The Greenland shark is a unique long-lived champion. Scientists have determined that it can reach the age of 500 years. The individuals they were able to study, judging by the lens of the eye, were about three centuries old. The Greenland shark lives in icy water, eats rarely and leads a very measured lifestyle. Puberty occurs at about 150 years of age.
At the tennis tournament in Wimbledon, about 53 thousand tennis balls are used during the two weeks of the competition. One ball is enough for 7-9 games, after that the players take a new one. Wimbledon tennis balls are stored strictly at a temperature of 20°C. Until the 1980s, athletes used white tennis balls, but with the advent of television and sports broadcasts, it became difficult for viewers to observe the movement of a white ball on the court, and since then the game has been played only with yellow balls.
In the history of football, there is the only player in the world with a disability who became a world champion and Olympic champion in the national team of his country. Hector Castro, nicknamed «One-Armed God», lost most of his right arm at the age of 13 due to careless handling of a saw, but the injury did not destroy the boy's dream of becoming a great athlete and getting out of poverty. Hector wanted to be a goalkeeper, but an injury determined his future in sports, giving the Uruguayan National team one of the best strikers. Over the 12 years of his career as a forward, he played 231 matches and scored 149 goals against opponents, Hector recorded another 24 goals in 25 international meetings.
James Cameron sold the Terminator script for one dollar. An unknown screenwriter and not yet a director saw in a dream a scene where a robot with a blood-red eye crawls after a woman and tries to kill her. When James rushed to his agent with this idea, he received no support. The agent was fired, the script was written, and James began to beat the doorsteps of film studios in search of a producer. The main condition is one — Cameron himself had to direct the picture. A stranger who became his wife, Gail Ann Hurd, took a chance and invested $6.4 million in the painting. «Terminator» was a stunning success at the global box office and collected $78.4 million in 1984, and James Cameron gained fame and earned authority, which opened the doors to the film industry for him.
In ancient Egypt, people worshipped not only the gods, but also... the bow. This vegetable symbolized eternal life, images of scenes of onion worship were found on the walls of pyramids and in various tombs. During the excavations, scientists discovered that instead of eyes, small bulbs were inserted into the sockets of Pharaoh Ramses IV. At the same time, the worship of the onion did not prevent the Egyptians from eating it at all.
In 2008, the US National Toy Hall of Fame included the stick in its collection as the oldest toy. The stick develops imagination and imagination, depending on the size, it can serve as an accessory in games for both boys and girls, a wonderful decorative element and a basis for children's creativity. We play with sticks with dogs, draw them on the sand, select them in shape, color and size depending on the idea, turning them into characters, using them for magic tricks and «witchcraft». It is difficult to determine where the story of the stick as a toy begins.
Everyone has heard about the water cycle in nature, but what time interval does it take? A drop of water spends an average of 9 days in the atmosphere before falling back to Earth. But if a drop falls into the ocean, it can only evaporate again after 3,000 years.
The electrician of the Indian village of Ganeshpur regularly turned off electricity in the whole village in the evenings. When residents began to complain, it turned out that the man was doing this so that his dates with his beloved would remain secret. The villagers figured out the lover on their own, and later forced the couple to get married.
The Desappuentman Islands [«Islands of Disappointment»] are a group of islands in French Polynesia. They were discovered by the Briton John Byron in 1765. He called them that because the locals were hostile to him.
In 1783, the Briton John Michell, a naturalist and geologist [and part-time priest of the village of Thornhill] , published an article about objects that he called «dark stars», meaning black holes in space. No one paid attention to his research... until the 1970s. He also discovered the wave-like nature of earthquakes, carried out a number of original studies in the field of magnetism and gravity, and proposed a method for the production of artificial magnets. He was called the father of seismology.
