Thomas Edison's last breath was saved in a test tube.

The "last breath" of the inventor Thomas Edison can be seen on display in the Henry Ford Museum. According to legend, Thomas Edison's son, Charles, approached his father on his death bed and placed a test tube over his father's mouth as he breathed his last breath. He then sealed the test tube with a cork and sent it to Henry Ford, a good friend of his father. Ford kept the test tube, believing it to contain his friend's soul.

If this seems too good to be true, that's because it is. However, it was years before anyone found out what the mysterious test tube actually was.

The full name for Los Angeles is El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula

The name comes from a Spanish expedition in California back in 1769. An expedition led by Gaspar de Portola arrived at what is now the city of Los Angeles, which back then was fertile ground by a river. They decided that this would be a good place for a settlement.

One of the members of the expedition, Father Juan Crespi, named the river El Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciúncula. (The river of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porciúncula). The community that was later established on that site was therefore named after the river. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciúncula (The town of Our Lady the Queen of the angels of Porciúncula). We now just call it "Los Angeles" for short

There hasn't been a reported case of smallpox since 1978.

Smallpox is a deadly disease that used to be very widespread. It would kill 1 in 4 people that were infected. Most of the survivors of smallpox would be blind or scarred. In the 1950s there were 50 million cases of smallpox every year.

The World Health Organization intensified the effort to eradicate smallpox in 1967. The eradication effort worked! The last case of smallpox occurred in a laboratory in the United Kingdom in 1978. Before that, the last natural case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977..

10 or 11 McNuggets???

On the 10-piece Chicken MgNugget box for McDonalds, there is a picture of 11 McNuggets!

The USA bought Alaska from Russia for 2 cents an acre!

Secretary of State William H. Seward agreed to purchase Alaska from Russia for only $7.2 million in 1867. At the time, critics referred to this as "Seward's folly", "Seward's Icebox" and "[President] Andrew Johnson's polar bear garden".

With approximately 365 million acres, that amounts to less than 2 cents per acre. Still, critics thought Seward was crazy, and the deal only passed the Senate by one vote. Of course, we later found out that Alaska has GOLD and OIL...

If Facebook were a country, it would be the THIRD LARGEST country in the WORLD!

If Facebook were a country, it would be the THIRD LARGEST country in the world, BIGGER than the U.S. and Indonesia.

In 2009, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had 200 million users, which (if Facebook was a country) would make it the fifth largest in the world.
That was back then. Now, Facebook's statistics page claims that there are more than 400 million active users (twice as many as last year!). This means that there are more Facebook users than people living in the United States (309 million) or Indonesia (231 million). The only countries with bigger populations than Facebook are China and India.

87 Hours movie!

The longest movie ever made is The Cure for Insomnia, lasting 5220 minutes (that's 87 hours long!)

It doesn't have much of a plot, either. The film consists of poet L.D. Groban reading a 4080 page poem, some X-Rated film footage, and some rock music videos. Despite its extreme length (87 hours is over 3 and a half days) it still was played continuously at its premier at the The School Of The Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois.

All MONOPOLY Facts!

The longest MONOPOLY game in history lasted 70 straight days.

Of course, you might recall that the longest underwater game of Monopoly lasted for 45 days (link).
More fun facts: The longest Monopoly game in a bathtub lasted 99 hours. The longest game in a tree-house lasted 286 hours. The longest game played underground was 100 hours, and the longest one played UPSIDE-DOWN was 36 hours. Also: Fidel Castro ordered all the copies of Monopoly in Cuba to be destroyed.

The average Google visitor on the May 22nd spent 36 seconds playing Google Pac-Man. That's 4.8 MILLION HOURS wasted for that day!

We've all seen the "doodles" that Google puts up on special occasions to replace the usual "Google" logo. On May 22, to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Google put up an interactive doodle: an actual playable Pac-Man game in the shape of the Google logo.

The Rescue Time Blog calculated the difference between the amount of time the average user spends per day on Google and the amount of time the average user spent on Google on May 22, 2010. The average user spent 36 extra seconds on Google that day. Multiply that by 504,703,000 unique visitors and you get 4,819,352 hours of time spent playing Pac-Man around the world!

Assuming that the average Google user is worth about $25/hour, Google cost the world about $120,483,800 in wasted time. That's enough money to pay the salary of every Google employee for 6 weeks of work!

The Pac-Man doodle is gone from the main Google page, but if you still want to waste time, you can play it here.

First Bar Code!

The first product to have a bar code was a Wrigley's Gum!

Cracking knuckles is NOT harmful...

Cracking your knuckles does not actually hurt your bones or cause arthritis. The sound you hear is just gas bubbles bursting.

Cracking your knuckles (or any of your joints) can have therapeutic benefits. When you crack one of your joints you are pulling the bones that are connected at the joint apart from each other. This process stimulates your tendons, relaxes your muscles, and loosens your joints. Chiropractors do this for spinal joints when your back is sore and stiff, but you can do this on your own for your knuckles, toes, knees, neck, etc.

Unfortunately, there can be too much of a good thing. Cracking your knuckles will never lead to arthritis (despite what your mom keeps telling you), but scientists have discovered that it can cause tissue damage in the affected joints. Knuckle-cracking pulls your finger bones apart which stretches your ligaments. Too much stretching of your ligaments will cause damage to your fingers akin to the arm injuries sustained by a baseball pitcher who throws too many pitches. In addition to making your hand really sore, this ligament damage can also result in reduced grip strength.

