Dead sponges can resist bacterial decay for more than five years when submerged in fresh water.

Following his breakup with the Beatles in 1971, Paul McCartney formed his group Wings. The group was nameless until McCartney, awaiting the birth of his daughter Stella about a month later, prayed for her health. He came up with the group's name on the "wings of an angel."

Redwood trees sometimes grow to heights of 350 feet and produce bark that is more than a foot thick. Yet they spring from a seed that is only sixteenth of an inch long.

Argentineans eat more meat than any other nation in the world — an average of 10 ounces per person per day.

Lightning has hit the Empire State Building in New York as frequently as 12 times in 20 minutes. The building is hit by lightning about 500 times a year.

Prior to migration a goose will consume the equivalent of up to 25 percent of its body weight per day, accumulating large amounts of fat. During the migration, geese may cover up to 600 miles per day. At the end of the migration, they often weigh less than before they started fattening up in

Newton estimated correctly that the Earth had a mass of 6,600,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons and a density of about five-and-a-half times that of water. The fact wasn't demonstrated until one century after his estimate.

Abraham Lincoln offered this timeless, usually unheeded, piece of advice to lawyers: "Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbor to compromise whenever you can. As a peacemaker, the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough."

Major-league baseball clubs didn't start putting numbers on uniforms until the 1930s. As a result, Ty Cobb, who broke many batting and base-stealing records while playing with the Detroit Tigers (1905-1926), didn't have his uniform number retired. This was, simply, because Cobb never was issued a

Tony the Tiger, cartoon mascot of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes since the early 1950s, was called "Tom-Tom the Tiger" in the island nation of Grenada.

When thinking about food, not necessarily hospitality, New York is America's first choice, chosen in a Gallup Poll by more Americans than any other for having the best food in the nation. New Orleans comes in second, followed by San Francisco, Chicago, and Boston.

Microsoft's Bill Gates, launched his business career in 1969, at age 14 by forming a company named Lakeside Programming Group. Gates and his friend Paul Allen signed an agreement with Computer Center Corporation to report bugs in PDP-10 software, in exchange for computer time.

RKO stands for Radio-Keith-Orpheum, formed by the merger of RCA and the Keith-Orpheum theater chain in 1921.

The blue whale weighs as much as thirty elephants, and is as long as three Greyhound buses.

A space vehicle must move at a rate of at least 7 miles per second to escape Earth's gravitational pull. This is equivalent to going from New York to Philadelphia in about 20 seconds.

In 1981, M&M's became an official food on board space shuttle flights. M&M's are now on permanent display at the space food exhibit at the NASA Museum in Washington, DC.

In the state of Queensland, Australia, it is still constitutional law that all pubs (hotel/bar) must have a railing outside for patrons to tie up their horse.

Laptop computers get bumped around too much, which makes them around 30 percent more likely to fail than a computer that stays in one place.

Only about 20 percent of diamonds are made into jewels. Because they are so hard, most diamonds are used to make tools such as dental drills and metal cutters.

The beautiful Eilean Donan Castle is situated in Loch Duich near Dornie on the west coast of Scotland near the Isle of Skye. It is the one of the most photographed castles in Scotland, and has been in a number of films, including Highlander (1984) and the nineteenth James Bond film The World Is