The Book of the Week is “20 Things You Didn’t Know About Everything” by the editors of Discovery Magazine and Dean Christopher, published in 2008. This book briefly covers a range of topics, regaling the reader with trivia and interesting factoids.
One topic covered was airport security. As might be recalled, at this book’s writing, “The U.S. government continues to spend untold billions developing technology designed to detect weapons [which were never found in Iraq]– but extremely little on techniques and training to ferret out troublemakers at our airports.”
There are at least sixteen thousand classified species of bees. On average, bees fly at fifteen miles per hour. The honey they make can be used as an antibacterial wound-healer, because it contains certain infection-fighting substances. The chapter on mosquitoes lamented that people must learn to live with the blood-sucking bugs; however, it completely failed to mention that there exist fish that eat mosquito eggs, thus keeping the pest’s population down in certain places in the world, such as Florida and Australia.
At the book’s writing, there was a museum on the history of contraceptives in Toronto, Canada. Read the book to learn additional fun information.