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What is your favourite piece of trivia?
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As far as the brain being alive after the head is severed from the body:
The brain continues functioning until the oxygen in its blood is depleted. This can take up to five minutes.
Hence a person cannot legally be pronounce dead until brain activity has ceased (brain dead).
This means that a beheaded person could still see his surrounding for some time. Awful thought isn't it!
>Unexplained purring -- we may not know why, but surely we know how?
Complete nonsense. the Purring is a product of the hyoid apparatus.
Living Cats (Felidae) are divided into two distinct genera, Panthera and Felis, although for some reason there are those authorities who disagree with the distinction. The division of cats is based on the structure of the hyoid apparatus, a series of connected bones at the base of the tongue. In one group of cats one of the hyoid bones (the epihyal) fails to develop and is represented only by a threadlike ligament, so that tongue and larynx are loosely attached to the base of the skull. This group, the Roaring cats, includes the big cats: the tiger, lion, jaguar, leopard, and ounce
In the second group, the genus Felis, the hyoid develops normally; all such cats can purr but do not roar.
Severed head: mmm, seeing your surroundings for 5 mins sounds temptingly macabre, but unfortunately it's still not quite right. as the brain uses up the oxygen in the remaining blood it won't have enough fuel to accept and process info from the eyes and ears, so after only a few topsy-turvy seconds it will lapse into a dreamlike state
A french guy did tests with a recently decapitated guillotine victim and got some 'strong form of recognition' from the face for up to 28 seconds after separation.
My fave is that the trans-siberian railway runs dead straight for hundreds of miles and then kinks wildly for a bit, then straight again. The reason being that the ruler the Czar drew the proposed route with had a kick taken out of it and nobody dared to contradict him. Life is entirely random.
You can tell if a sound comes from your left or your right because of time delays to each ear and differences in volume to each ear, but it's more difficult to tell whether a sound is from below or above: your external ear part is crinkly like that to distort the high frequency sounds and make that a bit easier. The barn owl faces no such problems. High frequency sounds from below sound louder to the right ear than the left, making picking out voles a cinch....
There's a group of cells in your brain specialized for recognizing faces..your brain also uses it for one other purpose...determining the make and model of a car.
If you take every species of animal on earth, and line them up in a row, every fifth one is a beetle.
There are more people on earth today than previously ever existed on earth.
Many blind people who cannot 'see' can still reach out for and grasp an object.
You become slightly better at doing sums when on your mobile, because the electromagnetic radiation warms the relevant part of your brain slightly.
You have more brain interconnections than there are atoms in the universe.
People play online games where they act out a character in a multiperson fantasy world, where they gather equipment and use it to fight one another. Such equipment is widely traded on the net, and the trade in the Starwars version outstrips the Gross National Product of Uganda.
If you take a piece of paper ANY size, you will find it impossible to fold it in half ten times... try it.
If you have a full to the brim pint of water, very, very slowly pour a cellar of salt into the glass. Eventually the entire cellar will empty into the water without any spilling over the edge - amazing!
On September 11th, the hikackings that were reported are the only in air force history in which F-16's were not immediately scrambled to follow. Why? Go figure.
All gloves are secretly made of anti-matter.
I have a big file with lots in.
The giraffe is the only mammal to be born with horns, the only mammal with no vocal chords, it has a 21 inch blue tongue and it cannot swim - and the same number of vertebrae as a human.Giraffes are unable to cough. The heart of giraffe is two feet long, and can weigh as much as twenty four pounds. When Europeans first came across a giraffe, they called it a 'Camelopard', believing it to be a cross between a camel and a leopard.
Chicken Tikka Marsala as invented in Glasgow
