The Mona Lisa originally had eyebrows and eyelashes.

A French engineer discovered her missing eyebrows by analyzing the painting with a specially-made high-definition camera. The camera took a super-high resolution photograph of 150,000 dots per square inch and discovered a single hair painted by a single brushstroke! The engineer also claims there are fewer cracks around Mona’s eyes, which may indicate a brow and last alteration performed by a museum curator at some point! The enlargement also reveals that the model’s left hand was originally in a different position. This is due to a lap blanket being held by Leonardo’s subject! The blanket is now so faded that it can barely be seen, but the magnified photograph has revealed the truth.

Source: CNN

The color orange was named after the fruit.

Before then, the English-speaking world referred to the orange color as ‘geoluhread,’ which literally translates to “yellow-red!” The word orange itself was derived from the Spanish word ‘naranja,’ which likewise came from the Sanskrit word ‘nāraṅga,’ meaning “orange tree.” Over time, the English dropped the first “n,” and soon the word was transformed to ‘orange.’ This word was also applied to the fruit’s color in the 1540’s, likely due to the increased popularity of oranges around this time.

Source: Etymonline and Oak Conservatories

A new type of glass has been invented that is stronger than steel.

The new metallic glass is a microalloy that features palladium,

a metal with a high "bulk-to-shear" stiffness ratio that

counteracts the intrinsic brittleness of glassy materials.

Not only is the glass stronger than steel, it is actually more durable than any known substance! This new “superglass” is a microalloy composed of palladium, a metal that has a high stiffness ratio and bends instead of cracking in response to high levels of physical stress. Glass samples cannot be more than a few millimeters thick due to the rapid cooling involved in its creation, but scientists are confident this breakthrough will lead to even stronger and more durable types of glass in years to come.

Source: MSNBC

Facebook is blue because founder Mark Zuckerberg is colorblind.

Zuckerberg is red-green colorblind, which means that the best color he can see is blue! We’re sure that it’s no coincidence that blue is the hue chosen to dominate the color palette of his ultra popular social networking website.

Source: CNN

The average human heart beats 100,000 times each day.

All this expanding and contracting pushes around 2,000 gallons of blood through the human body! Over a 70-year lifetime, the average human heart will beat more than 2.5 billion times. If all our blood vessels were laid end-to-end, they would stretch for about 60,000 miles - circling the planet more than two times!

Source: American Heart

Ever wonder why no one sings the real "Happy Birthday" song on television?

The real song is actually protected by copyright. That means that it cannot be used without permission for commercial uses. This includes in movies, tv shows, and commercials. Don't worry though. You won't get sued for singing it at home for your own birthday party.

The original tune for the song was originally for a song called "Good Morning to All". Since then, it has been recorded with the words we now know, and as of 1934 it has been copyright protected. The copyright isn't set to expire until at least 2030. That's nearly 100 years after the original copyright was secured!

"Happy Birthday to You" brings in roughly $2 million in royalties every year. Much of that has gone to charities.

The Eiffel Tower was originally supposed to be demolished.

That’s right - one of the world’s most beloved landmarks, symbolic of Paris and French culture worldwide, was only supposed to stand for 20 years! The tower was never intended to be permanent; it was only constructed as the entrance to the 1889 World’s Fair and in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution.

Many Parisians originally did not even like the design of creator Gustave Eiffel! They protested the tower’s construction, thinking that it would be an eyesore. The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be destroyed in 1909, but it was saved from this predetermined fate by an antenna atop the thousand-foot structure! This antenna was being used by telegraph companies at the time and would gradually become incorporated into newer communication technologies such as radio and television.

Source: Google Docs

Walt Disney never allowed the actress who played Snow White to make another film.

An early publicity still for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,
signed by Adriana Caselotti, right.

Actress Adriana Caselotti did not even receive credit for appearing in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! These tactics were not some strange form cruelty on the part of Walt Disney, however - Disney thought the illusion of Snow White would be ruined if the public knew which actress had provided her voice. Caselotti was under contract with the Disney Studio, so it was legally his right to make such a choice.

And let’s not forget - Snow White was the first feature-length animated film to be produced in the United States. This means that there was no precedent for how to treat voice actors. Therefore, Walt had a perfectly logical argument in thinking that cartoon voice actors should remain obscure in order to preserve the magic behind their onscreen characters!

Source: AnimatorMag

The 3rd astronaut on Apollo 11 never got to walk on the moon.

 

Michael Collins, command module pilot of the Apollo 11 lunar landing mission.



While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin received the honors of being the first and second man to walk on the moon, their other crew member had to wait in the ship! This man, Michael Collins, may have had the toughest assignment of all! Collins had to wait behind in the mothership all alone while Armstrong and Aldrin explored the lunar surface. While the other two were down below, Collins also passed behind on the dark side of the moon (the furthest distance any human has been from Earth!) - and out of radio communication for quite some time. If something had gone wrong with the lunar lander’s engine, Buzz and Neil could have easily been stranded to die on the surface of the moon.

This would have meant that Collins would have had to pilot the ship back to Earth by himself! He also believed that such a tragedy would have left him a “marked” man for life, since he would have returned as the lone survivor. Fortunately, the Apollo 11 mission was a success and President Richard Nixon did not have to read the speech he had prepared in case of a tragedy!

While he may end up getting less recognition in the history books, the legendary airman Charles Lindburgh wrote to Collins telling him that his mission had "greater profundity ... you have experienced an aloneness unknown to man before".

Source: Guardian, UK

The world’s smallest book must be read using an electron microscope.

