A typical backyard bird weighs less than two nickels.

5 exabytes (5,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) would hold all words ever spoken by humans.

Because smallpox vaccine was developed in 1792 from the related cow pox germ, some doctors feared that those inoculated would begin to exhibit cowlike behavior, including bovine appetite, mooing, going about on all fours, and butting people with real or imagined horns.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti coined the art term “futurism” in a Feb. 11, 1909, article that appeared in Le Figaro.

According to the Gawck Commission, through 1989, the East German Stasi kept track of more than 1,000 suspected dissidents by tagging them with radioactive pens (stuck in clothing) or spraying them with nonremovable radioactive sprays.

This article appears in February 2 • 2001.

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