How does this work? Your joints, the places in your body where you can bend, are where your bones intersect and are held together by ligaments. These joints are surrounded by a liquid called synovial fluid. When you stretch your ligaments by pulling the bones apart to crack your knuckles a gas in the synovial fluid escapes and turns into a bubble. This process is called cavitation. Cavitation ends when the bubble eventually bursts, producing that popping sound we know and love. After that, your joints won't be able to crack for another 25-30 minutes while the gas gets reabsorbed into the synovial fluid.

The Creator of NIKE logo was paid only $35!

The creator of the NIKE Swoosh symbol was paid only $35 for the design.

Nike paid Carolyn Davidson, a young graphic design student, $35 for the now famous Swoosh symbol. The founder of Nike, Phil Knight was teaching accounting at Portland State University when he met Davidson. He hired her to do some design work for his company, Blue Ribbon Sports, Inc.

For a presentation with some potential investors, Knight needed a design for a line of shoes. They were facing a deadline, so Davidson quickly put together some designs. One of them was the "Swoosh".

This is what Knight had to say about the now legendary design: "I don't love it, but it will grow on me."

He paid her $35 for the design at the time, but he also compensated her in the future by giving her stock in the company and a gold "Swoosh" diamond ring.

7% Americans think Elvis is still alive!

Some people even theorize that the body that is currently buried 6 feet underground in Graceland is actually a wax model, and that the real Elvis was spotted hopping on a plane to Buenos Aires 2 hours before his official time of death, going by the alias "John Burrows".

In reality, Elvis was found dead on his bathroom floor on August 16, 1977. He was overweight and his health was deteriorating due to his drug use. He suffered from glaucoma, high blood pressure, liver damage, and an enlarged colon, and he may have been suffering from degenerative arthritis as well. He was pronounced dead at 3:30 pm at Baptist Memorial Hospital. Though he is most certainly dead, he lives on through his music.

Cows, Cows and duh....COWS!

There are more cows in India, than there are cars in the United States!

India has more cows than any other country. There are over 280 MILLION (281,700,000) cows in India. That's more than a quarter of the entire world population of cows in JUST ONE COUNT(28.29% to be precise).
To put that into perspective the United States has only 96,669,000 cows (less than half the number of cows that India has). The Indian cow population is higher than the American dog and cat populations combined (77.5 million dogs and 93.6 million owned cats).

It's even higher than the U.S. car population, which is also a really huge number: 246 million cars at the end of 2009.

When the Niagara Falls freezed!

In 1848, the Niagara Falls stopped flowing altogether.

In March of 1848, so much ice had flown into the Niagara Falls that the falls literally stopped moving. As reported in the Buffalo Express: "The Falls of Niagara can be compared to nothing but a mere mill dam this morning. In the memory of the oldest inhabitants, never was there so little water running over Niagara's awful precipice, as at this moment!"

Despite what you hear from chain mail, the Niagara Falls rarely freezes over completely. Photographs have captured various times when parts of the Niagara Falls became frozen. In 1912, much of the Niagara River froze. The ice formed a bridge over the falls, but then collapsed, killing three people.

Three continuous 'Becauses' in one sentence...

A sentence cannot start with a because because because is a conjunction.

This is an absolutely correct sentence. Can't believe it? Then read it like this...

A sentence cannot start with a because, because because is a conjunction.

Square Watermelons!

In Japan they have square watermelons!

They get square watermelons by growing them inside of square glass cases. That way they can fit easily into a refrigerator, and you can stack things on them. Square watermelons are expensive though (10,000 yen or about $82). Compare that to regular round watermelons which cost about $15-20 in Japan.

Source: CNN Archives

SINKING Tower of Pisa!

The Leaning Tower of Pisa is actually sinking into the ground.

The entire structure is built on unstable clay and it began sinking before it was even done being built. By the time the architects had built the third floor in 1178 it began leaning.
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini ordered the Leaning Tower of Pisa to be straightened. He had concrete poured into the tower's foundations, but it only made it sink more.
Out of fear that it would topple over, the Leaning Tower of Pisa was closed in 1990. It reopened in 2001 with cement injected into the ground to keep it from sinking any further.

The Soldier who refused to surrender...

A Japanese soldier refused to surrender to U.S. forces after WWII. Instead, he hid in Guam for 27 years.

Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese sergeant in World War II, returned to Japan in 1972, 27 years after World War II ended. Two American hunters discovered Yokoi in the jungle in Guam. They turned him over to the police, and he was sent back home. He had been hiding in the jungle rather than surrender to U.S. forces at the end of the war.

Yoichi was living in a cave, eating fish and rats, and made clothes out of tree bark. Like other Japanese troops, he was trained to fight to the death and told that surrendering was shameful. Upon returning to Japan he discovered that he had been declared dead in 1944.

The Japan that he came back to was very different than the one he left. He had never heard of jet planes, television, or the atomic bomb. ''I am ashamed that I have returned alive,'' he said.

Shoichi Yokoi wasn't the only Japanese WWII vet to hide out that long, either. Two years later, a lieutenant named Hiroo Onoda was discovered hiding out in the Philippine jungle.

Source: NY Times