Barbara Jo Rubin became the first female jockey to win a horse race on February 22, 1969. She rode Cohesian to victory at Charlestown Racetrack in West Virginia.

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History houses the world's largest shell collection, some 15 million specimens. A smaller museum in Sanibel, Florida owns a mere 2 million shells and claims to be the world's only museum devoted solely to mollusks.

On the TV sitcom Seinfeld, when Kramer moved to Hollywood to pursue an acting career, he landed the role of one of Murphy's short-term secretaries on Murphy Brown.

In addition to silversmithing, Paul Revere practiced dentistry in colonial Boston. He learned the craft from a surgeon dentist and advertised himself as being prepared to fix loose false teeth and to clean teeth.

A prolific and imaginative writer, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote 26 Tarzan books without ever visiting Africa.

In 1992, Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon, better known to country music fans as singer/comedienne Minnie Pearl, was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President George Bush. In 1994, Minnie became the first woman to be inducted into the Comedy Hall of Fame. She was too frail and sick to attend the ceremony, and so good friend and comedian George ...Read more

On food, writer Barbara Costikyan notes, "In the childhood memories of every good cook, there's a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot, and a mom."

A "duffer" is Australian slang for a cattle thief.

A kelpie (or kelpy) was a water spirit of Scottish folklore reputed to cause drownings.

The sci-fi flick Gog (1954), in which a nuclear "brain" takes over a secret laboratory, was the first film to have a computer appear as a main character in a movie.

At any given time, there are 1,800 thunderstorms in progress over the Earth's atmosphere. Lightning strikes the Earth 100 times every second.

The Dead Sea is not a sea, but a landlocked salt lake, 45 miles long by 9 miles wide.

In a traditional French restaurant kitchen, a "garde-manger" is responsible for salads.

Recycled glass uses only two-thirds the energy needed to manufacture glass from scratch. That means for every soft drink bottle that is recycled, enough energy is saved to run a television set for an hour and a half.

Mao Zedong, like many Chinese of his time, refused to brush his teeth. Instead, he rinsed his mouth with tea and chewed the leaves. Why brush? "Does a tiger brush his teeth?" argued Mao. Chairman Mao also loved to chain-smoke English cigarettes. When his doctor asked him to cut down, he explained, "Smoking is also a form of deep-breathing ...Read more

The NBC daytime drama, The Doctors, was the first soap opera to win an Emmy series award in 1972. Although the Emmy Awards were launched in 1948 to honor accomplishments in the television industry, the genre of daytime drama was largely ignored. It was finally recognized with its own category 24

In the old school primer "Now We Read," the name of the cat featured with Dick, Jane, Sally, and their dog Spot, was Puff.

Old firehouses have circular staircases because, in the days when horses pulled fire engines and were stabled on the ground floor of fire houses, they figured out how to walk up straight staircases.

In 1960, M&M's added the colors: red, green and yellow to the mix. Then in 1976, the color orange was added to the peanut version. Later that year, red was pulled out of the lineup due to a controversy surrounding a specific red food coloring, however the type of red was not used in M&M's but

Breathing for most snakes is accomplished with one lung only. The left lung is either greatly reduced in size or missing completely.