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| 180133. Mon Jun 04, 2007 6:02 am |
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Question: Who has the Belgium Army recently declared war on?
Answer:
Hairy caterpillars.
Limburg in Belgium is currently infested with Procession Caterpillars, so named because the march in straight lines through the forest, whose toxic hairs can cause dermatitis and respiratory problems.
In fact, the infestation currently accounts for around 80 percent of doctor visits in the affected area, so the Belgian military has deployed a platoon of soldiers and airmen to help the fire brigade and civil protection authority to defeat the caterpillars.
The soldiers will travel in groups of two, with super-size blowtorches to burn the caterpillars off the trees.
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| 180140. Mon Jun 04, 2007 6:23 am |
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Question: Why did the start of the filming of Star Wars get postponed by one day?
The film was set in the deserts of Tunisia, and as luck would have it, the country experienced its first major rainstorm in 50 years and a rest day had to be called.
This wasn't the only problem during filming, Anthony Daniels was injured when one of C3PO's legs fell off and stabbed him in the foot while Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker had a car-crash after the first set of filming; his face was damaged and he couldn't do any reshoots.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/6679425.stm
Last edited by eggshaped on Tue Jun 05, 2007 5:26 am; edited 1 time in total
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| 180144. Mon Jun 04, 2007 6:29 am |
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Question: What's the worst thing you can do if you live in a public toilet in Morocco?
Answer:
Complain.
For seven years, Aze Adine Ould Baja and his family have listed "Sidi toilets" as their official address. They lived in public toilet in Morocco.
Fed up of the situation, Mr Baja went to his local newspaper to tell his story. But a few days after reading the article, the local authorities moved in to block up the toilet's entrance with cement and concrete - now Mr Baja and his family have nowhere to call their home.
Morocco is a country of great poverty and contrasts. There is a huge gap between rich and poor in the country and so Morocco's shanty towns are breeding grounds for disillusioned suicide bombers.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/6718249.stm |
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| 180158. Mon Jun 04, 2007 6:48 am |
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Question: If talking on your mobile phone while driving is distracting, isn't talking to other people in the car just as bad?
Answer:
It's not as bad, but it can still make you more likely to have a crash.
Studies have shown that drivers with passengers are almost 60% more likely to have a crash resulting in hospitalisation than those driving on their own. This compares with mobile phone users who are four-times more likely to be in a crash.
It's not certain why talking on your mobile is so much more distracting, but it is generally thought that it's because people in the car can see if things get dangerous and change their behavoir accordingly. Others believe that bad mobile phone reception is to blame.
http://www.newscientist.com/blog/shortsharpscience/ |
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| 181481. Sun Jun 10, 2007 4:27 am |
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Question: How could salad dressing help save artworks?
Answer:
In the 1960s, conservators decided it would be a good idea to cover frescos in an acrylic co-polymer called paraloid, however this was a disasterous move; it led to colours being skewed and a fake-looking shiny finish to appear.
All other attempts to remove the paraloid have failed, but scientists have come up with a solution using a mixture between nano-technology and cookery. A salad-dressing style mixture with tiny molecules of oil is having unprecedented success.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/2007/1941461.htm |
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| 181482. Sun Jun 10, 2007 4:31 am |
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Question: What is the worst way of getting out of a blind date?
Answer:
Sara White from California was arrested last week for pretending to have been kidnapped in order to get out of a blind date.
White agreed to meet someone she had met on the internet in a local park, she got cold feet and told her date that a man had hit her on the head and bundled her into a car. The police were informed and rang White on her mobile but instead of coming clean she kept up the act. After a huge manhunt the police realised the scam and charged White with "abusing police dispatch services".
http://www.nbc4.com/slideshow/news/13467663/detail.html |
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| 181484. Sun Jun 10, 2007 4:40 am |
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Question: Barnesville, Minnesota has an annual potato festival, what is the highlight of the weekend?
Answer:
Every year 14,000 people visit Barnesville for the "potato days" festival which has what they call "zany potato activities". These include: potato sculpting, "dress a potato", the potato sack fashion show and potato peeling competitions.
The highlight of the weekend is probably the mashed potato wrestling which takes place on the last friday in August. As you have probably guessed, participants wrestle in a makeshift ring filled with mashed potato.
http://www.potatodays.com/sports/wrestling.html |
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| 181487. Sun Jun 10, 2007 4:53 am |
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Question: Where in the world was the last island to be discovered?
New islands crop up every now and then due to volcanic activity, the last of these I can find in the news was discovered near the Solomon Islands in the Pacific in 2000.
However more recently global warming has led to the discovery of a new island on the south coast of Greenland. Melting ice has uncovered a new, claw shaped island which was thought to be part of the mainland. Researchers believe that as the ice-shelf retreats, more and more islands will be found.
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| 181494. Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:17 am |
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Question: What is the most common way of damaging your mobile phone?
Answer:
According to a survey by SimplySwitch, the price comparison and switching service, the most common way of damaging your phone is dropping it in the toilet with 855,000 such incidents every year.
About 4.5 million phones are lost or damaged every year including 810,000 left in a pub, over 300,000 left in taxis and over 200,000 left on the bus.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/24145.php |
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| 181495. Sun Jun 10, 2007 5:23 am |
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Question: Why should you be careful when catching a huge fish in an American town?
Answer:
Many smaller towns in the US take great pride in being the place where the largest fish are caught. You'll regularly see such monsters mounted on walls and hear them discussed in great length.
What can be dangerous is if you manage to catch a new record holder. There have been a number of documented cases of theft of huge fish, including some cases of violence against the fisherman, by members of a town who don't want their record holder usurped.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/WIHAYmoccasin.html |
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| 181638. Mon Jun 11, 2007 1:42 am |
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Question: How can you use a mobile phone to catch a leopard?
Answer:
Forest guards in India had formally used goats tied to trees to lure leopards away from villages where they had been blamed for attacks on people.
A new technique involves attaching a mobile phone to the inside of a cage and plays a ringtone of a cow mooing. The leopard wanders towards the noise, hoping for an easy meal then can be captured and can be released back into forest areas.
Five leopards have been lured away from local villages since the method was introduced last month.
http://infotech.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2097461.cms |
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| 181965. Tue Jun 12, 2007 5:39 am |
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Question: What is the best state of mind to be in when you make an important decision?
Answer:
According to psychologists at the University of California at Santa Barbara it's best to make decisions when you are angry. Their experiments have shown that angry people are better at discriminating between strong and weak arguments and are more convinced by the stronger arguments.
They summise that it could be because anger is designed to motivate people to take action—and that it actually helps people to take the right action.
http://www.livescience.com/health/070611_anger_rational.html |
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| 181983. Tue Jun 12, 2007 6:21 am |
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Question: Where can you find cheese made from human milk?
Answer:
Nowhere. It's impossible to make.
The protein content of human milk is a lot lower than cow milk which means it will not curdle, and so one cannot make cheese from human milk. The difference in protein is the same reason that babies cannot drink cow milk.
You could probably make breast-milk yoghurt, though it would be quite runny, and you could probably make breast milk butter, though you'd need an awful lot of milk to make not much butter.
http://www.indrani.net/index.php?q=2006/03/breast_milk_cheese |
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| eggshaped
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| 202100. Mon Aug 20, 2007 11:41 am |
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According to genetecist Steve Jones (interviewed in BBC Focus magazine, Jun07):
"Symbiosis was discovered by Beatrix Potter." |
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| 203938. Sat Aug 25, 2007 6:42 pm |
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| Pictures and text co-existing to mutual advantage, you mean? |
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