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Cars kill the most people except in Victoria where its swimming in the surf.

The fossa is Madagascar's apex predator and an evolutionary riddle. While it looks like a cross between a dog and a large cat, it's evolutionary ancestry has not been fully deciphered yet, although recent DNA tests link the mongoose as a distant relative. The fossa is nocturnal and very elusive, and very few people have seen it in the wild.

Every year, more people in Africa are killed by hippos than by crocodiles. Wild hippos kill an average of 2 to 3 people a week.

On average every year in the United States, 5 people die from venomous snake bites, 50 die from dog attacks, and 500 die from accidents or attacks involving horses.

Lewis Carroll's real name was Charles Ludwidge Dodgson. He came up with the name "Lewis Carroll" by taking another version of his first and middle names and putting them in reverse order.

Alice Liddell Hargreaves was the girll who served as Carroll's inspiration for his character Alice.

Philip Jose Farmer had a character also based on this girl in his 1971 clssic sci fi novel, To Your Scattered Bodies Go.

The largest organ in your body is your skin. The strongest muscle is your tongue.

I have had a migraine since 7 AM this morning.

My cat Antony is currently sitting on top of my computer moniter.

The horizontal mark above a vowel that indicates a long vowel sound in phonetics is called a macron.

In the mid-1900's, husband and wife George and Gladys Dick devised a test for detemining a person's suspectibility to scarlet fever. That test was known as the Dick Test.

Pellagra is a disease that is caused by a deficiency of niacin (B3) and protien, and results in skin rashs, G.I. distress and nervous tics, and eventually dementia and death.

Up until the early 20th century, pellagra was thought to be due to germs, and was common in Southren U.S. orphanges and asylums, where it was known as "the Southern scourge." In 1915, a doctor, Joseph Goldberger, believed pellagra was due to a diet deficiency when he realized pellagra only effected the orphans and patients, who were fed a limited diet consisting mostly of corn, and not their caretakers. He was allowed to conduct a 6 month experienment on prisoners, where they was fed a diet primarily of corn, without any meat, milk or vegetables. Even though the prisoners developed pellagra and were likewise cured onced their diet was corrected, the medical community laughed at Goldberger's findings. It would be over 20 more years before pellagra was widely recognized as due to poor diet and not germs, when researchers Spies, Cooper and Blankenhorn (and not Goldberger) were honored for establishing the link between pellagra and niacin.

Irregular plurals:

crisis = crises

axis = axes

phenomenon = phenomena

criterion = criteria

apex = apices

cactus = cacti

octopus = octopi

opus = opera

A cup of regular, brewed coffee has about 5 times more caffeine than a shot of espresso.

I'm waiting for somebody to actually clink my link of the day and get back to me with their opinion before I change it.

Cheesecake is not technically cake. It's a custard pie.

Cake must contain some type of flour, which provide the proteins for binding, plus fat, liquid, flavoring and usually alkaloids or leavening.

Custards do not use flour. Instead they rely on a mixture of proteins derived from milk and eggs and suspended in fats and liquid to bind the custard together.

Butter is 20% water.

Shortening is 100% fat.

If you subsitute shortening from butter ina recipe, you should use only 80% the amount of shortening as you would butter. Likewise you must compenste for the other 20% with extra liquid.

The cashew nut is covered with an inner shell, and between the two shells is a thick, caustic, and toxic oil called cardol. Cashew nuts must be cleaned to remove the cardol and then roasted or boiled to remove the toxins before they can be eaten.