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