FactsMyths111

Mystery of Woolpit's Green Children #facts

Yes, but not everyone brushed their teeth. A more widespread use of urine was as a sort of laundry detergent. This isn’t as crazy as it seems. Urine consists mostly of water, but it also contains ammonia, or NH3. If exposed to air for too long, the water in urine evaporates, leaving just the ammonia. Ammonia is actually oftentimes used in toilet bowl cleaner, as it has powerful antibiotic qualities - it is toxic to most life (which is why your body needs to get rid of it), and will kill many unwanted living organisms (like bacteria) on your clothes. Brushing their teeth with urinal ammonia probably isn’t a good idea, not only because ammonia is toxic if consumed, but also because if the person producing the urine is sick, the urine may contain pathogens - which, in ancient times, could mean cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and other nasty diseases.

In 1983, one man prevented a nuclear war between the USSR and the USA. Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States.

In 2009, astronomers exploring a giant cloud of gas and dust at the centre of the Milky Way made a surprise discovery – the cloud was packed full of a chemical known as ethyl formate, which has a couple of intriguing properties: it is responsible for giving raspberries their flavour, and has the smell of rum. Another nearby region is also notable as it’s full of ethyl alcohol, or ethanol, the type we use to make alcoholic beverages.

NASA has found that the height of astronauts increases approximately 3% over the first 3 to 4 days of weightlessness in space. There are many factors that influence each individual, so each astronaut will experience more or less of an increase than others.