Fact of the day

Please note that some of the 'facts' below have been proven false myths. An example is the duck's echo which does not echo (but proved that it does).

It is impossible to lick your elbow (busted)
A crocodile can't stick it's tongue out.
A shrimp's heart is in it's head.
People say "Bless you" when you sneeze because when you sneeze,your heart stops for a mili-second.
In a study of 200,000 ostriches over a period of 80 years, no one reported a single case where an ostrich buried its head in the sand.
It is physically impossible for pigs to look up into the sky.
A pregnant goldfish is called a twit.
More than 50% of the people in the world have never made or received a telephone call.
Rats and horses can't vomit.
If you sneeze too hard, you can fracture a rib.

If you try to suppress a sneeze, you can rupture a blood vessel in your head or neck and die.
If you keep your eyes open by force when you sneeze, you might pop an eyeball out.
Rats multiply so quickly that in 18 months, two rats could have over a million descendants.
Wearing headphones for just an hour will increase the bacteria in your ear by 700 times.
In every episode of Seinfeld there is a Superman somewhere.
The cigarette lighter was invented before the match.
Thirty-five percent of the people who use personal ads for dating are already married.
** A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why. **
23% of all photocopier faults worldwide are caused by people sitting on them and photocopying their butts.
In the course of an average lifetime you will, while sleeping, eat 70 assorted insects and 10 spiders.

well at least one of those is wrong and that was first one I looked up, couldn't be bothered checking any more.

Does a duck's quack echo?

     **The short answer is yes, it does. But this is a science myth that has been quoted all over the place.**

Professor Trevor Cox and a team at Salford University recently did some research to get to the bottom of the problem with the help of willing volunteer, Daisy the duck. They found that a duck's quack does echo, but it is quite hard to hear the echo because of the quality of the quack sound. A sound that fades in and out (like a duck quack) makes an echo which can become mixed up with the original sound being made. This means it is hard to distinguish one from the other.
The other reason the myth may have arisen is because you don't often find ducks hanging around places where you commonly get echoes, like cliffs on a beach, or large cathedrals!