This first-ever nanoscale book was published as a work of art in April 2007. This book, called Teeny Ted from Turnip Town, measures 0.07 mm by 0.10 mm!! Each letter was carved on a polished piece of single crystalline silicon by a focused-gallium-ion beam. The beam had a minimum diameter of about 7 nanometers, or only 70 ATOMS!! The story is written on 30 microtablets, each measuring at about 11 by 15 microns.

Source: Nanowerk

Rupert Grint’s first car was an ice cream truck.

At age 18 he bought a fully functional ice cream truck, complete with a freezer, a kitchen with sinks, and musical bell. As you could have probably guessed, Grint is a BIT more well off financially than his onscreen persona Ron Weasley. (On the other hand, this car doesn’t fly). The young film star said that he has been interested in the ice cream industry ever since he was a child. If his movie career doesn’t pan out after the Harry Potter franchise comes to an end, at least he’ll have something to fall back on? He may need the job security too, seeing that he dropped out of school at age 16!

Source: Monsters and Critics

Facebook’s oldest user is 103...and she updates from an iPad.

Lillian Lowe, 103, posts her Facebook messages from her grandson's iPad

Great-grandmother Lillian Lowe has taken the title of oldest Facebooker from 104-year-old Ivy Bean, who died in her sleep this past July. Lillian checks her wall about twice a week and is friends with 34 different people, including 7 grandchildren and 13 great-grandchildren!

Born in 1907, Lillian has seen all kinds of changes during her lifetime - the sinking of the Titanic, two World Wars, the first computer, and now the advent of social networking and tablet computers!

Thanks to the publicity that comes with being dubbed the oldest person on Facebook, she has recently received over 900 Facebook friend requests. She says she has also heard of Twitter, but does not know what it is.

Source: BBC UK

The movie Avatar takes up over one petabyte of storage space.

A petabyte is the equivalent of 500 hard drives, each with a capacity of 2 terrabytes (a terrabyte to 1,000 gigabytes!). That’s the size of a 32 YEAR long mp3 file!!

The movie was shot in 3-D and rendered in one of the most powerful data centers in the world. Its computing core adds up to 40,000 processors and 104 terabytes of RAM. It would be realistic to assume that a significant portion of the film's $300 million budget went to storage space.

A complex series of tunnels runs beneath Walt Disney World.

Walt Disney was concerned when seeing a Frontierland cowboy walking through Tomorrowland. Unimpressed by this breaking of the 4th wall, Disney recognized there needs to be a way to keep certain things out of sight from the general public. Thus, underground tunnels were added to Disney World. That way trash and utilities can be hidden and costumed performers can move around outside of public view when they are not on duty. 

This massive tunnel system contains corridors that are 15 feet high and wide enough for delivery trucks to drive through. There are also locker rooms, maintenance rooms, cafeterias, and a fire prevention center. There are 28 hidden stairwells to get to the tunnel system. Children under 16 are not allowed in, so as not to spoil the magic of their Disney World experience. 

Read all about the Disney Tunnel System, including where the entrances are!

“Hey There Delilah” by Plain White T’s was written about a professional athlete.

The group’s lead singer, Tom Higgenson, became infatuated with Olympic track hopeful Delilah DeCrescenzo when he was introduced to her by a friend back in 2002. Higgenson thought she was the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, and told her that he had already written a song about her (...he wrote the song a year later)! The pair kept in touch by email, but DeCrescenzo ignored all of Higgenson’s advances until late 2004, when he actually brought her a disc with the song on it! 

DeCrescenzo was flattered but still was not interested in the musician, saying, “It was so beautifully written. There was pressure to live up to this ideal - I didn’t know how to be polite but, you know...ditch him.” Less than a year later, the tune became a smash summer hit and topped the Billboard charts! The real Delilah says she hears it all the time - “When I’m at the gym, it’s playing; when I’m at the pool, it’s playing. Part of me wants to scream at the top of my lungs that it’s about me...another part of me wants to cower and say it’s not.” 

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all been blocked in China.

Google is available in China, but the Chinese government ordered Google to censor search results. This, and an alleged attempt by the government to hack Google’s source code led to Google shutting down its Chinese servers. Google searches can still be performed in China, but they are routed to the company’s Hong Kong servers. Google’s revenues in China have gone down in China since the move. 

YouTube has been blocked in China since March of 2009. China also blocked Twitter, but Chinese activists still access it and use it to communicate to each other through foreign servers. Facebook has been blocked since July 2009, after ethnic riots in Xinjiang. Since then, Facebook clone websites have been popping up in China, making it much more difficult for Facebook to catch on in China if it is ever allowed back in. 

New laws in China could make Skype illegal too. 

The Harry Potter books all take place in the 1990s. Harry was born in 1980.

If Harry Potter was a real person, he would be 30 right now. Though the books all came out from the late 1990s through the 2000s, and the movies have come out from 2001-2011, the actual series is set in the early 90s. Harry actually starts going to Hogwarts in 1991! 

That these books are set in the 90s may explain why no one relies on cell phones or email for communication in the books. Instead, they all use owls! Also, if you remember, they use magic to be able to pause, rewind, and fast forward the Quidditch World Cup, something that would be a lot less fascinating if they already had TiVo.

You can’t scroll through a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet forever.

Yes, folks, there is a limit to even what Excel can do. In the old version of Excel, you can only scroll over as far as column IV and you can only scroll down as far as row 65536. As of the 2007 version you can go as far as column XFD and row 1048576. If you need to fill up any more cells after that, you'll have to use "Sheet 2".

In Albania, nodding your head means ‘no’ and shaking your head means ‘yes.’

Even more confusing is the way head nodding has evolved over time. The left-right nod means "yes" but also implies confusion and disagreement, so it can also mean "no". Nodding up and down means "no", but it also implies agreement and understanding. 

Albanians are also very nice to strangers. Hospitality is considered to be very important. Albania is supposed to be the most hospitable country in Europe.