The first settlers arrived in Australia by sea from Southeast Asia somewhere in the range of 40000-70000 years ago. So the aborigines of Australia became the first navigators in the history of mankind.
An interesting fact from astronomy is the presence of age in the universe. Einstein assumed that the universe is eternal and there is no point in speculating about its age. However, in 1929, when observing various galaxies, it was found out that they were moving away from each other and, accordingly, from the Milky Way. It follows that the universe is expanding. This phenomenon can be compared to inflating a balloon. If the universe is expanding, then there must be a starting point of this expansion and the end of the process. Therefore, her age is finite and it can be calculated.
Nikolai Gogol's mother was the first beauty of the Poltava region. The talented writer comes from a respected noble family of Gogol-Yankovsky. Maria Ivanovna was distinguished by increased impressionability, religiosity and superstition. Vasily Afanasyevich Gogol was also superstitious. Superstition breathes his story about how he married Maria Ivanovna: as if the Mother of God appeared to him in a dream and pointed to a certain child. Later, in Maria Ivanovna, he recognized this very child.
Koala fingers have the same fingerprint pattern as human fingers. For many centuries, zoologists could not understand why these marsupial bears needed fingerprints. The most adequate answer was received in 1996 by scientists from The University of Adelaide, Australia, who concluded that this property increases the tenacity of the limbs, which is necessary when climbing trees.
The Andromeda galaxy closest to us is 2.5 million light-years away. That is, Andromeda now looks to us as it did in the days of the distant ancestors of man — the Australopithecines.
A huge amount of garbage has accumulated in Earth's orbit over the past decades. To a greater extent, it consists of the debris of satellites that people have ever launched. The debris has different sizes — large and microscopic, but it moves along the orbit with great speed. Therefore, even a paper clip can cause irreparable damage to the ISS, an active satellite of a telecommunications system or a security system. Also, debris can lead to the death of an astronaut, piercing through his spacesuit.
Jules Verne played a big role in the popularization of bananas. In his 1873 novel Around the World in Eighty Days, the French writer included enthusiastic descriptions of bananas, which first aroused interest in these fruits among Europeans and Americans.
The London Underground has a special branch of the Docklands Light Rail, the trains on which are completely controlled by electronics. The Docklands Metro is controlled by an automatic system, and there are no employees on the platforms, except for particularly busy and underground stations. But each train has a special passenger assistance agent who can take manual control of the train in case of an unforeseen situation.
The emperor of ancient Rome, Nero, loved to bury people alive. Virgins who violated the vow of chastity were almost always subjected to such punishment. Only once did Nero act differently: he walled up the priestess Rubria in a small cave and left her to starve to death. The victims dug their own graves, in which stakes were placed. They tried to push a person into a pit so that the stake pierced the heart, even if the crime committed by him was insignificant. The accused of more serious crimes was pushed so that the stakes could injure, but not kill, after which the victim was left to die in the grave or immediately buried alive.
Sharks cannot sleep, because they can only pass water through their gills, taking oxygen from it, during swimming, because at rest their gills cannot «suck in» water themselves. Thus, sharks never sleep, otherwise they will simply suffocate.
