The praying mantis eats nothing but live food, predominantly insects. Its prey is taken only from flowers, leaves, bark, or the ground - never while the potential victim is in flight. Surprisingly, if quick and lucky, it will also consume and eat a hummingbird.

When she was a girl, former Radio City dancer Valerie Harper lived all over the U.S. because her father was a traveling salesman. When she was 18, she left upstate New York to be a member of the "Li'l Abner" chorus in 1958. A few years later, Harper contracted hepatitis. Her doctor prescribed loads of candy, and she ballooned to 155 pounds. In ...Read more

The Peanuts were first animated in 1957 for a Ford Fairlane automobile commercial. Snoopy stood on two legs for the first time in a 1958 strip. Snoopy and Charlie Brown appeared together on the March 17th, 1967 cover of Life Magazine. The Apollo X astronauts took the duo into space in 1969. Charlie Brown hits a game-winning home run on March 30,...Read more

Medical experts warn that compulsive exercising can be just as bad for a person as no exercise at all. The human body needs 24 hours without exercise about once a week in order to cleanse itself of lactic acid and other waste products of strenuous activity.

Mona Lisa, or La Gioconda, is a 16th-century oil painting on poplar wood by Leonardo da Vinci, and is, perhaps, the most famous painting in Western art history or even the world. Few other works of art are as romanticised, celebrated, parodied or reproduced. It is owned by the French government and hangs in the Musee du Louvre in Paris. The ...Read more

Sylvan N. Goldman of Humpty Dumpty Stores and Standard Food Markets developed the shopping cart so that people could buy more in a single visit to the grocery store. He unveiled his creation in Oklahoma City on June 4, 1937.

The Taylor-Burton diamond is a dazzling 69.42-carat pear-shaped diamond. Cartier bought the diamond at auction. Screen actor Richard Burton bought the rare stone the very next day for his wife, Elizabeth Taylor, an avid collector of diamond jewelry.

Breathing for most snakes is accomplished with one lung only. The left lung is either greatly reduced in size or missing completely.

Batman is a DC Comics fictional character and superhero who first appeared in Detective Comics #27 in May 1939. He has since become, along with Superman and Spider-Man, one of the world's most recognized superheroes. Batman was co-created by artist Bob Kane and writer Bill Finger. Witnessing the murder of his parents as a child led millionaire ...Read more

The letters in the acronym LED stand for light-emitting diode.

In Austria baked carp is served for the traditional Christmas dinner.

The British Broadcasting Company played the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in all its broadcasts to Europe during World War II. The familiar "dah-dah-dah-DAAAAH" opening is the same as Morse code for the letter "v" (dot-dot-dot-dash) the symbol adopted for "victory."

A tiger's paw prints are called pug marks. A tiger's forefeet have five toes and the hind feet have four toes. All toes have claws. The claws are 80 to 100 mm in length.

Almost half the pigs in the world are kept by farmers in China.

Long before Detroit became renowned for the production of automobiles, the city had earned a national reputation for the manufacturing of cigars and chewing tobacco. Tobacco companies were among the city's leading employers at the turn of the twentieth century, employing more than 10,000 people. In the mid-1920s, it was estimated that 210 ...Read more

In most cases men's boot cut and women's boot cuts differ. Women's boot cut jeans are tight to the knee and then flare out slightly to the hem while men's boot cut jeans are usually flared/loose all the way from crotch to hem.

In January 2000, the U.S. Postal Service issued a Grand Canyon stamp. However, the photo used was a reverse image, giving a mirror image of a view from the South Rim. The previous year, the Postal Service mistakenly labeled the Grand Canyon as a Colorado landmark on 100 million stamps. Those stamps were destroyed. A trade paper estimated the ...Read more

A quality, fully-faceted round brilliant diamond has at least 58 facets. These are important for the maximum sparkle and brilliance of the stone.

Brazil is a land with a lot of big creatures -- it is home to the world's largest snake (the anaconda, measuring up to 35 feet in length), largest spider, largest rodent (the capybara, a sort of guinea pig the size of a police dog), and the world's largest ant.

Prior to the invention of lawn mowers, lawns were cut with scythes, but this operation was ineffective unless the lawn was wet. The sale of lawn mowers got a great boost when lawn tennis came into vogue in England in 1870.