period. Within 3 months, police arrested James Lewis in connection with this crime.
In 2029, the 1,000-foot (320 meters) asteroid 99942 Apophis (2004 MN4) will whiz by Earth at a distance of about 18,600 miles (30,000 kilometers). That’s about as close as many geosynchronous satellites.
It will swing by the Earth again in either 2035 or 2036, and scientists predict it has a small chance of hitting the planet on this pass.
The Rubik's World Championship includes speed-solving for the standard (3x3) Rubik's cube, but also includes more unusual events like solving the cube one-handed, with feet, or blindfolded.
Rubik's cube was introduced to the world 25 years ago.
Several variants of this do occur in the series, such as "Beam me aboard," or "Two to beam up", but "Beam me up, Scotty" was never said during the run of the original Star Trek series.
The movie Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home included the closest other variation: "Scotty, beam me up."
In 1947, engineers found a moth in Panel F, Relay #70 of the Harvard Mark 1 system. The computer was running a test of its multiplier and adder when the engineers noticed something was wrong. The moth was trapped, removed and taped into the computer's logbook with the words: "first actual case of a bug being found."
Historically, "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing.
However, the presence of the prefix in- has misled many people into assuming that inflammable means "not flammable" or "noncombustible." This -in is an intensive prefix derived from the Latin preposition in. This prefix also appears in the word enflame. But many people are not aware of this derivation, and for clarity's sake it is advisable to use only "flammable" to give warnings.