mere “dwarf planet” 76 years later,
in 2006. That’s a lifetime to humans
but less than a year in Pluto’s little
world. The amount of time it takes
Pluto to revolve around the sun:
248 Earth years.One of the last American Civil War
widows passed away just over a de-
cade ago. Maudie Hopkins was born
in 1914, long after the end of the
Civil War. But her husband, a former
Confederate soldier named William
M. Cantrell, was 67 years her senior.
He died in 1937. Hopkins lived to
be 93 and passed away in 2008.The tenth president of the United
States has living grandchildren.
John Tyler was born in 1790 and
was inaugurated as president in- He had 15 children (with two
wives), including Lyon Gardiner
Tyler, who was born in 1853, when
former president Tyler was 63. Lyon
Tyler’s sons Lyon Jr. and Harrison
(the president’s grandsons) were
both born in the 1920s—and are
still alive and well.
guillotine had been the official
method of capital punishment in
France since 1792, when Dr. Joseph-
Ignace Guillotin championed it as
a more humane means of execution
than hanging convicts, breaking them
on the wheel, or burning them alive.
The country didn’t officially discon-
tinue the use of the guillotine until
1981, when it outlawed capital pun-
ishment entirely. (On the Star Wars
calendar, that was the year after the
premiere of The Empire Strikes Back.)There are likely whales still swimming
today that were alive when Moby-Dick
was published. Moby-Dick came out
168 years ago, in 1851. But bowhead
whales can live for over 200 years,
one of the longest life spans of any
mammal known to science.From the day Pluto was discovered
until the day it lost its status as a
major planet, it didn’t complete even
one orbit around the sun. Poor Pluto.
The tiny celestial body was discov-
ered and named an official planet in
1930, only to be downgraded to ard.com 97Who Knew? Reader’s DigestWhat an Ugly Baby!
In many cultures, people believe that you can protect a baby from
evil spirits by not complimenting him or her, lest the fates get jealous.
So in Thailand, you might hear an adult coo something like
“Fatty” or “Pig.” In Bulgaria, adults pretend to spit and insult the baby
by saying things like “May the chickens poop on you.”
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