Statistically speaking, the older you get, the higher your likelihood of dying in a period within six months of your birthday.

American portraitist Charles Willson Peale had 17 children with two wives and named many of his children after famous artists. One of Peale’s sons, Rembrandt Peale, also became a portraitist artist.

Worldwide, the Spanish flu of 1918-1919 killed more people than World War I.

Researchers say animals that urinate, on average, take 21 seconds to completely empty their bladders.

A French car engineer created the bikini, which was so named because it was made in 1946, the same year as the first nuclear tests at the Bikini Atoll. The first bikini was small enough to fit in a kitchen matchbox.

More than a century after she wrote them, Marie Curie’s laboratory papers are still radioactive.

Early basketball uniforms were wool.

If you live to be 80 years old, your heart will have beaten more than three billion times. In those years, it will pump about a million gallons of blood through your body.

Benjamin Franklin invented a glass musical instrument called the armonica, which consisted of rotating glass bells of different sizes. The bells were played with the tips of moist fingers. If you’ve ever rubbed your wet finger over the edge a brandy snifter, you have the basic idea.

Historians say that the Romans had the first heated swimming pools in the 1st century BC. Today, Americans enjoy more than 10 million swimming pools, many of which are heated.