Apple paid a couple of 1.7 million dollars for their plot of land, which was only worth $181,700. While Apple was building a huge data centre in the middle of North Carolina, they wanted to occupy the area of a couple that had lived there for 34 years. When the couple refused to leave, Apple paid them 1.7 million dollars for their land.
100 Mind-Blowing Couple Facts
Although the saltwater crocodile has the highest recorded bite force of any animal, the muscles to open its mouth are weak. Its mouth can be shut with a couple of layers of duct tape.
February used to be the last month of the year. We may know January and February as the first two months of the year, but these months were the last couple of months added to the Gregorian calendar. Before, the Roman calendar only recognised 10 months. However, the winter period was measured in these two months – making February the last month of the calendar. This is also why February has the shortest number of days in a month.
When you die your hair still grows for a couple of months.
The Milky Way smells of rum, raspberries and booze. In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery – the cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties: it is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum. Another nearby region is also notable as it’s full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages. It contains enough alcohol to supply every person on the planet with 300,000 pints of beer per day for the next billion years! If bottled at the source, the proof for this beer would be very low, with an alcohol content of less than 1%, but as the cloud also contains plenty of other nasty chemicals, among them carbon monoxide and hydrogen cyanide, it would still leave you with quite a headache the next morning.
You could survive for a couple of minutes in a leaky spacesuit. Although films such as Total Recall show instant explosions and rapidly puffed-up spacesuits, the effects of being exposed to space are slightly less dramatic. Although it would be unpleasant, you could survive for a couple of minutes. After around 10 seconds, you would lose consciousness. The lower pressure of the vacuum would cause your blood to boil, along with other body fluids (the moisture on your tongue, for example) – but this boiling alone would not be fatal due to the pressure maintained by our blood vessels themselves. Gas bubbles would form in your bodily fluids, causing your body to swell up and bloat. The low humidity of space would cause you to cool down rapidly, and your eyes may freeze over. Within one to two minutes, the lack of oxygen would be deadly. The stress of the situation may make these symptoms worse – you would become oxygen-deprived more quickly. A rapid decompression would cause damage to your lungs, eardrums and sinuses, along with bruising and bleeding from soft tissues.
Only one married couple has ever been sent to space. Mark Lee and Jan Davis met during their astronaut training programs but decided to keep their relationship secret. NASA had an informal policy against sending out married couples on missions. Nine months before their mission, they got married, and by the time NASA found out it was too late to begin training replacements. Instead, they made their informal policy formal to prevent it from happening again!
Dictators together. In 1913 Stalin, Hitler, Trotsky, and Tito all lived in Vienna for a couple of months.
‘Blackening the bride’. In rural parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland, a tradition known as ‘blackening the bride’ was practised in the 18th and 19th centuries. Just before a wedding, friends and family would cover the bride and groom with all sorts of messy substances, such as soot, mud and feathers. This custom was believed to ward off evil spirits and bring good luck to the couple.
Science has several different ways of defining time. To cover just a couple: There’s astronomical time, which is measured by how long it takes Earth to rotate on its axis. In astronomical time, a second is 1/60th of a minute. And then there’s atomic time, which dictates the numbers that you’ll see on a clock. According to atomic time, one second equals 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium-133 atom. Measuring the vibration of an atom—which, in simple terms, is the gist of what oscillation is—is the most accurate way to track time.
Even with the advent of standardised time, people still struggled to keep their clocks in sync. One London family used this to their advantage and made a living by selling people the time. An astronomer named John Belville would set his pocket watch to the time at the Royal Observatory Greenwich. He would then travel around the city and visit his network of subscribers, who paid to set their clocks by Belville’s pocket watch. After Belville died in 1856, his wife, and then later their daughter Ruth, carried on the tradition. Ruth continued to sell the time until World War II. By then she was in her eighties, and a couple of factors led to her timely retirement: Improved technology had made her role less important, and the war was making treks around London too dangerous.
53% of users haven’t changed their password in the last year (LastPass): Despite numerous reports in the last couple of years highlighting the impact of a poor password on data security and hacking issues, 53% of users worldwide haven’t changed their password in a year. 42% of customers say they believe a password should be easier to remember, rather than secure. 80% of users in this study said they’d be concerned if their password was compromised, but 48% wouldn’t change their password if it wasn’t required. When asked where they’d be tempted to create strong passwords, 69% of users said they would do so for financial accounts, and only 29% said they would create a strong password for work-related accounts.