James Ramsey invented a steam-driven motorboat in 1784. He ran it on the Potomac River, and the event was witnessed by George Washington.

Cape Disappointment, a nob of land on Washington state's coast at the mouth of the Columbia River, lives up to its name. It was named by a British captain who, thanks to fog, couldn't find the mouth of the river said to exist there. Fog covers the land an average of 106 days per year.

The language of Taki, spoken in parts of French Guinea, consists of only 340 words.

Grasshopper Glacier in Montana was named for the grasshoppers that can still be seen frozen in the ice.

A chip of silicon a quarter-inch square has the capacity of the original 1949 ENIAC computer, which occupied a full city block.

Isaac Asimov wrote more than 500 books during his lifetime (1920-1992). He has the honor of being the only person who has authored a book in each of the Dewey Decimal System classifications.

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.

In 1901, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen won the first Nobel Prize for physics. He noticed that certain rays caused paper coated with barium platinocyanide to glow, even when the paper was in the next room. Baffled by the mystery, he called them "X rays."

Almost half the newspapers in the world are published in the United States and Canada.

George Washington left no direct descendant. Though his wife Martha had four children by a previous marriage, Washington never sired a child to continue his family line.

In the pilot episode of the American televison show The Partridge Family, the group of musical siblings convinces their mother to help them out by singing with them as they record a pop song in their garage. Through the efforts of the 10-year-old son Danny, they find a manager who helps make the song a Top-40 hit. After some more convincing, Mom...Read more

The most commonly used language in the world is Chinese. It is spoken by over 1 billion people.

Wind barriers such as hedges give protection downwind for a distance of up to ten times the height of the barrier.

Undertakers report that human bodies do not deteriorate as quickly as they used to. The reason, they believe, is that the modern diet contains so many preservatives that these chemicals tend to prevent the body from decomposition too rapidly after death.

The custom of being clean-shaven is said to date back to Alexander the Great, who had a scanty beard and set the fashion. A century later, shaving entered the Roman world in the West and the Eastern world abandoned the custom.

City squirrels will eat just about anything, and often, it's the junk food that people offer them that they prefer, like Cracker Jack peanuts. Many naturalists have concluded that a peanut diet is harmful to squirrels: it seems to result in a weakening of eyesight and a thinning of the animal's

On the average, women dream more than men and children dream more than adults. Overall, more people dream in black-and-white than in color.

Christmas trees are known to have been popular in Germany as far back as the sixteenth century. In England, they became popular after Queen Victoria's husband Albert, who came from Germany, made a tree part of the celebrations at Windsor Castle. In the United States, the earliest known mention of a Christmas tree is in the diary of a German who ...Read more

Cheetos are a crunchy, cheese-flavored snack made from cornmeal introduced by Frito-Lay in 1948, and currently sell about one billion bags per year in a number of countries. In some markets they are popular enough that the word "Cheetos" is often used as a generic term for any similar cheese puffs snack food, but it is, in fact, trademarked by ...Read more

Inside an asbestos suit coated with aluminum, a fire fighter may experience a sweaty, but tolerable, 85 degrees to 100 degrees F, while attempting to extinguish an inferno of jet fuel raging at over 2,000 degrees. Aluminum's reflective qualities are used in hundreds of ways.