Facts & Quotes™💡

A blue whale's tongue can weigh as much as an elephant. #animals

Attitude is a greater predictor of success than IQ, according to researchers at Stanford University People with a growth mindset (those who believe they can improve with effort) tend to outperform people with a fixed mindset, even when they have a lower IQ. #psychology

When asked what he loved most about making movies, Anthony Hopkins said: "I love the hour in makeup. It gives you time to think and have a cup of coffee. It's my favorite part of the day… Then you go out and say things and they pay you. It's a nice line of work" #entertainment

Astronauts can't burp in space because there is no gravity to separate the gas from the liquid in their stomachs. #space

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“Quit lying to yourself and accept your power and beauty. Liberate yourself from the slow-death you call life.” - Bryant McGill #quotes

Blood is always red However, our veins look blue because only blue light waves can penetrate the skin. #science

You can zipline across the border between Spain and Portugal. #knowledge

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Dolphins have "bromances" in which two males may pair up for as long as 15 years and help each other hook up with females. #animals

​​What is The International Space Station? The International Space Station is a large spacecraft. It orbits around Earth. It is a home where astronauts live. The space station is also a science lab. Many countries worked together to build it. They also work together to use it. The space station is made of many pieces. The pieces were put together in space by astronauts. The ISS consists of pressurized modules, external trusses, solar arrays and other components. ISS components have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuzrockets as well as American Space Shuttles. The space station's orbit is about 220 miles above Earth. NASA and other space agencies uses the station to learn about living and working in space. The first piece of the International Space Station was launched in 1998. A Russian rocket launched that piece. After that, more pieces were added. Two years later, the station was ready for people. The first crew arrived in October 2000. People have lived on the space station ever since. Over time more pieces have been added. NASA and its partners around the world finished the space station in 2011. The purpose of the International Space Station is to provide an international laboratory to perform experiments within the space environment. For many of those experiments, the key parameter is prolonged weightlessness. ISS is the ninth space station to be inhabited by crews, following the Soviet and later Russian Salyut, Almaz, and Mir stations as well as Skylab from the US. The station has been continuously occupied for 15 years and 32 days since the arrival of Expedition-1 on 2 November 2000. This is the longest continuous human presence in space, having surpassed the previous record of 9 years and 357 days held by Mir. The station is serviced by a variety of visiting spacecraft: Soyuz,Progress, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, the H-II Transfer Vehicle, Dragon, and Cygnus. It has been visited by astronauts, cosmonauts and space tourists from 20 different nations.

Nearly 70% of the universe is dark energy — an invisible force that counteracts gravity and causes the universe to expand at an accelerating rate. #space

​​How do Ants sense Food? Sugar has a slight odor, particularly granulated beet sugar. While all species of ants can differentiate between a wide variety of odors, the smelling range differs from a few centimeters to meters. Desert ants can smell sugar from up to 3 meters. the food sources that ants cannot smell from a distance they 'smell' it (contact chemoreception) by touching it. So in a way, all the food they detect, they detect it by smelling. So yes, ants smell (although contact chemoreception is more like taste) the sugar. The ant colonies send scout ants to search for food in various directions, often up to a range of 100 to 200 meters.(Depends on the territorial boundary and time of the year). The scout marches steadily in less circuitous paths initially if it has memories of previous feeder locations. (Ants use visual landmarks, and a stereo-smell system to create an odor map and navigate) Periodically it will halt and look for olfactory cues. It will then take into a more circuitous random search. And as it nears the sugar and can smell it, its search ends. The antennae of ants have hair-like sensilia that contain one or more sensory neurons. Most of the sensilia contain olfactory neurons. Each neuron sends a long nerve fiber through the antennal nerve that terminate in the antennal lobe of its brain. The axons from the olfactory neurons terminate in the lobe in globular structures called glomeruli. The antennal lobe of ants is particularly large and it has around 420-430 glomeruli. (A honey bee has 160). The more the glomeruli, the more variety of odors the ant can process. This provides for the acute smell sense of ants. Once food is found, the scout collects a little sample of it and marches back to the colony finding the shortest route and leaving a pheromone trail behind. Once in the colony the other ants analyse the food the scout brought and take the trail set by the scout. As more ants get on the trail, they make the marking stronger so that other ants who went out on searches can smell the trail and join them. This sugar detection process is not entirely intuitive and needs to be learnt. A leader scout takes a willing pupil with it to teach how to search for food. The pupil walks behind the teacher in a paired march called tandem running. The pair stops from time to time so that the pupil can commit the landmarks to its memory. When the pupil is done, it taps on its master's hind legs or abdomen two times and they start moving again. (If you see a pair stop like that, you can tap the hind legs of the master ant with a hair and it will keep moving. If the distance between the pupil and the master gets too large the master slows down while the pupil runs to catch up).

Cows kill more people every year than sharks. #weird

Overworking your brain, both physically and mentally, can lead to bad decision making. #knowledge

"The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common." - Ralph Waldo Emerson #quotes

Dogs experience a burst of oxytocin when they see their owners, the same chemical responsible for the feelings of love between humans. #animals

​​How does Debit card processing work? When the payment is initiated by the customer swiping Debit Card on POS device or entering Cards details such as Card Number, Expiry Date, CVV on App or website. From this exchange, your point-of-sale system (POS system) reads the card information and transmits the data to the customer’s card processing network (Visa, MasterCard, etc.). The processing network verifies the data and evaluates it for the possibility of fraud. The processing network then sends the data to the issuing bank (i.e. the bank that issued the customer’s debit card). The issuing bank confirms that enough funds are available and passes along an approval to the merchant or business owner. Although this process may seem complicated, it occurs in only seconds — making debit cards (and credit cards) a very efficient form of payment. The types of debit card processing are categorized by the way the card interacts with your POS system, and therefore, the way the data is transmitted and validated. i.e. PIN Debit Transactions Signature Debit Transactions Contactless Debit Transactions

Women make up over 60% of all purchases in the sex toy industry. #weird

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