Are left-handed people smarter?
Yep. According to researcher Alan Searleman, southpaws have higher IQs, solve problems better and enjoy more extensive vocabularies than righties. Lefty cases in point: Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso, for starters. Not to mention every U.S. president since 1981, except this one.
Take heart, righties: Searleman's study also found that lefties have worse memories than their right-handed peers.
Can a broken heart kill?
Sad but true. Doctors even call the condition "broken heart syndrome." What happens? A sudden, traumatic event stuns the heart, leaving the aggrieved with chest pain and shortness of breath.
Sounds like a heart attack, but is it? Not exactly. Unlike a heart attack, broken heart syndrome is reversible and doesn't cause permanent heart damage. But if left untreated, a heart malfunction can lead to complications and even death.
People aren't the only ones who suffer from broken hearts. Animals suffer, too: Mary G, a dolphin nursed back to health by trainer Tamara Monti, 37, of Rome, was in danger of dying of a broken heart when Monti didn't return to work after being stabbed to death by a neighbor. No word on whether the forlorn creature survived.
You eat spiders in your sleep?
Nope, says MythBusters. There's no evidence that spiders secretly crawl into our mouths while we're sleeping. Even if you were lying perfectly still, your breathing would scare a spider off, so it's unlikely to hang out around your mouth.
Can a freezer save your hard drive?
Yep. This method won't magically fix whatever is wrong with your computer, but it can get your hard drive working long enough for you to recover important data before it gives up the ghost for good.
Here's how it works: Freezing the hard drive cools and shrinks the metal so the drive will mount properly and run long enough (hopefully) for you to copy your files to another source.
Freezing works best when the drive is making a tell-tale clicking sound caused by overheated metal parts that have expanded.
Which 'Friend' has a neuron named for her?
Jennifer Aniston. A British neuroscientist discovered a specific brain cell that fires up after people view Aniston's picture -- hence the so-called Jennifer Aniston neuron.
The study, which monitored subjects' brain activity after showing them photos of famous celebrities and landmarks, suggests that we assign individual cells to process familiar faces -- an insight that could aid research on Alzheimer's and other brain-related diseases.
A rooster lived for 18 months after having its head chopped off?
Strange but true. A farmer from Fruita, Colo., thought he was just putting dinner on the table when he picked up an axe and beheaded one of his chickens. What happened next became the stuff of legend: The headless rooster bobbed and weaved back to the henhouse and lived for 18 more months.
The animal, later dubbed Mike, survived because the blade missed his jugular vein and a clot prevented him from bleeding to death. The axe blow landed high enough that most of the chicken's brain stem and one ear remained intact. Mike was fed and watered by inserting an eyedropper directly into his gullet. Sadly, he later choked to death in a motel room.
Are there more rats than people?
Probably, at least in Great Britain. The human population there is around 60 million, but pest control company Rentokil estimates that between 65 and 80 million rats call the U.K. home.
New York City is famously said to have one rat per resident. Although no one has ever managed to do an exact tail count of Big Apple rats, estimates vary between one rat for every 36 New Yorkers (around 256,000 rats) and a terrifying seven rats for every person (96 million rats).
What's contributing to the rat boom? Warmer winters and easy access to food scraps in unsecured compost bins may be making life easier for urban rodents.
Can a dropped penny kill?
You've heard the story: If you toss a penny off the top of the Empire State Building, you could kill someone on the sidewalk below.
Fortunately, this isn't true. Here's why: The Empire State Building is 1,250 feet tall, and a penny dropped from that height would hit the ground at a rate of 280 feet per second. Taking into account the shape of a penny and the likely wind resistance it would encounter on its way down, it's unlikely the coin would even break the skin of a hapless passerby on the ground.
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