The world is not as simple and sometimes not as straight forward as we think that it is. Look at gravity, although we still don't know what it is, we know what it does. At first Newton taught us that a bigger body attracts a smaller body and that is why the apple falls from a tree and that is what holds us to the surface of the earth. When Einstein looked closely at this theory, he realized that there was a lot more to gravity and showed us that a mass and gravity can deflect light. Newtonian theory stated that mass resists acceleration and yet can cause this same inertia. Think of it this way, a planet can resist the force to move it and yet can attract a body to fall on to it. Einstein thought that this made no sense. So what was Einstein's answer to this problem? He proved that mass actually deforms space and this caused the shortest distance between two locations and it would be curved by this attraction near a pathway to the massive body. In other words a shortcut to the object is created by bending space. This is why scientists think that they may be able to warp space and get around the light speed barrier. This would allow them to travel to the stars in a reasonable amount of time.

A sponge is a sea creature. If you were to put a real sponge into a blender and liquefy it, it would reform back to a sponge in about 24 hours. Taking this a step further, if you were to take several different species of real sponges and put them into a blender, the next day they would separate into the several species and each would form into a sponge again.

Some people are very calorie conscious. They look around for foods that contain the least amount of calories and they come up with all sorts of exotic examples, but the one food that is had to beat in the calorie department is celery. You burn more calories eating celery than the celery contains, thus you get a negative calorie count.

When people play cards, they hardly ever think about what those cards represent. The kings in a deck of cards actually represent historical kings and emperors. The King of Diamonds is actually Julius Caesar. The King of Hearts is Charlemagne. The King of Clubs is Alexander the Great and the King of Spades is King David.

In ancient Babylon when a man's daughter got married, the father would have to supply his new son-in-law with all the mead that he could drink. Mead was a type of beer with a honey component. That period of time was known as the honey month and that is where the term honeymoon came from. Talking about ancient societies, most people attribute the birth of democracy to the ancient Greeks, but this is wrong. About two thousand years before the Greeks, the ancient kingdom of Ebla was electing their kings for seven year terms. Speaking of elections, Andrew Jackson lost a presidential election once to John Quincy Adams. It wasn't that he didn't get enough votes, because he had the most. The Electoral College didn't cast enough votes for him.

Genius can not always be measured by I.Q. A great example is the Genus Study that was conducted in a particular school. To participate you had to have an I.Q. greater than 140. Because of this standard a student named William Shockley was excluded from the study, because he had too low an I.Q. Score. The man went on to invent one of the most important devices of the last century, the transistor. He was not the only one excluded from that study for not meeting the I.Q. standard. In 1968. Luis Alvarez won the Nobel Prize for his work on elementary particles, he had also been excluded from the I.Q. Study. Hey just maybe we are measuring genius the wrong way. Genius might be a combination of things like fortitude, imagination, I.Q. and other things.

Who invented the telescope? Was it Galileo? No it wasn't. Most people give the credit to Hans Lippershey, who they think invented it in 1608, but this may not be true either. The story goes that a lens maker allowed his children to play in his shop and while playing they put together a series of lenses and created the device, but we don't know for sure. Since we are on the subject of lenses, credit for the first pair of eyeglasses goes to Salvino D'Armante in 1284, but reading devices may have been around far longer. A magnifying lens that was placed on the material to be read, was known to have been around at least in 1000 A.D. There is some proof that lenses were around before that in much more ancient times, but they were not used for reading, but to cauterize wounds by magnifying the suns rays on the wound.

When we refer to oil, I am talking about crude oil, we all know how it was formed. It was formed from the remains of dinosaurs and animals. Well if you think that you are wrong. That has been said for quite awhile now, but it is simply not the truth. Most oil comes from zooplankton and algae. These life forms were the most abundant life forms on earth. It stands to reason that we never had enough dinosaurs to make up the huge oil reserves that we had.

For years we have been hearing scientists explain how our sun works and even telling us how long it has to go before it consumes it's nuclear fuel. Well it is looking like they were completely wrong. There is no where as much metal in the sun as they thought and this effects all the former predictions. It just might turn out that our sun uses some still unknown process and that it could be much older than we suspect. Not only that, but if we are wrong about the sun, could we be wrong about how the planets were created, the age of the solar system and even the age of the universe itself? It also turns out that the sun may be smaller than we thought. It could be 300 kilometers smaller, which is a mere drop in the bucket to the sun.

When World War II ended, trials were conducted at Nuremberg to try Nazi war criminals. Some of them were tried for conducting experiments on humans without regard for their safety, health or general well being and without their consent. Some of these experiments were brutal and consisted of operations without anesthesia and such. During the trials some of the Nazis referred to medical experiments we had performed in the United States that were just as cruel. One experiment that we conducted that was continuously referred to by the Nazis, was the experiment conducted in 1906 where Dr. Richard Strong infected prisoners in the Philippines with cholera. He did this to study the disease and 13 of them died. There were many other inhumane experiments conducted on people here before World War II, but I will only mention one more. In 1919 researchers conducted experiments on prisoners at San Quentin State Prison. They inserted the testicles of dead inmates and goats into live prisoners.

We all have this proclivity to think that we know more than we do, but it turns out that a lot of what we think we know is wrong and is passed down to us over many years as gospel. Some think that as computers become more and more an integral part of our lives, that this will change. The problem is that you can only get out of a computer what you put into it. If you put erroneous information into a database that is what you will get out of it.