Cicadas are well-known singers. The song is a mating call produced by the males only. Each species has its own distinctive call and only attracts females of its own kind, even though rather similar species may co-exist within the same territory. Cicadas are the only insects known to have developed such a specialized and effective means of ...Read more

There is no synonym for thesaurus. The word is from Greek and means “a treasure.”

The game of Monopoly is the best-selling board game in the world, licensed or sold in 80 countries and produced in 26 languages including Croatian.

The modern tin can is an elaboration of the invention in the decade of the 1800s by Nicolas Francois Appert. It was patented by the Englishman Peter Durand in 1810. Due to the invention of mass production, the tin can became a consumer standard late in the 19th century, primarily in

Winking at women, even to express friendship, is considered bad manners in Australia.

In many countries, urine was used as a detergent for washing. One of urine's major components, ammonia, is used in cleaning products.

The flagship known as Queen Anne's Revenge belonged to the famous pirate, Blackbeard. The ship sank in 1718. Blackbeard's real name was Edward Teach.

Of the million-plus species of insects on earth, 3,000 of them are mosquitoes. More than 165 of those live in the United States.

Signing a memorial to Congress for the abolition of slavery was the last public act of Benjamin Franklin.

The hides of mature female blue sharks are more than twice as thick as those of males, probably as a protection against courtship bites.

Starting from his farm near Philadelphia during the 1700s, John Bartram traveled north to Lake Ontario, south to Florida, and west to the Ohio River in search of plants and natural history specimens for his own botanic garden and for collectors at home and abroad. He and his son William are credited with identifying and introducing into ...Read more

The brass family of instruments include the trumpet, trombone, tuba, cornet, flügelhorn, French horn, saxhorn, and sousaphone. While they are usually made of brass today, in the past they were made of wood, horn, and glass.

During his heyday, John Quincy Adams was nicknamed a oeOld Man Eloquent.a

Gold salts are sometimes injected into the muscles to relieve arthritis.

St. Amand of Maastricht is the patron saint of beer and wine sellers.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first U.S. president to ride in an automobile.

Pecans vary in size, from thirty to ninety nuts per pound. No nuts are produced until the trees are at least five years old.

In A Little Book of The Green Man Mike Harding gives some examples of similar figures in Borneo, Nepal and India: the earliest is a foliate head from an 8th century Jain temple in Rajasthan. He also notes that heads from Lebanon and Iraq can be dated to the 2nd century and that there are early Romanesque foliate heads in 11th century ...Read more

The chiao is an official unit of currency in China. Also known as jiao, it is a copper-zinc coin that is one-tenth of a yuan and equal to 10 fen.

Every year an inmate spends in prison costs taxpayers an average of $22,000. As prisoners get older, the cost of maintenance rises, ultimately reaching an average of $69,000 per year for those over the age of fifty-five. A study by a Stanford University professor estimated that the cost of a life term for an average California prisoner is $1.5 ...Read more