Transcripts

Will Pearson, editor of Mental Floss magazine, which has put out a book called Condensed Knowledge...

In addition to being the fourth most visited monument, it's also the tallest national monument in the United States.

When you hit the snooze button on your alarm clock, you likely get an extra nine minutes of sleep.

Well this has to do with when the snooze feature was originally added, and the inside of the standard flat-style alarm clock had long been standardized, and this meant that the teeth on the snooze gear had to mesh in a certain way. The gears basically left open the option of either letting people sleep for nine more minutes, or almost 11 more minutes. And after some studies were done, they decided that 11 more minutes would allow people to go into a deeper sleep, and so they settled on nine minutes. And so even though today with our digital clocks you could set it to just about anything, out of tradition we've kept that nine minute time period.

And here are some interesting facts about the animal kingdom you can use to impress people with your knowledge:

A goldfish has a memory span of three seconds; after sleeping for 17 years a cicada will awake, mate and then die within two weeks; dragonflies live for only 24 hours; and humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.