Chapter 56 - Random Facts 9

Yes, lamb is a red meat. The amount of the protein myoglobin in animal muscles determines the color of meat. Lamb is called a red meat because it contains more myoglobin than chicken or fish. Other red meats are beef, veal, and pork.

Although the process of weathering that turned the copper covering of the 1886 Statue of Liberty from brown to its current green was gradual, color images indicated that the transformation was complete by 1920.

The word robot was introduced in 1920 in a play by Karel Capek called R.U.R. , or Rossum's Universal Robots. Robot comes from the Czech word robota, meaning forced labour or drudgery. In the play, human-like mechanical creatures produced in Rossum's factory are docile slaves.

Not many athletes make it to the NFL. There are 15,588 senior student athletes playing football. 256 of those athletes will be drafted into the NFL. That's 1.6% of all NCAA seniors playing football that get drafted. .008% of all high school athletes get drafted.

If you want to completely escape Earth's gravity and travel to another moon or planet, though, you need to be going even faster - at a speed of at least 7 miles per second or about 25,000 miles per hour.

The eleven Finger Lakes from east to west are: Otisco Lake, Skaneateles Lake, Owasco Lake, Cayuga Lake, Seneca Lake, Keuka Lake, Canandaigua Lake, Honeoye Lake, Canadice Lake, Hemlock Lake, and Conesus Lake.

On May 21, 1927, the aviator Charles A. Lindbergh landed his Spirit of St. Louis near Paris, completing the first solo airplane flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Lindbergh was just 25 years old when he completed the trip.

Tennessee and Missouri each share borders with eight states. Here are the states with their neighbors, listed clockwise. Tennessee: Kentucky, V.i.r.g.i.nia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Missouri. Missouri: Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska.

The average fall was 5.5 stories. Of the 115 cats studied, 90 per cent survived, including one cat that fell 32 stories onto a sidewalk and suffered only a mild chest injury and a chipped tooth. Interestingly, cats that fell from 9 or more stories suffered fewer injuries than those falling from lower heights.

While a brain takes up about twenty percent, or 300, of a resting body's 1300 calories a day, and while it has the potential to burn more, it's estimated that most actual thinking only changes the amount of calories that the brain burns by around twenty to fifty calories per day.

Google came from the mathematical term googol. It's the number one followed by one hundred zeros. In its earliest version, Sergey Brin and Larry Page named their search engine "Back Rub." They changed the name to Google, which stems from the mathematical term "googol."

And then there's four franchises -- the Cleveland Browns, Detroit Lions, Houston Texans, and Jacksonville Jaguars -- who have never been to the Super Bowl. Cleveland has lost three AFC Championship appearances, Jacksonville two, Detroit one, and Houston has never made it past the AFC Divisional round.

Gone with the Wind is a novel written by Margaret Mitchell, first published in 1936. The story is set in Clayton County, Georgia, and Atlanta during the American Civil War and Reconstruction era.

Nearly 40% of small breed dogs live longer than 10 years, but only 13% of giant breed dogs live that long. The average 50-pound dog will live 10 to 12 years. But giant breeds such as great Danes or deerhounds are elderly at 6 to 8 years.

The origin of the phrase, it's believed, is that hatters really did go mad. The chemicals used in hat-making included mercurous nitrate, used in curing felt. Prolonged exposure to the mercury vapors caused mercury poisoning.

After a three-season career at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was a member of the Tar Heels' national championship team in 1982, Jordan joined the NBA's Chicago Bulls in 1984.

To measure blood pressure, your doctor uses an instrument called a "sphygmomanometer," more often referred to as a blood pressure cuff. The cuff is wrapped around your upper arm and inflated to stop the flow of blood in your artery.