Strange But True: Color of the universe

By Lucie Winborne

• Alcohol is considered a performance-enhancing drug in most shooting sports, as it calms your body down and allows you to shoot straighter.

• The universe has a color, but it's not what you might think. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University took the average of light from over 200,000 galaxies. It turns out the universe is, on average, kind of beige. They named the shade “cosmic latte.”

• In a 2008 survey of British teens, 58% of the respondents believed Sherlock Holmes was a real person, while 20% said that Winston Churchill was not.

• When asked if her husband Abe had any hobbies, Mary Todd Lincoln responded, "Cats."

• Amelia Earhart and Eleanor Roosevelt once sneaked out of a White House event, commandeered an airplane, and went on a joyride to Baltimore.

• The Karni Mata Temple in Deshnoke, India, is home to 20,000 rats who are believed to be descended from an incarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga.

• According to NASA, it possibly rains glass on the planet known as HD 189733b.

• The first baseball caps were made from straws and worn by the New York Knickerbockers in 1849. A few years afterward, the first merino wool baseball caps were put into circulation.

• Some traditions hold that walking backward while wearing your clothes inside out will allow you to see a witch on Halloween.

• In ancient Rome, lemons were used as an antidote to all poisons.

• One of the world's largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons is located at a U.S. Navy base near Seattle, which is partially defended by trained dolphins.

• The highest mileage on a single car is over 3 million miles.

Thought for the Day: "History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again." -- Maya Angelou

(c) 2024 King Features Synd., Inc.