|
|
The longest a person has survived after a heart transplant is 24 years.
Human kidneys will clean about 1 million gallons of blood in an average lifetime.
Pope Sylvester II tried to introduce Arabic numbers into Europe between the years 999 and 1003, but their use did not catch on for a few more centuries, and Roman numerals continued to be the primary number system.
Cancer has been around as long as humankind, but only in the second half of the twentieth century did the number of cancer cases explode.
Although the Roman numeral for the number 4 has always been taught to have been "IV," according to historians, the ancient Romans probably used "IIII" most of the time. This is partially backed up by the fact that early grandfather clocks displayed IIII for the number 4 instead of IV. Early clockmakers apparently thought that the IIII balanced out the VIII (used for the number 8) on the clock face and that it just looked better.