by
Leah Baltus and Jeremy Topping
- Satchmo’s syndrome, common to high-brass players, is a condition in which the lip muscle called the orbicularis oris ruptures or tears. Louis Armstrong loaned his nickname to the syndrome when it prevented him from playing in 1935. Though not named after Armstrong, cheek muscles are known as buccinators, or trumpeters in Latin.
- Liquid detergent is often added to beer to create a foamier head for televised beer commercials. Such commercials comprised 14 percent of the 2002 Super Bowl’s commercial airtime, in which the King of Beers reigned supreme: Budweiser dropped $22 million for 300 total seconds of product pushing, the most during the game.
- Mount Everest’s peak sits 29,028 feet above sea level, where the air is so sparse that prolonged exposure will induce high-altitude pulmonary edema, filling the lungs with fluid. In 1961 Sedom, Israel, recorded Earth’s highest naturally occuring air pressure ever. Sedom is nestled 1,275 feet below sea level—30,303 feet lower than Everest’s peak.
- From 2002 to 2003, the United States consumed 1.57 billion gallons of orange juice. It takes 50 to 150 oranges to make one gallon of orange juice—and 98 percent of all oranges grown in the United States are picked by hand.
- Nerve receptors sense only temperature, pressure and pain to create the sense of touch. (Wetness, texture, etc. are merely combinations of these sensations.) One square inch of a fingertip contains an estimated 50,000 nerve endings.
- Ernest Hemingway coined the phrase “grace under pressure” in a 1929 interview of Dorothy Parker in The New Yorker: Parker asked, “Exactly what do you mean by ‘guts?’” and Hemingway replied, “I mean, grace under pressure.”
- While pressure continues to mount in coffee trade, a double espresso remains exactly the same—a 1.5 to 2 ounce extract that is prepared from 14 to 17 grams of coffee through which purified water of 190 to 203 degrees Fahrenheit has been forced at 9 to 10 atmospheres (9 to 10 times the air pressure at sea level) for a brew time of 22 to 28 seconds.
- Scheduled for completion in 2009, the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River is the world’s largest hydroelectric project to date. The controversial dam will create a 366 mile-long lake, submerge 13 cities and displace 1.5 million people while producing the equivalent of the energy output of nine Hoover Dams, or 20,000 megawatts.
- In 1984 an unemployed ice-cream truck driver named Michael Larsen won $110,237 on the CBS game show Press Your Luck by memorizing patterns on the seemingly random gameboard. Press Your Luck was cancelled in 1986, but not before Larsen was broke again: $40,000 was stolen from his home, and he lost the rest in bad investments.
- Old Faithful, the world’s most famous geyser, is becoming increasingly sporadic. The interval between eruptions is currently about 76 minutes, almost 10 minutes longer than 30 years ago. When it does erupt, the superheated water (sometimes 400 degrees Fahrenheit) shoots as far as 184 feet straight up. Geyser is the only Icelandic word in the English language.
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