No, anyone can contract AIDS. One possibility for the misconception that AIDS infects only homosexual men is that AIDS was termed Gay Related Immune Deficiency Syndrome when it was first recognized in 1981 (it was subsequently renamed after it was recognised that there were methods of transmission other than male-male intercourse). HIV appears ...Read more

For the knife fight between Jim (James Dean) and Buzz (Corey Allen) in the 1955 blockbuster Rebel Without a Cause, the actors used real switchblades. They protected themselves by wearing chainmail under their clothes.

Electric Christmas tree lights were first used in 1895. The idea for using electric Christmas lights came from an American, Ralph E. Morris. The new lights proved safer than the traditional candles.

The Super Ball® was born in 1965, and it became America's most popular plaything that year. By Christmas time, only six months after it was introduced by Wham-O, 7 million balls had been sold at 98 cents apiece. Norman Stingley, a California chemist, invented the bouncing gray ball. In his spare time, he had compressed a synthetic rubber ...Read more

Director and screenwriter Cecil B. DeMille was one of the first film pioneers who quickly realized that how a movie looked could be a powerful magnet to draw larger audiences into theatres. He capitalized on audiences' thirst for extravagance and luxury, as evidenced in his The King of Kings, The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah, and The ...Read more

Dimitri Tiomkin wrote High Noon's prize-winning musical score. Asked in an interview how a Russian-born concert pianist could write Western music, Tiomkin had a quick reply. "Did Strauss," he inquired hotly, "have to be an Olympic swimmer to write The Blue Danube?"

British parents like the female name Jane a lot more than do American parents. Although it has been a very poplar name in both countries for the last 100 years, it consistently ranked Number 1 in England in the 1980s.

Until the 1970s, Jessica was a very unusual name. William Shakespeare, who may even have made up the name, called Shylock’s lovely daughter Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, but it was not until recently that large numbers of people began choosing this name for their daughters.

The fur of the vicuna, a small member of the camel family which live in the Andes mountains of Peru, is so fine that each hair is less than two-thousandths of an inch. The animal was considered sacred by the Incas, and only royalty could wear its fleece.

The fortune cookie was invented in 1916 by George Jung, a Los Angeles noodlemaker.

A bronze cat, believed to be 2,300 years old, was one of the most popular sculptures in the Egyptian Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Despite its popularity for nearly 25 years, a few museum officials had reason to doubt the statue's authenticity. After X-raying the 15-inch-high figure and scanning a small portion of it ...Read more

A United Parcel Service delivery person typically makes up to 300 pickups or deliveries a day. That compares to someone doing 600 sets of step aerobics a day.

The only items required to play the game are the rulebooks, a character sheet for each player, and a number of polyhedral dice (a set of standard D&D dice includes: d4, d6, d8, d12, d20, and two d10s for percentile: ones and tens), although there are many optional items which can be used to supplement or enhance the gaming experience, such as ...Read more

City squirrels will eat just about anything, and often, it's the junk food that people offer them that they prefer, like Cracker Jack peanuts. Many naturalists have concluded that a peanut diet is harmful to squirrels: it seems to result in a weakening of eyesight and a thinning of the animal's

Points are awarded for clean, solid blows to the legal area on the front of the opponent's body above the waistline, with hits to the head and torso being especially valuable. The fighter with the most points after the scheduled number of rounds is declared the winner. Victory may also be achieved if the opponent is knocked down and unable to ...Read more

When they're actually plantains. Banana is the common name used for herbaceous plants in the genus Musa, which because of their size and structure, are often mistaken for trees. Bananas are cultivated for their fruit (techincally berries, since the plant is a herb) which bear the same name, and to a lesser extent as ornamental plants. Globally, ...Read more

The famous Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 near the town of Rosetta in north Egypt, on the Nile.

If a red giant star was the size of an ordinary living room, its energy-generating core would be the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

Since the Lego Group began manufacturing blocks in 1949, more than 189 billion pieces in 2,000 different shapes have been produced. This is enough for about 30 Lego pieces for every living person on Earth.

It was said that cowboys made their coffee by putting ground coffee into a clean sock and immerse it in cold water and heated over campfire. When ready, they would pour the coffee into tin cups and drink it.