The Enemy of Ignorance: facts, trivia, & general knowledge (The Smarty Pants Series Book 3) by Elsmere Gracey

Author:Elsmere Gracey [Gracey, Elsmere]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-07-27T00:00:00+00:00

To make clear ice cubes, the water should be boiled beforehand as oxygen solubility in water decreases when the temperature rises.

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“Ditto” as a response means the same here. It is derived from a dialect variation of the Italian detto which translates as said or to say. It was first recorded to be used in English during the 17th century in a bid to avoid repeating words in accounting and commercial language. Ditto gradually altered from a noun to an adverb to convey that one person agreed with what another has just said.

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In 1967, the world’s first UFO landing pad was built in St. Paul, Canada. In 1990, the town’s mayor officially opened a UFO tourist information centre which exhibits photographs of UFO’s, crop circles, and cattle mutilations.

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Typing into Google “do a barrel roll” makes the browser do a barrel roll.

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Between 1932 and 1972, the U.S. government denied hundreds of African-American men treatment for syphilis as part of a racist medical experiment that was initially only planned to last six months. Known as the “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” it is infamous for being one of the most prolonged and knowingly unethical medical experiments in history.

Researchers observed the untreated men to ascertain whether the disease affected black men differently than white men. They were given placebos, and the truth of their condition was withheld. By the time journalists exposed the experiment only seventy-four of the original participants were still alive; over one-hundred had succumbed to the disease. By that stage, some wives had contracted the disease, and children had been born with congenital syphilis.

In exchange for taking part in the project, the men received free medical exams, free meals, and burial insurance. Although Penicillin had become the drug of choice for treating syphilis in 1947, it was not offered to the participants.

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Gregory Goodwin Pincus (1903 to 1967) was an American endocrinologist whose work on the antifertility properties of steroids led to the development of the first effective birth-control pill.

In 1934, Pincus successfully created a test-tube rabbit; this breakthrough in artificial insemination caused different opinions as some were excited, while others referred to him as Frankenstein.

By the 1950s, Pincus had developed the “Pill” which was a combination of the hormones oestrogen and progestin. The trials were the most extensive series of clinical tests ever performed - the participants were mostly Puerto Rican women of colour. The government officials supported birth-control as a form of population cleansing in the hope that it would curtail the widespread poverty - in fact, in 1937 it was legally sanctioned that Puerto Rican women could be sterilised for such reasons. These vulnerable women were neither told that the pill was only in its experimental stages nor were they informed of any potentially dangerous side effects.

Following a year of trials, the pill was deemed to be effective at preventing pregnancy regardless that 17% of the test subjects had suffered debilitating side effects such as headaches, vomiting, and stomach pains. Three women had died during the trials, but their cause of death was never investigated.

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